Starting in Year 4: What Is Actually Worth Doing
A parent with a child in Year 4 has usually just discovered that this test exists, generally from another parent, and the discovery arrives with an implication that everybody else started earlier. That implication is worth resisting for a moment, because the arithmetic is friendlier than it sounds: the test is sat in Year 6, applications open in Year 5, and there is a great deal of ordinary time in between.
The calendar itself is laid out in the Selective test timeline. This is about what a Year 4 should actually be doing, which is mostly not what a Year 6 is doing.
The one-sentence version
In Year 4, build the inputs. In Year 5, build the skills. In Year 6, build the stamina. Doing them in the wrong order is how families burn a year.
Why timed papers now are a bad trade
A Year 4 sitting a Year 6 paper produces a low score and a bad afternoon, and neither is information. The content is not covered yet, so the mistakes do not tell you about the child. What they tell you is that the paper is two years ahead of them, which was already known.
There is a worse cost. A child who meets these papers as an object of failure at nine has an association to unlearn at eleven, and unlearning it takes longer than the year you gained.
The four things that are worth doing
- Reading, at volume and above their comfort level. Nothing else in this list is worth as much: see the reading habit.
- Mental arithmetic, to the point of fluency. Not speed drills. Fluency, so that the working memory is free for the actual question later.
- Arguing well. Being asked why, being expected to answer, being allowed to disagree with an adult who then takes the disagreement seriously.
- Something hard that is not academic. An instrument, a sport, a craft, anything where progress is slow and visible and the child has already survived being bad at something.
That last one is not filler. The most reliable difference between children who cope with Year 6 preparation and children who do not is whether they have ever practised something for a year, and most Year 4s who have, learned it somewhere other than a desk.
What about maths content
Stay with school. The Selective maths paper draws on primary curriculum content, so a Year 4 who is solid on their year's work is on track by definition, and the topics worth drilling is a Year 5 and 6 document rather than a Year 4 one.
The exception is anything the child is currently behind on. A gap at Year 4 is cheap to close and expensive to carry, and closing it is ordinary school support rather than test preparation.
Is it worth looking at the format at all?
Once, briefly, for the parent rather than the child. Knowing that there are four components and roughly what each looks like makes the Year 5 decisions easier, and it takes an evening. There is no reason for a nine-year-old to have seen a practice paper.
The one thing worth doing early is deciding whether you are doing this at all, because that decision shapes Year 5 far more than any practice does, and it is easier to make calmly two years out than eight months out.
The honest summary
Almost nothing in Year 4 needs to be about this test, and a family who spends the year reading widely, keeping up at school and protecting a child's appetite for hard things will arrive in Year 5 ahead of a family who spent it on papers.
When Year 5 does arrive, preparing in Year 5 sets out the term-by-term version, and it starts by measuring rather than teaching.
Selective Edge is not affiliated with the NSW Department of Education or the Selective High Schools Test administrators. This guide is general information for parents, drawn from publicly available test materials.