Requirement for Schools' CCA Teachers in Charge to be Present at Training Venues

Dr Benedict Tan asked the Minister for Education whether it is possible to remove the requirement for the teacher in charge of CCAs to be physically present at training venues and leave the duty of care fully to the external CCA provider.

The Senior Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education (Mr Hawazi Daipi) (for the Minister for Education): CCA is an integral part of students' holistic education. Through CCA, students discover their interests and talents while learning life skills, values and socio-emotional competencies.

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CCA activities are supervised as schools are concerned about the safety and well-being of students. The degree of supervision may vary, depending on the circumstances. As an example, for overnight or out-of-school CCA activities, CCA teachers will be present to provide more immediate response should somebody be injured. It would not be prudent to leave the duty of care fully to the external CCA provider in this case.

As far as possible, schools will match teachers to their assigned CCA based on each teacher's interests and experience, so that they can better encourage and nurture students' passion in that CCA.

MOE will continue to work closely with schools to enable students to develop holistically through CCAs in a conducive learning environment.

Madam, I thank the Senior Parliamentary Secretary for his reply. We know that our teachers already have a very heavy academic workload and it is difficult to match teachers' interests to the sports they cover. Some schools have cited the lack of resources for scrapping certain sports CCAs and one of the resource constraints is finding a teacher to be in charge of the sport and that is why I have suggested doing away with that requirement.

For all intents and purposes, the teacher is there for safety but when the school has already outsourced the coaching of the sport, let us say, badminton, to a professional service provider with a proper agreement which includes having the professional provider take care of safety, can we not just leave it to the professional provider to be responsible for safety and free up the teacher to do other academic duties?

Madam, I would say that this is a question of outsourcing tasks while, at the same time, retaining the responsibility. CCA is an integral part of education and we would like our students to learn not just to play the game. We want them to develop the right values, the ability to communicate and share wins and losses collectively. This is part of education. We would like teachers to be directly involved, apart from supervising or ensuring the safety of the students during CCA, in particular, games.

During training, it is important for teachers to be there. They may not be good at a game and may not be able to teach the students to play the games, but they would be there to supervise and build team spirit.

In some cases, the presence of teachers becomes even more critical. Where there are competitions, teachers may be adjudicators. They will have to mediate between the different stakeholders: organisers, parents, coaches and so on. It is, therefore, important for

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teachers to be there to supervise the training as well as during competitions as part of the holistic education for our students.