Why I Chose The DSA Route For My Son

DSA. If you’re a parent to a primary school child, you’ll know exactly what this stands for. 

It’s the Direct School Admission – an exercise that allows Primary 6 children to secure places in secondary schools using their talents in areas such as sports, music, the performing arts, and leadership. The children are offered these spots even before they receive their PSLE results.

While the DSA process formally begins in May of the Primary 6 year, many parents start preparing for it years in advance. After all, it’s a competitive scene, with some 14,500 students submitting applications for 8,000 available spots in 2023.

Based on social media posts in PSLE parent groups that I see, a significant proportion of these applications are to branded or elite schools in Singapore. There aren’t any publicly available figures to back this up, but online chatter skews heavily towards asking questions about admissions to the traditional top schools.

I’m a mum to a DSA child who has started secondary school this year, and I’m here to share why we decided to go this route – even as I wrote an open letter to my son in 2025 about how he is more than his grades and the school he goes to after his PSLE.

Why DSA?

So, why did we choose to put my son through the DSA?

I wouldn’t blame you for assuming I did this to secure a place in a branded school for my son without needing to rely on his PSLE results. It’s human nature after all, to try to work systems to our advantage.

The truth is a little more complicated. On one hand, I wanted to help him alleviate the stress of sitting for the PSLE, which we’ve experienced for ourselves and can say for a fact that it’s real.

All those horror stories of extra tuition classes to perfect answering techniques, as well as immense pressure to study and complete as many past year papers as possible, just to secure those extra few marks to make it to the next better AL score – sorry to say, they are true. I was also guilty of panic-buying assessment books and papers for my son to complete.

That being said, I really wanted him to go to a school where he could continue to grow in his talent and hone his skills.

Applying for a place in a school which offered his talent area with a track record of high achievement felt like the right thing to do.

And so, with these, we decided to bite the bullet and throw his name into the thousands of students applying for a DSA place last year. And because he wanted to go to a boys’ school, our choices were pretty limited.

Never try, never know right?

Our prep process

The controversy around the DSA is centred on the argument that the process unfairly favours those who are rich and those who have connections. That’s because the DSA is perceived to be really competitive, and children need to stand out from the crowd to be offered a place in their school of choice.

Many applicants in popular DSA domains are multiple medalists in national and even international competitions, while others have impressive portfolios of leadership and volunteer work.

For many parents, that means investing a lot of resources into training their children up to that level of excellence.

Why bother to enter this other race?

That was my initial thought. 

We didn’t have the means to pump in more money and time into my son’s talent, nor did we want to.

What he had was a deep love for singing and music which was evident from a very young age. I remember the first time I heard him singing in his car seat at 11 months old – he was swaying and chattering what sounded like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and he took so much delight in us singing along and clapping with him.

Seeing how much he enjoyed music, we started piano lessons when he was six years old. At nine, he joined a children’s choir where he trained weekly for two hours.

He, along with a few other boys, also started the choir CCA in his primary school, and became their first-ever leader, a role he relished as he taught the younger ones how to warm up and singing techniques. With that, we decided to let him apply for two schools with strong boys’ choirs where I felt matched his academic abilities, and see where his passion would take him.

No specialised DSA bootcamps thank you, because I personally believe it’s a money-making business and I don’t have the spare cash to throw around. It also places undue stress on the child, because what if they don’t get the DSA spot in spite of all the extra effort, time, and money you’ve put in?

So in May, we accessed the portal, submitted all his choir performances, piano exam and competition certificates, and just hoped for the best.

The results

What you’re probably curious about is: how many DSA offers did my son get?

He got two offers – one Confirmed Offer and one Wait List Offer.

Would he have received more Confirmed Offers if we’d prepped him more rigorously? Who knows. But it’s not important to me. 

A school he wanted to go to for their choir had offered him a spot, which is his no matter what he scores in the PSLE as long as it’s below 20 because that’s the cut-off for Posting Group 3 – the only posting group the school offers, and approximately the equivalent of the Express stream in the old PSLE system.

He ended up scoring well below the affiliation entry score, which I was relieved about solely because that meant he would probably be able to keep up, academically. 

Of course, if he hated singing, entering the DSA pool through choir would not have been on the cards. Why would we want to tie him down in a CCA he would ultimately come to resent, if we only made him take it up for a chance at the DSA?

Music has always been his first love, so going this route felt exactly right for us.

He’s even chosen to further his music studies with the Music Elective Programme, a four-year programme which will culminate in the Higher Music paper at the Singapore-Cambridge Secondary Education Certificate (SEC) examinations – entirely of his own volition.

What’s next

Naysayers will say he used a backdoor to enter the school, because he is a DSA student. 

“He didn’t get into the school fairly, he used DSA.”

“Entering via DSA is cheating because his PSLE score wouldn’t have qualified him.”

Well, I say let them say what they want. Academic results are not the only measure of success, and that’s where the DSA comes in.

Of course, there’ll be people trying to game the system, those who try to improve the chances of their child entering a “better” school by sending their children to academies or coaches linked to the school, or by capitalising on personal relationships to pull strings behind the scenes.

While these are explicitly disallowed, parents do it anyway. And these are precisely the parents who give the DSA a bad name.

For the rest of us, the DSA scheme is a great way to encourage our children to be well-rounded individuals who can use their achievements outside of schoolwork to take the next step in their education journey.

I’m thankful my son got to do his PSLE year this way, without crazy prep – just his usual Chinese group class and adhoc math tuition in the six months leading up to the PSLE. We have no regrets.

Would I do this for my other children? Only if they want to commit to their pursuits in sports, dance, or other areas of interests at a more intense pace in secondary school.

Otherwise, I’ve decided we’ll just go where their PSLE results take them, with as little additional stress as possible.

Kelly Ang (@kelthebelle) is a freelance writer and a mum of five who spends an equal amount of time each day writing, driving her kids around, nagging at them (sadly) and planning her next family adventure. She’s still learning new things about being the mum her kids need, 12 years into this motherhood gig.