Every year, secondary schools across Singapore hand a leadership badge to the loudest, most articulate student after the student council elections. And every year, some of those same students freeze the first time a real problem lands on their desk.

This brings us to a critical question that every Head of Department (HOD) running a leadership portfolio needs to sit with: Are we building leaders, or are we running a popularity contest with better paperwork?

Most schools can identify which students look like leaders. Far fewer can identify which students actually are — because that only becomes visible once something breaks. Every school carries a shortlist of leadership students long before anything difficult has happened to any of them, and that shortlist is almost always assembled from stage presence. The evidence is wrong, and so is the moment it is gathered.

Every staffroom knows it privately: the charismatic student everyone recalls from assembly is not necessarily the one who can be trusted to keep a deadline. Ask any selection panel who they would rely on to lock up after a late CCA session, and the name that comes back is often not the name on the badge. Schools default to charisma as a proxy for capability, because charisma is visible and capability is not.

Students can often explain sound money principles in class, yet make very different decisions when real choice, pressure, and trade-offs appear. The issue is often not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of behaviour formation. If schools want financial literacy to contribute to life readiness, they need to design not only for understanding, but for stewardship.