47 SECONDARY SCHOOLS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE DIRECT SCHOOL ADMISSION EXERCISE

1. The Direct School Admission Exercise (DSA) aims to promote holistic education by giving participating schools greater flexibility in selecting students while holding to the key principles of transparency and meritocracy. For students, the DSA provides them the opportunity to demonstrate a more diverse range of achievements and talents in seeking admission to secondary schools. This year, 47 schools, four more than last year, will be participating in the Direct School Admission Exercise for admission to Secondary One in 2007 (DSA-Sec).
2. Based on their track record of achievements and their development plans for their niche areas, the following four additional schools (in alphabetical order) have been approved by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to offer discretionary places under the DSA-Sec Exercise for schools with approved niche programmes:

School	Niche
Admiralty Secondary	Robotics Enterprise
Clementi Town Secondary	Uniformed Groups
Jurong Secondary	Basketball
Yishun Town Secondary	Uniformed Groups

The full list of niche programme schools is at Annex A.

Direct School Admission Exercise for Secondary Level

3. Independent Schools (IS), Autonomous Schools (AS) and schools with approved niche programmes (NS) have the flexibility to admit up to 20%, 10% and 5% respectively of their intake using school-based criteria.  Schools offering Integrated Programme (IP) and NUS High School will continue to have full discretion in admission.
4. MOE will continue to invite applications from schools interested to establish niche programmes in subsequent years.

Student Selection

5. Each school has its own merit-based criteria for selection (academic and/or non-academic criteria), based on the student personal qualities and areas of focus (such as science, music, sports) that the school would like to emphasise. Information on the schools participating in DSA-Sec Exercise, their selection criteria and their application and selection processes can be found on their respective websites. Annex B lists the participating schools and their website URLs.

DSA-Sec Exercise

6. The exercise will be conducted in 3 stages as follows:

Stage No.	Stage Name	Description	Period
1	Selection	Schools will conduct their own selection exercises, and inform students of the results (confirmed offer, on waiting list or rejected).	26 Jun 06 to 31 Aug 06
2	Exercise School  Preference	Students may indicate their school preferences during this stage, based on the confirmed offers they have received and schools which have placed them on the waiting list.  Offers not taken up will be considered as lapsed.	12 Oct 06 to 18 Oct 06
3	Results Release	The results of the DSA-Sec Exercise will be released together with the PSLE results.	late Nov 06

7. Please refer to Annex C for details of each stage.
8. Students who have been admitted through the DSA-Sec Exercise will not be able to participate in the centralised Secondary One Posting Exercise.

For Further Information

9. Students who are interested in participating in the DSA-Sec Exercise should approach any of the participating Secondary schools or visit their websites for more details regarding the selection exercises.
10. Students/Parents can also call MOE Customer Service Centre at 6872 2220 for further clarifications or refer to the MOE website for more information regarding the DSA-Sec Exercise.

Background

11. MOE has been giving schools and universities greater flexibility in their admission of students to allow a more diverse range of student achievements and talents to be recognised.
12. Since 2004, MOE has introduced a phased plan to provide greater flexibility in the secondary and junior college (JC) school admission system.  The plan includes:
    1. allowing schools with the Integrated Programme (IP) full discretion in admissions;
    2. enhancing the autonomy of Autonomous Schools (AS) and Independent Schools (IS) by:
       1. increasing their level of discretionary places to 10% and 20% respectively, and
       2. allowing them to adopt their own merit-based admission criteria for these places;
    3. extending discretion on admissions to mainstream secondary schools that are able to develop strong niche programmes;
    4. giving discretion on admissions to all JCs.

13. This has been accompanied by increasing the flexibility of the admission system for the five polytechnics, National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University.