STUDENTS FOUND WITH PORNOGRAPHIC VCDS

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STUDENTS FOUND WITH PORNOGRAPHIC VCDS: 3.

Mr Iswaran asked the Acting Minister for Education in light of the recent incident at Kent Ridge Secondary School , where students were found with pornographic VCDs and the incidents were reported to the Police, what guidelines on how to handle such incidents have been issued to schools by the Ministry.

The Acting Minister for Education (Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam): Mr Speaker, Sir, MOE has given schools broad guidelines on the approaches and actions they could adopt in managing student discipline. These guidelines set out the

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positive, proactive approach schools should adopt in handling discipline, as part of their broader efforts to help our young become responsible, thinking citizens.

The guidelines recommend the development of a coherent, whole-school framework for managing discipline. This comprises measures ranging from the preventive to the corrective - in other words, from educating the students to counselling them and to taking disciplinary actions. The guidelines provide schools with examples of programmes and strategies that they can adopt to manage discipline in their schools. They also advise schools on how they can work in partnership with parents, and obtain the assistance of external agencies, such as the VWOs, self-help groups and the Police.

While the MOE guidelines help achieve a broad consistency of principles and approaches in managing discipline amongst our schools, each school has to decide on its own specific approaches. This will depend on the nature of its student body and the history of student discipline in the school.

Schools also have to decide on the actions most appropriate in each situation, such as counselling the students involved, disciplining them within the school, referring them to other agencies for further counselling and help, or reporting the matter to the Police. In particular, a decision on whether to call in the Police has to be made by the principal, and that will depend on the severity of the offence, the scale of the problem, and the willingness of the students involved to cooperate. These are ground decisions that the principal is in the best position to make.

Assoc. Prof. Ngiam Tee Liang (Nominated Member): Mr Speaker, Sir, the guidelines from the Ministry would probably set the broad parameters and depending on the experience of the

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principals (including new principals coming in), what additional guidance is given so that they have an idea of how to operationalise those guidelines? Otherwise, I think maybe it is a situation of not having opportunities to learn from each other and, although principals are trying their best, it could be a hit-and-miss affair.

Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam: First, the guidelines themselves are actually quite useful. We provide examples of the types of problems and offences within the school that perhaps the school can handle on its own and how it should go about handling them. We also provide the examples of the more serious matters which would be referred to external agencies, including the Police. I think we prepare our principals, including our young principals, quite well. They all go through not just training on how to be a good school leader, but we also engage them in a fair bit of sharing of best practices. They meet often with their cluster's Superintendent, and with the people in the Ministry. There is a fair bit of sharing within the community of principals themselves. Young principals do not come in totally fresh. They have already been acquainted with the ways of leadership in a school and once they are in leadership, they are able to tap on views and perspectives from others within the school leadership community.

Mr S Iswaran (West Coast): Sir, I accept the Minister's explanation that we entrust considerable discretion and responsibility in the hands of our principals. That is quite correct. But the corollary is that there will be some variability in the way that discretion is exercised across schools and we can accept that to a limit. But on matters as serious as Police reports, can the Ministry perhaps be more prescriptive as to the steps that the principals must take before taking such a serious decision which can have a lifelong impact on the students?

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Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Variability is what is to be expected because, as Mr Khaw Boon Wan says, every birth is different. Every school is different. Student population is different, the history of the problem is different and each instance is different. So I would not want to constrain schools with too prescriptive an approach. We already provide very useful guidelines, with lots of illustrations on how to handle the problems. But the principal is the person on the ground and he or she has to decide. The Ministry is not in a position to prescribe how each and every situation should be decided upon. It is just not possible. Not only is it not possible, it is not desirable either.

If we want strong schools with strong leaders, we cannot have them referring to a detailed rule book each and every time something happens, we cannot have them second guessing the Ministry, we cannot have them calling up the Ministry to ask: what should I do in this instance? We do not get strong schools and strong principals if we do that. We now have strong schools and, by and large, we have very good principals. I think to keep it that way, we have got to leave the decisions on these matters with them. These are the ground decisions they are in the best position to make. If they make decisions that are quite unreasonable, then the Ministry will intervene. But in this instance, the decision was not unreasonable, and that is why the Ministry supported the decision of the principal.

Ms Braema Mathiaparanam (Nominated Member): Can I ask the Minister then, since we do believe that principals must have the autonomy to exercise what they feel is the best ground decision, how are principals chosen, perhaps what kind of track record do we look at to ensure that we have got a good principal who knows how to use discretion in such matters?

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Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam: There is no cookie-cutter approach to selecting a principal. This is like leadership in other areas that we are familiar with, how you spot a person with leadership abilities. It is also, in the school context, about people who know what teaching is about, what nurturing students is really about, people with a certain sense of care and compassion. Our principals are basically people with a good sense of how young individuals grow. We take great pains to identify potential school leaders early in their careers and we check our assessments as they go through their careers. We go to great lengths to do so and put them through various projects and courses where we can also come up with further assessments as to who would make a good principal. It is not a perfect process, but it is not working too badly.