Singapore Budget 2015: Spending on continuing education to push average spending to S$1bn per year

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SPENDING on continuing education and training in Singapore will increase from about S$600 million per year over the last five years, to an average of over S$1 billion per year from now to 2020, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Finance, said on Monday.

This comes amid a development effort, known as SkillsFuture, which will include a lifelong SkillsFuture credit which every Singaporean will receive.

"There will be top-ups at regular intervals with credits that they can use to help pay for courses of their choice. Every Singaporean can use the SkillsFuture Credit to take charge of their own learning over the course of their lives," said Mr Tharman.

The government will also top up the National Productivity Fund by S$1.5 billion this year to partly meet this increase in expenditure, he added.

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INFOGRAPHICS: What Budget 2015 may bring; Snapshot of the Singapore economy