PM Lawrence Wong at the PCF Family Day 2025

Organising Chairperson Ms Yeo Wan Ling,
My Cabinet and Parliamentary colleagues,
PCF management, staff and leadership,
Parents, children, ladies and gentlemen,

A very good morning to all of you. It was a wonderful performance by our PCF staff, as well as the children and seniors in our care centres – let us give them another big round of applause to start the morning. It is so good to join all of you today for our annual PCF Family Day.

We do this every year to celebrate what we hold most dear – our families.

But this year’s event, as Wan Ling said just now, is especially meaningful because it also coincides with Singapore’s 60th birthday, which we will be celebrating quite soon. So this morning, let me wish all of you Happy Family Day, and Happy SG60 in advance.

Families have been at the heart of our nation-building journey since the very beginning.

Because families are the bedrock of our society.

They are the pillar of support that enables us to overcome challenge and move forward together.

PCF has been a vital part of this journey as well.

It started with the PAP setting up low-cost kindergartens in the 1960s.

And then later, we set up PCF, the PAP Community Foundation, as a non-profit foundation to oversee these kindergartens and to better serve all Singaporeans.

We have come a very long way since then – PCF is now the largest pre-school operator in Singapore.

So to the many families in Singapore who have entrusted your children with PCF; to the many graduates of PCF, myself included, many of you as well, to the hardworking and dedicated team at PCF – I would like to say a very big “thank you” to all of you for your strong support all these many decades.

The government will continue to support families in Singapore at every stage of life.

In the last year or so, we have provided more support for young parents and their newborns. Not just financial support, but also more parental leave.

We have also provided more help for large families, those with three or more young children. These are just new initiatives we have rolled out over the past year, and we will continue to do more.

But these days, when we talk about family support, it is no longer just about supporting young parents with children. Because these days, our society is getting older – we have many more seniors in our midst, and you can see this around us. Singaporeans are getting older, we are leading longer lives as well. In the past, you retire at 60, you have another 10, 20 years, and people think that is it. But nowadays, you can retire at 65, you can retire at 70, you may have 20, 30 more years. So we have longer lives, more seniors. And so as our population gets older, as we have more seniors around us, when we talk about family support these days, we also have to pay attention to supporting our seniors, as well as their caregivers.

And that is why we have started work on this through Healthier SG and Age Well SG – National initiatives to ensure that our seniors stay healthy for as long as possible, keep active, stay engaged; and also to ensure good living environments for them, to continue to live their golden years with dignity.

Of course, as our seniors get older, we also will need to prepare for a time when more of us – all of us – will need care at some point in time, and we will need to prepare for that.

That is why we are also strengthening our care services – be it at long-term residential facilities or providing care within our communities themselves. Because many seniors say they want to age in place – they do not want to move out, and we understand that. So we are also stepping up our services to provide more care for seniors wherever they are. A lot of this work has just started. There is still much, much more to do, and we will share more of our plans when we are ready. So the government will do a lot more, but we will not do this alone. We will need partners to do this work, and organisations – social organisations and agencies like PCF – will have a role to play too.

PCF is actually stepping up in this space of senior care, as you can see just now.

PCF is already expanding its capacity to serve more seniors.

In time to come, we can expect PCF to also have more Active Ageing centres and Senior Care centres in communities across the island. PCF can play a very unique role, because PCF already has many kindergartens and childcare centres.

Now, when it also has Senior Care and Active Ageing centres, it will open new opportunities for PCF as an operator to bridge generations – to bring young and old together, and to foster greater inter-generational understanding. That is also the theme of today’s event: about bridging generations. We look forward to PCF doing more, and we will continue to support PCF, and we hope all of you will continue to support PCF in its good work.

Of course, as a foundation, PCF is not just an operator by itself. PCF also raises funds to support the community, and a diverse range of causes and partners.

And as you heard just now, for this SG60 year, PCF is raising funds to support six beneficiaries: Blossom Seeds, Brighthill Evergreen Home, Salvation Army Gracehaven, Food from the Heart, HCSA-SPIN and Club HEAL. Their representatives are here with us today. They are all doing good work, let us give them a big round of applause to acknowledge that.

PCF is happy to support you, because this reflects PCF’s mission as well. It is not just about PCF doing the work ourselves, but we also want to help others, support other organisations, uplift our community, so that together we can support the vulnerable and less privileged members of our society.

This year is SG60. Going forward, we will be embarking on our next phase of nation-building. In this new phase, we will face new and more complex challenges.

As you can see, the world around us is changing rapidly. The global conditions that enabled our growth and success are shifting.

But I am confident that we can weather these challenges, and we can emerge stronger together –

So long as we continue to work closely together, look out for one another, and stay strong and united as one people.

So let us continue walking this journey together and take Singapore forward into a better and brighter future.

Thank you very much and enjoy your family day today.

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