Why parents vote with their wallets to get kids into selective school

It’s the best education money can’t buy.

Or is it?

Sydney’s selective public schools remain the gold standard in education, so it is little wonder parents are spending thousands of dollars, trying to move heaven and earth, to get their kids in.

James Ruse students Warren Song, Yutong Duan and Julia Zheng all received 99.95 ATARs last year.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

Typical of these is Manha Sarker, a bright 11-year-old from Campbelltown featured in today’s Sun-Herald. She spends almost every waking minute preparing for next weekend’s selective school test.

Selective schools were set up for gifted and talented students – the top 5 per cent. But accusations that selective entry has been hijacked by tutoring colleges are not unfounded. Many of these organisations market themselves on getting children into these schools, and then continue to prey on parents once students get in by teaching ahead of class under the guise of “keeping up”.

Later this week, 17,559 year 6 students will sit testing aimed at snaring one of about 4200 places in a selective school or class. More than 13,000 of them will fail. That’s a lot of very upset 11-year-olds and their families.

Mohan Dhall, the chief executive of the Australian Tutoring Association, thinks about 90 per cent of children have coaching before the test.

Twenty per cent of places in selective schools are reserved for disadvantaged students but they must score within 10 per cent of the bottom successful rank. Thus, not all of these equity spots are awarded.

Combined with a thoroughly opaque scoring system now, parents are flying blind and the coaching colleges are cashing in. After 2021, the Department of Education stopped publishing entry cut-off scores. In that year, James Ruse Agricultural High had the top entry score, followed by Baulkham Hills High and North Sydney Boys.

Governments started to increase the number of selective schools in the late 1980s and, particularly this century, added selective classes to comprehensive schools. Now there are 21 fully selective and 25 partially selective public high schools in NSW. (Victoria – with a similar-size population – has four.)

It’s a two-tiered system of the state’s own making, which, combined with the failure to publish cut-off scores, has created an arms race.

Only a year ago, Dhall said the cut-off secrecy meant tutoring companies were filling the information vacuum with their own league tables and exploiting parent anxiety to spruik their services.

“It is a public test in a public system and there should be public disclosure of test scores and accountability around it,” he said at the time. “The citizens of NSW should be able to make informed decisions, and you can’t do that in the absence of information.”

To counter the ferocious competition for selective schools, Education Minister Prue Car has promised to create a gifted education program in all public schools.

It’s a start. But it’s a long way from making public education equitable when parents pull out their wallets to give their children the best opportunity of all. And you can’t blame them for that.

Bevan Shields sends an exclusive newsletter to subscribers each week. Sign up to receive his Note from the Editor.