Something Is Rotten In The Heart of Tanglin's Head Team
Tanglin Trust School is a very well established school that's been running for over 90 years. It's well-known in the international school community for it's amazing facilities, great teachers, happy students and it's democratically elected student council, if you understand a democracy to be a system built on lies and corruption, that is. What I mean to say, is that The Tanglin Trust School head team have been elected through biased methods. To put it simply, OUR VOTES DON’T MATTER.
For at least two to three years now the teachers within the school have been controlling the voting system, bending and rigging the elections to make sure that only certain people get into the head team. A small group of highly powered staff members basically control the entire system. I spoke privately with a member of the current Year 13 head team and he disclosed to me that if the teachers dislike or don’t agree with a candidate then they will just veto them out of the race, meaning that our votes don’t matter in the end. By the time those candidates, who have already been dismissed, step up onto the stage, the teachers already know who has won. Last year, Alistair Choo won the majority by a pretty big margin. Well guess what? The teachers didn’t care about his ideas for change as he didn’t fit the school’s image of what a Head Boy should be. So he was disregarded as a potential option, even though he had won the majority vote by the students of the school. The Last Word sat down with Alistair and we learnt a great deal of information.
One issue that came up in conversation was the fact that prospective candidate were instructed not to discuss their ideas for change and what they wanted to improve at Tanglin, but instead just “sell themselves”. This means that the candidates that propose real change are just shut out. In essence, the school turn the people that embody student voice into puppets that simply push an agenda the school has already decided, making sure that only staff changes happen and not those of the students’. Whilst I support that school’s mission to have more of a focus on the mental health of students and saving the planet, it’s the only change the head team have been able to initiate in the last few years. In addition to this, the reason why there isn’t any real change is due to the fact that the school purposely chooses people that they know won't try and argue, debate or disagree with teachers and so without disagreement and new ideas, change cannot be achieved.
The corruption in Tanglin’s head team voting system is an insult to everyone. It's an insult to the “elected” head team, the head team that should have been, students that voted, other teachers that voted and pretty much everyone in the Tanglin community.
This has to change or nothing in our school will really change.
For at least two to three years now the teachers within the school have been controlling the voting system, bending and rigging the elections to make sure that only certain people get into the head team. A small group of highly powered staff members basically control the entire system. I spoke privately with a member of the current Year 13 head team and he disclosed to me that if the teachers dislike or don’t agree with a candidate then they will just veto them out of the race, meaning that our votes don’t matter in the end. By the time those candidates, who have already been dismissed, step up onto the stage, the teachers already know who has won. Last year, Alistair Choo won the majority by a pretty big margin. Well guess what? The teachers didn’t care about his ideas for change as he didn’t fit the school’s image of what a Head Boy should be. So he was disregarded as a potential option, even though he had won the majority vote by the students of the school. The Last Word sat down with Alistair and we learnt a great deal of information.
One issue that came up in conversation was the fact that prospective candidate were instructed not to discuss their ideas for change and what they wanted to improve at Tanglin, but instead just “sell themselves”. This means that the candidates that propose real change are just shut out. In essence, the school turn the people that embody student voice into puppets that simply push an agenda the school has already decided, making sure that only staff changes happen and not those of the students’. Whilst I support that school’s mission to have more of a focus on the mental health of students and saving the planet, it’s the only change the head team have been able to initiate in the last few years. In addition to this, the reason why there isn’t any real change is due to the fact that the school purposely chooses people that they know won't try and argue, debate or disagree with teachers and so without disagreement and new ideas, change cannot be achieved.
The corruption in Tanglin’s head team voting system is an insult to everyone. It's an insult to the “elected” head team, the head team that should have been, students that voted, other teachers that voted and pretty much everyone in the Tanglin community.
This has to change or nothing in our school will really change.