Updated: 6:12am – Teachers be warned – there is zero tolerance on corporal punishment.
Permanent Secretary for Education Iowane Tiko gave this stern warning yesterday after he confirmed that three senior teachers from a Namosi school were recently sent home.
He said from Seoul, South Korea, where he stopped over on his way to an international meeting in London (full story on page 3), that the teachers (understood to be a principal, vice principal and assistant principal) had been suspended with pay pending investigations.
The ministry would submit its report to the Solicitor-General’s office to vet the charges. If the S-G’s office stamps its seal of approval, the case proceeds to the Public Service Disciplinary Tribunal for its decision. When the case reaches this point, the teachers’ pay is stopped.
Since 2016, when the ban on corporal punishment was introduced, more than 20 teachers were disciplined and convicted by the courts, Mr Tiko said.
“Just this year there were seven cases at QVS (Queen Victoria School) and two cases at RKS (Ratu Kadavulevu School). There were cases from other schools too. Overall, there are about three to four cases a term,” he said.
He stressed that the ministry was complying with the law in our statutes which outlawed corporal punishment. It was not a ministry law, he clarified.
He said the ministry was thinking of a judicial review on how the law was interpreted and applied in schools. In its current form, the “definition of the law is broad and it does not specify what action is construed as corporal punishment.”
He said the ministry’s corporate services division was working on a submission to Cabinet about streamlining the law. He said to help the teachers, the law must specify what constituted corporal punishment.
“At the moment, slapping, punching, pinching, pulling an ear and using a stick to whack a student are all classified as corporal punishment.”
Some teachers claimed they had received permission from parents to administer corporal punishment to instill discipline. Mr Tiko said the law applied to both parents and teachers.
He said it had also been alleged that some parents who reported cases to the ministry were trying to get back at the teachers because they had a grudge against them.
In this case, it is understood that the aggrieved student had informed the wife of a headmaster in another school about the alleged incident. She then reported the matter to the ministry.
Mr Tiko reiterated that the “law is the law”, and the ministry was bound by that law.
He said parents and teachers “cannot take the law into their own hands.”
-Fiji Sun
