SINGAPORE — The facilitators who conducted the workshop session attended by Hwa Chong Institution (HCI) student Agatha Tan were “ineffective”, especially the male facilitator. This was the conclusion after an internal investigation by the school was completed, said HCI’s principal Dr Hon Chiew Weng in a statement today (Oct 9) issued to all students and teachers.

The relationship workshop, provided by Focus on the Family Singapore, caused a furore after Ms Tan shared a letter she wrote to her principal on her Facebook page, calling out the workshop as sexist. Yesterday (Oct 8), the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) and the Ministry of Education (MOE) said they would look into the feedback.

Today, the MOE said the relationship module workshop, which started in 2009, was planned to cease its run by end-2014, "as the learning objectives on educating the students on healthy relationships can be met starting 2015 by MOE's refreshed Growing Years Programme at the JC/CI level".  The Growing Years Programme is a holistic sexuality education programme for Primary 5 to JC/CI students and taught by MOE-trained sexuality education teachers.   

In his statement, Dr Hon said several workshops on managing relationships were held for JC1 students last week, and they were facilitated by an external vendor approved by the MSF. The school has used the service of the vendor before and feedback had been positive. Dr Hon did not name the vendor.

However, the male facilitator in question for this class was unable to address the concerns of students satisfactorily when several of them objected to various viewpoints during the discussion, said Dr Hon.

On the other hand, a similar workshop in another venue did not draw unhappiness from students who attended it, and the facilitators were professional, and qualified their claims, he said.

They had recognised that the views put forth in class were generalisations that do not apply to everyone, and when referring to controversial viewpoints, they were open to accepting alternative explanations and perspectives, he added.

“As educators ourselves, we recognise that the success of any talk or workshop depends to a large extent on the quality of the speaker or facilitator... We are disappointed that this time they had sent someone who was unable to address the concerns of the participants,” said Dr Hon.

He said the school will provide feedback to the vendor, and is planning to design its own future workshops.

“One lesson we can learn from this episode is that even if a programme is approved by both MSF and MOE, things can go wrong. We have to depend on ourselves to ensure the quality of our programmes,” added Dr Hon.

However the school should still adopt an open culture when it comes to engaging external speakers in the future.

“Workshops or seminars of this nature will give the necessary space for our students to think, synthesise and exercise their ethical reasoning. Most important, we must always observe mutual respect in any discussion, which is our win-win philosophy,” he said.