Remaining Vacancies in Secondary Schools following DSA Exercise and Affiliated Admissions

Since the 2019 Secondary 1 Posting Exercise, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has required affiliated secondary schools to reserve at least 20% of places of their Secondary 1 cohort for non-affiliated students. This requirement is applied to each posting group, so that our schools remain open to students of different backgrounds. Overall, over the past five years, non-affiliated students have comprised about half of the Secondary 1 cohort of affiliated secondary schools.

The total number of Secondary 1 places offered in each school is the sum of planned places offered under the Secondary 1 Posting Exercise and the Direct School Admission (DSA) exercise. While the DSA admissions does not reduce the number of Secondary 1 places available in a school, non-affiliated students admitted via the DSA exercise will be considered as taking up reserved places for non-affiliated students.

In the past five years, there have been only two instances where an affiliated secondary school filled all the reserved places for non-affiliated students in one posting group via DSA, and no non-affiliated students were posted for that posting group during the Secondary 1 Posting Exercise. However, non-affiliated students in the other two posting groups were still admitted via the Secondary 1 Posting Exercise.

Mr Speaker, I think it would be very helpful if schools were to publish the number of DSA offers made this year and the number of affiliated students admitted in the previous year, and also, the incoming cohort size. With these three metrics, I think it would allow parents and students to make better informed choices when deciding which school the students should apply for, for the Secondary 1 admission exercise. Will MOE consider this suggestion?

Mr Speaker, I thank Ms Gho for her suggestion. We will consider it. Perhaps, an opportunity to explain that in deciding whether to publish such details, we would have to consider whether the information would help parents make an informed decision. In other words, does the historical data have low variance and help to predict what will happen next? Or it has a high variance in which case it is not so helpful for the family to make the decision this year.

But we will certainly study her suggestion.

Sir, on the matter of affiliation, I wonder if the Senior Minister of State will be willing to share if MOE provides guidelines or imposes stipulations on how wide the differential between an affiliated and non-affiliated student may be. I ask this because I understand the principle behind wanting to encourage affiliated students to attend their given secondary school, but I have seen reports that this difference can be quite wide – as much as 10 points within the given posting group – which seems to undermine this principle of meritocracy.

Sir, I thank Prof Lim for the question. I do not have the data with me. This Parliamentary Question (PQ) that was filed by Ms Gho was about the DSA exercise. I would suggest that he file a PQ on the issue of the affiliation and non-affiliation data.