DSA-SEC: How Dance Can Complement Your Child's Admission Into Their Preferred Secondary School

25 Aug 2022
Direct-School Admissions (DSA-SEC)
Direct School Admission (DSA-SEC) Programme

In an academically driven society as Singapore where every parent's primary concern with school-going children is their educational results, we have encountered first-hand when dance is often sacrificed for extra tuition classes when a student's academic results needs improvement. However, we are of the humble opinion that dance actually offers students an outlet to engage in an activity that betters their mental and physical wellbeing, leaving them recharged for their academic pursuits. 

In recent years, our nation's leading education authority - Ministry Of Education has been pushing for a broad-based multifaceted learning approach as evidenced by the introduction of the new Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) scoring system - Achievement Level (AL) since 2021 and the introduction of Subject-Based Banding (SBB) in Secondary Schools from 2024 onwards. Thus, pursuing dance while striving for academic excellence at the same time is now a very viable option through MOE's DSA-SEC admission programme that takes into account a student's talent in Dance when they are vying for a spot in their preferred Secondary School. 

For a quick overview of DSA-SEC, please refer to the following content: 
 

 
On 26th March 2022, we also held our first-ever DSA-SEC Webinar that was attended by more than 100 parents/students and we are confident that everyone walked away from the session with new found knowledge about how a student's participation in dance may complement the enrolment into their preferred Secondary School. Please refer to this link for an overview of the response from our parents on the effectiveness of the webinar: Parent's Reviews. 
 
As the entire webinar lasted more than 2 hours, thus we seek your kind understanding as it would be challenging for us to cover the entire topic in a single article.  For our existing students and parents, we will endeavour to hold 2 DSA-SEC webinars annually thus please stay tuned for our email updates on this. While there are many considerations for a parent to contemplate before embarking on the DSA-Sec journey (>30% of all PSLE students applied for DSA-Sec each year), we have developed our own decision-making matrix to streamline and assist our parents in planning for your child's first important academic milestone using DSA-Sec through Dance. Please refer to the flowchart below: 


Moving on, we had also covered a few case studies of the DSA-Sec selection criteria in the top 30 Secondary Schools and please refer to the information below for an overview of the general criteria required: 
 

Based on these general requirements, these are our recommendations for parents/students who are keen to pursue DSA-Sec in their child's PSLE year: 


To stand a good chance of success in the DSA-Sec submission, we have formulated our own 2 years DSA-Sec programme as shared below: 



 
Thus, for students who progress into Primary 5 every year, the parents will receive an email from us in early January on the start of the DSA-Sec programme and they can respond with their interest to try out DSA-Sec for their child as per our programme outline above. 

To summarise, DSA-Sec is a substantial undertaking where years of planning, preparation and staging are required before a child progresses into their PSLE year in Primary 6. Thanks for your attention to this article and please feel free to contact us at [email protected] for further assistance. In the meantime, stay safe and keep on dancing! 

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