School portraits / Six weeks before a Nursery assessment, in Bukit Timah
The Nursery Entrance Requirement
An Australian mother, a daughter two months shy of three, and the one admissions criterion nobody can coach.
Lauren Pascoe read the Dulwich College admissions policy on her phone in a taxi from Changi, and the line that stopped her was not about fees. It said Nursery applicants must use the toilet independently. Her daughter Matilda, two years and ten months old, was asleep in the car seat beside her in a nappy that could have stopped a bullet. They had moved to Singapore on four weeks’ notice and nobody had told the child.
Her husband, Ben, took the view that this was a formality. “They can’t actually check,” he said. Lauren pointed out that the policy said Nursery and Reception applicants were assessed by the Head of DUCKS, the early-years school, which meant a real person in a real room with Matilda, who announced bodily events to strangers with the clarity of a railway tannoy. The assessment was in six weeks. Ben stopped taking the view.
Week one was the potty, bought at a mall in Bukit Timah in a shade of pink that Matilda rejected on sight. Week two was the second potty, green, which she accepted as a hat. Lauren joined a Facebook group for expat mothers in the west of Singapore and asked, in a post she deleted and rewrote three times, whether anybody had tips, and received forty replies, of which eleven recommended a book, nine recommended chocolate buttons, and one recommended “just letting her go nude in the condo for a week,” which Lauren read aloud to Ben in a voice that did not invite comment.
They went nude in the condo for a week. The condo had a marble floor and a helper called Marisol who had raised four children in Cebu and watched the Pascoes with an expression that Lauren eventually identified as pity. Marisol took over on the Wednesday. She did not explain her methods. By Friday Matilda was sitting on the green potty of her own accord and demanding applause, which was given, by three adults, at volume, while the neighbours in the next unit wondered what had happened.
Week five was the regression. It always is. Matilda, having mastered the potty, decided it was beneath her and that the nappy was a lifestyle, and Lauren spent three days bargaining with a person who did not yet understand the concept of a week. Ben rang the school to ask whether the date could move. It could not, but the woman in admissions was so kind about it that Ben came off the phone feeling he had been given something, which he had not.
Assessment day. Lauren dressed Matilda in pants and a dress and packed a bag containing two further sets of each and a quiet prayer. Bukit Batok in the morning heat. A bright room with low tables. The Head of DUCKS, a warm, unhurried Englishwoman who crouched to Matilda’s height and asked her name. Matilda gave it. The Head asked what she liked to do. And Matilda, in a voice that carried to the car park, said, “I do wees in the toilet now,” and then, in case the point had been missed, “by myself.”
The Head of DUCKS said that was wonderful. Lauren says she has never been so proud of anything in her life, including the job that brought them here, and she is not entirely joking. Matilda was offered a place. Marisol was given a bonus, which she accepted with the air of a woman who had known all along.