The National Youth Achievement Award (NYAA) is a nationally recognized award for individual who developed themselves holistically through four broad areas of self discovery and learning.  To develop pupils leadership skills through Service, self discovery while undertaking a journey in a group, participation in physical activities and development of personal interests and practical skills, all Secondary 2 and 3 students in Dunman Secondary School are strongly encouraged to participate in the NYAA Bronze Award, after which they can try for the Silver Award.

1. Community Service: Students perform at least 15 hours of service spread over a period of 3 months. All students are involved in wide variety of community activities like coaching, helping at All Saints' Home, Service Learning,  Beach Cleaning and collection of canned food for the less fortunate. Many initiate their own activities.

2. Adventure: Students will spend 2 days spent outdoors, including 1 night in a shelter or tent, including at least 12 hours of effort and activity, averaging 6 hours a day. Apart from CCA camps and activities, students either attend Outward Bound Singapore Camp and other Leadership Camps.  In 2007, all Secondary 3 students attend an Adventure cum Bonding camp at Kota Tinggi in Johore, Malaysia.

3. Skills Development: Over 6 months. Students initiate their own development programmes. Some initiatives include music lessons were conducted for all secondary 2 students for one period a week for the whole year. They learnt about different types of equipment used in the different genres. Besides that, they learnt about musical movies and how to read musical notes. They learnt to play Angklong too. Students put up an entertaining angklong performance for the school. Other students attended development sessions hip-hop dancing, video production and drumming.  The respective CCAs also take ownership in imparting skills such as fancy foot and arm drills, weight training and many other interesting skills.

4. Physical Recreation: 20 hours over 8 weeks. All pupils from sports groups and uniform group meet this criteria through their CCA involvement. Fitness conditioning is conducted during uniformed group training. A Sports and Recreation Club was set up for students who are from club and societies and performing arts group, who do not have opportunities to participate in physical recreation. Students can choose to play a variety of games such as in line skating, tchoukball or archery on Thursday afternoons. Students also initiate their own skills development programmes.