The Ministry of Education just announced stricter disciplinary measures for bullying — including standardising caning. As someone who got bullied by both students and a teacher, I have questions.
Let me set the scene. Primary school, Singapore, sometime in the 90s. A teacher, an actual qualified adult whose job was to educate and protect children, decided that the best way to handle a student she didn’t particularly like was to humiliate her in front of the class, regularly. With great enthusiasm and what I can only describe as creative flair.
That student was me.
I also got the full student-on-student bullying experience too, so really, I got the collector’s edition of Singapore school parade square trauma, which often stemmed from unclear bullying regulations in MOE schools back then.
I tell you this not to trauma dump on a Friday, but because this past week, the Ministry of Education released its long-awaited Comprehensive Action Review Against Bullying — and one of its headline moves is to standardise caning and suspension as disciplinary options across all schools by 2027.
A response to children being hurt, that involves… hurting children? Interesting.
What’s actually in the MOE’s Anti-Bullying Review?
The review is not all bad. In fact, parts of it are genuinely good. They engaged over 2,000 educators, parents, students and members of the public. They’re talking about values education, empathy, conflict resolution, peer culture-building, additional counsellors and youth workers in schools. They want students to be “upstanders,” which is a word I am half guffawing, but choosing to accept. There is language about restorative actions and communication timelines and “a culture of kindness and respect.” Reviewing bullying in MOE schools regulations in Singapore was certainly overdue.
All of that? Solid. Needed. Long overdue.
And then, sitting right there in the middle of the kindness-and-empathy framework, like a pineapple on a cheese board: caning. Not as a last resort whispered about in hushed tones. As a standardised measure. Across all schools. By 2027.
What happens when your child gets picked on?
My child was picked on last year. Nothing that made headlines, nothing that required intervention — just the quiet, grinding kind of social exclusion that kids do to each other when they’re figuring out power and belonging. The kind that doesn’t leave marks but absolutely does leave marks, if you know what I mean. For parents, bullying in Singapore MOE schools and related regulations become a very personal concern when your own child is affected.
Watching my child navigate that — and trying to help him understand what happened, why people do it, and how to stay whole through it without setting anyone on fire — I found myself thinking a lot about what we’re actually trying to teach kids when we respond to cruelty.
Is the lesson ‘don’t hurt others because it’s wrong and it damages people’? Or is it ‘don’t hurt others or a bigger person will hurt you’? Because those are different lessons. And they produce different adults.
Does caning actually stop bullying? Here’s what the research says
I know we’re a pragmatic, evidence-based society (MOE’s words, not mine, though I appreciate the aspiration), so let’s look at the evidence. The WHO, as recently as 2025, recommended ending corporal punishment of children entirely, citing overwhelming evidence that it causes long-term developmental and psychological harm.
Studies have linked physical discipline to reduced grey matter in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, decision-making, and empathy. So if the goal is to produce children with better impulse control and empathy… we may want to revisit the methodology. The intersection of bullying and Singapore MOE schools regulations is critical when evaluating these disciplinary approaches.
There’s also this inconvenient finding. Children who experience corporal punishment are more likely, not less, to exhibit aggression and behavioural difficulties over time. In the specific context of bullying, this creates what researchers politely call a “contradiction at the heart of policy,” and what I will less politely call a bit of a hot mess.
EveryChild.SG, in their response to the MOE review, put it plainly. A system cannot credibly teach non-violence while retaining violence as one of its tools. I have read a lot of policy documents in my life and I cannot find a hole in that logic.
What does effective school discipline actually look like?
I’m not arguing for consequence-free school environments where bullies get a hug and a feelings chart and carry on. Bullying causes real, lasting harm and needs to be treated with real seriousness. Regulatory frameworks for bullying in Singapore MOE schools could play a bigger role in shaping more effective responses.
But restorative approaches, where perpetrators are required to actually understand the impact of what they’ve done, make amends, and rebuild trust, are by most research more demanding than caning, not less. You can’t passively receive a restorative consequence. You have to show up, be accountable, sit in the discomfort of having hurt someone, and do the work of repair.
That is harder than getting six of the best and going back to class.
What do the experts recommend?
The tiered model that child welfare experts recommend — immediate safety, restorative conferencing, targeted rehabilitation, structured reintegration — asks more of everyone involved. It also produces better outcomes. Including, critically, for the victim, who gets to be more than just the reason a punishment was administered. These improvements are precisely what bullying in MOE schools regulations in Singapore aim to achieve over the coming years.
What Singapore parents actually want from this review
I want my child to go to school in a system that teaches, by example and in policy, that power is not the same as authority, that harm is repaired not avenged, and that the measure of discipline is whether it actually changes things.
I want the teacher who bullied me to have had to look at what she did and understand why it mattered. Because if we’re serious about this, accountability can’t stop at the school gate — it has to include the adults inside it too.
I want us to be better than we were when we were kids. Not aspirationally better. Structurally, systemically, deliberately better; in the ways we raise children, the ways we run schools, and the ways we decide what pain is acceptable to inflict on an eight-year-old in the name of discipline. The MOE’s recent review of school discipline policies is a moment worth taking seriously. It has good instincts. It uses the right language. But good instincts mean nothing if the cane stays on the wall.
In my opinion, a culture of kindness and respect cannot be enforced with a cane. You cannot beat your way to empathy. You cannot standardise safety while also standardising pain.
Singapore is good at hard things. This is a hard thing. Let’s do it properly.
