Learning For Life Programme in Community and Youth Leadership

Punggol Secondary School (PSS) seeks to develop students to become confident citizens of the future who are learners and leaders guided by values and motivated to excel. This conviction underscores the impetus behind PSS’s Learning for Life Programme (LLP). Our LLP is an enriching, values-based and value-added educational experience to enable students to become future-ready citizens with a heart for people. The school thus embarked on the LLP journey in the domain of Community and Youth Leadership.

The LLP is crafted with equal emphasis on both community and youth leadership. Every student who journeys through PSS can expect themselves to be a part of this distinctive niche in LLP. With a strong focus on community and youth leadership, students’ voices are imperative in helping students develop ideas, opinions and empowering them to work towards achieving their aspirations steadily. LLP in PSS hence adopts a progressive and developmental model where the roles of the students and design of the programmes become increasingly complex as students learn to engage different stakeholders and beneficiaries. This progression is captured in the chart below.

In PSS, we hold strong to the belief that every student can be a leader, beginning with basic leadership of self. Leadership is a quintessential part of the development of students as we prepare them to face future challenges even as they progress to post-secondary institutions. Purposeful activities and programmes are crafted to create opportunities for the development of leadership in our students. 

Newly oriented students in Secondary One get a taste of the LLP through the design and planning of projects to conserve the environment. Students are given training in key leadership skills such as communication (Secondary One) and project management (Secondary Two). These are lifelong skills that will be very relevant to students as they journey through the education system.

Given enough opportunities to acquire leadership skills and serve the needs of others, students are then given higher levels of autonomy as their LLP journey culminates in a Service-Learning (SL) project in Secondary Three. Here, they are given the autonomy to decide as a class on the type of SL project they like to embark on with some guidance and facilitation by their Form Teachers. The SL project then becomes a vehicle of learning as the students engage beneficiaries more directly and understand the needs of others with empathy.

In the final year of education in PSS where they face the challenges of national examinations, the graduating students will then extend the projects they worked on in the previous year to further advocate for social issues faced by the beneficiaries. Students conduct research into topics of interest before sharing their findings with their juniors.