A Montessori pre-school in Clementi is currently being investigated over allegations of child abuse.

The Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) confirmed this in a statement shared with Mothership, saying that they are unable to comment further on the case as it is currently under investigation.

What happened?

The New Paper reported that about a month ago, a person claiming to be a teacher at the preschool wrote an anonymous post submitted to Storience, which was shared on their Facebook page.

Storience is a platform for people to share and submit their stories and secrets anonymously.

According to TNP, in the now-deleted post, the person said that a colleague would tape the mouths of noisy children, and had force-fed a child who cried so hard that she vomited.

The post also contained allegations that the teacher had made the child eat her own vomit.

The post has been taken down

As of July 29, the post has been taken down by Storience.

The page clarified that the post was removed because the presumed writers had written subsequent follow-up posts requesting its removal.

They said they acted in good faith that the requestors were indeed the writers of the posts, and removed the posts as requested to respect the writers' wish.

This is Storience's clarification post:

ECDA takes serious view of child mismanagement

Responding to Mothership's queries, the ECDA spokesperson said that they were alerted to the incident at around the same time the post was published.

ECDA takes a serious view of any case of child mismanagement and immediate actions will also be taken if their findings support the allegation.

They will also follow up on every alleged child mismanagement incident, by means such as conducting unannounced visits and interviews.

The pre-school has been advised to provide guidance and support to teachers in classroom management.

Pre-schools are also required to report any incidents impacting the safety of staff and children to ECDA, the statement added.

Top photo via Erica Fletcher/Unsplash.