Jail term upheld for woman who lied about address to enrol daughter in primary school in 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 April 22 against her one-week jail term.

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon dismissed the woman’s appeal and upheld the sentence handed down by a district judge in November 2025, News.Az reports, citing Straits Times.

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 on Sept 24. She cannot be named due to a gag order to protect her daughter’s identity. The order covers the name of the school and personnel involved.

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.

When the vice-principal of the school met the woman to verify her address in August 2024, she told her tenants to shut the flat’s windows from 7am to 11pm.She also instructed them 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.

News.Az 

By Leyla Şirinova