Should My Child Sit the Selective Test? An Honest Guide

Should my child sit the selective test is a question most NSW parents of a Year 5 or Year 6 child end up asking, usually because someone else's parent mentioned it at pick-up and made it sound compulsory. It is not compulsory, and for a meaningful number of children the right answer is no.

What follows is an attempt at an honest version of this decision, including the parts that do not favour sitting. We build practice material for this test, so you should read what follows knowing that, and hold us to it.

What sitting the test actually costs

Start with the price, because it is usually left out of the conversation.

The test itself is one morning. Four components, all taken on department-supplied computers: Reading with 17 questions in 45 minutes, Mathematical Reasoning with 35 questions in 40 minutes, Thinking Skills with 40 questions in 40 minutes, and a single 30 minute writing task. That is a demanding morning for an eleven year old, but it is one morning.

The real cost is everything before it. Preparation, done at any serious level, takes hours that would otherwise have gone somewhere else. It usually runs across the back half of Year 5 and most of Year 6. It competes with sport, with music, with reading for pleasure, and with the unstructured time that children of that age quietly need.

And there is a second cost that is harder to see. A child who spends a year preparing for something learns that the something matters. If the household treats the outcome as the point of the year, an eleven year old will absorb that framing completely, and in August they will interpret the result as a verdict on themselves. That is not inevitable, but it takes deliberate effort to avoid, and plenty of families do not make it.

Signs it suits your child, and signs it does not

Some children genuinely thrive on this, and the signals are usually visible before any preparation starts.

• They enjoy problems for their own sake, and will keep poking at a puzzle after the reward for solving it has gone.
• They are not derailed by being wrong. They can look at a mistake, shrug, and try again.
• They read widely and by choice, which does more for the Reading and Writing components than any drill.
• They are visibly under-stretched at school, finishing early and asking for more rather than coasting comfortably.
• They want it themselves, in their own words, rather than repeating a sentence they heard at the dinner table.

The counter-signals matter just as much, and they are easier to rationalise away.

• They take mistakes hard. A child who cries over a wrong answer in the kitchen will have a very difficult year of timed practice.
• Their current workload is already at capacity, and adding anything means removing sleep or play.
• The interest is entirely yours. If every conversation about it is initiated by you, that is information.
• They have a strength that is not primarily academic, in sport or the arts, and a selective pathway would crowd it out rather than support it.
• School is already a source of anxiety rather than a source of confidence.

None of these are permanent verdicts on a child. A student who is not ready in Year 5 may be a different person in Year 8, and selective high schools do take students in later year groups through processes run individually by each school. The Year 6 round is not the only door, and the others are covered in alternatives to selective schools.

The arithmetic nobody enjoys

There are 4,338 places available in selective high schools across NSW for entry to Year 7, plus 100 places at Aurora College. Far more families apply than that.

Which means the ordinary, unremarkable outcome of this process is that most children who sit do not receive an offer, including a great many who are genuinely excellent at school. It is not a story about a small unlucky minority. Missing out is the statistically normal result.

You should therefore make this decision as though no offer is coming, because for most families that is what will happen. If the year only makes sense on the assumption of a place, it does not make sense.

A reality check on the prize

It also helps to know what the evidence says about the size of what is being competed for, because the conversation around selective schools rarely includes it.

A 2024 study in the British Journal of Educational Studies by Melissa Tham, Shuyan Huo and Andrew Wade followed 2,933 Australian young people and found that attending an academically selective school is not associated with major benefits for education, employment or life satisfaction outcomes, though selective-school graduates reported slightly higher general life satisfaction.

Australian value-added work points the same way. A 2018 Melbourne Institute working paper on achievement gains from attendance at selective high schools found effects on university entrance ranks were small, consistent with similar studies in the United Kingdom and the United States.

This is not an argument that selective schools are bad. Plenty of children love them and do well in them, and a school full of students who want to be there is a real thing to want for your child. It is an argument against the intensity, against treating one morning in May as the hinge on which a life turns. The evidence simply does not support that much weight.

The part that transfers either way

Here is the case for sitting, made honestly.

The skills the test rewards are not test-specific. Reading a problem carefully enough to work out what it is actually asking. Holding several steps in mind at once. Finding a way into an unfamiliar question with no worked example in front of you. Writing something coherent for a purpose and an audience, in half an hour, without a plan handed to you.

Those are the skills of secondary school, of scholarship examinations at other schools, and of most of the difficult things your child will meet afterwards. A child who spends a year building them has not wasted the year, whatever the screen says in August. That is genuinely true, and it is the reason a well-run preparation year can be worth doing.

It is also the reason it does not need to be frantic. If the skills are the point, the process can be measured: a couple of focused sessions a week, real problems rather than repetitive drilling, conversations about how your child got to an answer rather than only whether it was right. That version costs a fraction of what a full-scale campaign costs, and it delivers most of what actually transfers.

Landing the decision

There are three defensible positions here, and only one of them is wrong.

You can decide not to sit, and that is a perfectly good choice for a child who is happy, well served by their local school and not asking for this. You can decide to sit in the measured way described above, treating the preparation as skill-building with a possible bonus attached. Both are reasonable.

The position that does not hold up is sitting because everyone else is, then escalating through the year because the pressure escalates, and arriving in August with a child who believes their worth was on the line. That is the version families regret, and it is the most common one.

So ask a smaller question than the one in the headline. Not whether your child could get in, but whether the year in front of the test is a year you would be happy for them to have, even if the answer in August is no. If it is, sit the test. If it is not, the honest answer really is no, and there is no cost to saying so out loud in your own kitchen.