Update: View our latest guides, including tips from other parents, in our DSA section! 

In response to some parents’ requests, I decided to share my experience about Visual Art DSA for secondary schools, with Visual Art DSA and Portfolio preparation.

You can only DSA to 3 schools maximum. Choose the 3 schools carefully by looking at the MOE website to see which school has Visual Art DSA.

Each Secondary School with Art DSA may request for specific things. It is best you refer to their website, and generally schools have common things that they look for. If after reading the school’s website and you are still unsure, it’s best to call up the school to clarify.

For Art DSA, here are some pointers that I would like to share, about things you need to know or have:
1. Certificates of participation for Art Competitions (school and outside school). It’s best if your child has won competition prizes.
2. Certificates for passing art exams/tests. If you go to private schools that teach art and have some kind of “exam,” it's better if it is a well-known school.
3. Your child’s artwork collections — colour-printed images will do. This is to show evidence of passion and also the quality of the art pieces drawn/done.
4. Compile the items from point 1 to 3 in an orderly manner. We call this the "portfolio," i.e. put everything in a nice file and submit with the application form downloaded from schools’ website. For non-portable art pieces, take a picture and colour print it for compilation. The portfolio's purpose is to help your child gain a place for an interview by the school.
5. Interview of students: normally your child will be given a time slot, and your child will need to draw/do an art piece “live” at the school, usually with a “question” set by the teacher/interviewer. This can be very stressful if your child has had no formal training, unless your child is really very talented.
6. Ah ha, last but not least, you will be surprised that schools interview parents too. Maybe this helps the school to understand how supportive the family is for the child’s art journey. 

Hope the above helps. It's best to call up the school to clarify what they are really looking for.

If you get to see those Sec 3 and 4 students’ art pieces in their school’s gallery, you will be surprised at the high standard of the work.

For the certificate exam/test portion, maybe it’s good to start getting private lessons say in P4, to give 2 yrs of formal training with exams/tests to obtain certificates.

As for which private lessons to go, just google for some art schools in Singapore, call them up and ask them.

We started to provide our child with private art lessons and competitions to build their portfolio from P4. We looked out for 3 schools in P6 prior to the DSA closing dates (note that different schools have different closing dates), which we thought would match our child’s academic capability. We applied to the 3 schools, got 3 interviews and 3 offers.