SINGAPORE: A woman who lied about her home address to enrol her daughter in a primary school lost her appeal to the High Court on Wednesday (April 22) against her one-week jail term.
Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon dismissed the woman’s appeal for a S$9,100 fine and upheld the sentence handed down by a district judge in November 2025.
He said that if he had heard the case at the start, he would have imposed a lengthier jail term.
The 42-year-old woman pleaded guilty in September 2025 to a charge of giving false information to public servants and another charge of giving false information when reporting her change of address.
She cannot be named due to a gag order to protect her daughter’s identity. The order covers the name of the school and the personnel involved.
In 2025, both the prosecution and the woman, who was then unrepresented, sought a fine before the district court.
On April 22, she engaged a lawyer to argue her case at the appeal hearing.
The prosecution submitted that the one-week jail term imposed by District Judge Sharmila Sripathy-Shanaz was justified after studying her written decision, and did not seek a heavier sentence.
Chief Justice Menon said he found nothing wrong with the sentence passed by the district judge.
He added that the woman’s actions had resulted in the school wasting resources to investigate the offences.
During the 2023 Primary 1 registration exercise, the woman enrolled her daughter in the school via priority admission based on the distance of their home to the school.
To do so, she provided the address of an HDB flat she had leased out to six tenants.
In June 2024, she e-mailed the school to request a change to her records and provided her partner’s address, which was beyond 2km from the school.
She retracted the request when the school told her it would violate the 30-month stay requirement for pupils who enrolled via priority admission.
School officials became suspicious and tried to verify whether the girl really lived at the flat.
During the first visit on Aug 1, 2024, school staff were met by tenants.
When the vice-principal of the school met the woman to verify her address on Aug 6, 2024, she lied that she and her daughter lived in the flat on weekdays.
The woman also told the real estate agent representing the tenants to instruct them to close all the windows from 7am to 11pm and to lie and say that she and her daughter lived in the unit.
After several futile attempts to verify her address, the school informed the woman that it would transfer her daughter out of the school in October 2024.
The school made a police report the following month.
In 2007, a lawyer was given 11 months’ jail for forging stamp duty certificates for a client’s property transaction and lying about his home address to get his daughter into a reputable school in Bukit Timah.
In another case in 2015, a man was fined $5,000 for lying to a school principal about where he lived to get his daughter admitted to a primary school.
In 2018, a woman was fined $5,000 after she gave a false address to enrol her child in a prestigious school during the Primary 1 registration exercise in 2015. Her husband was fined $4,000 for giving a false contact address to a registration officer at a police post.
According to data from the Ministry of Education, the number of investigations into such cases averaged about one a year from 2008 to 2018, but jumped to nine a year from 2020 to 2024. - The Straits Times/ANN
