Selective school fail: Why NSW has lost control of the beast it created

Just for a moment, climb inside the head of a nine or 11-year-old sitting this year’s selective education exam.

A heavy responsibility sits on your pint-sized shoulders. You’ve spent years of Saturdays at tutoring, sacrificing chunks of your childhood to prepare for a test that’s desperately important to your parents, and that has consumed vast amounts of your family’s financial and emotional resources. You believe your future rides on whether you do well enough to win a place in a sought-after selective school or opportunity class.

Victoria has four selective schools. Western Australia has one. NSW has 42.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

The day arrives. You’re racked with nerves. You cram as you’re driven to the test, like an athlete warming up for an Olympic qualifier. When you arrive, you’re enveloped by chaos. Computers crash, kids are crying, hundreds of frantic adults swarm, riot police push through the crowd, people are shouting orders into loudspeakers and staff search for lost children. Perhaps worst of all, you worry you’ve messed up the test.

“[The children] were sitting at their desks with their hands on their ears, so many of them crying,” said one adult at the Canterbury test centre.

The debacle of this year’s selective school test was a manifestation of everything that’s wrong with the NSW selective school system – traumatised children, desperate parents and a Department of Education that has lost control of the beast it created.

This needs to be a galvanising moment – the final nail in the coffin for NSW’s radical, failed experiment in gifted education. We have known for a long time that the selective system offers no academic benefit to the students of NSW and may be causing some of them harm. It’s time to stop prioritising the aspirations of politicians and parents and to focus on the interests of children. It’s time for serious and significant reform.

Former NSW education minister Rob Stokes. “We’ve created an addiction to create specialist schools.”Credit: Brook Mitchell

Victoria has four selective schools. Western Australia has one. NSW has 42 (some fully, some partially) – a number that ballooned since the 1980s (when there were just seven) because both sides of government formed the view they’d be a good way to win votes and keep middle-class families in the public education system. They were wrong. It has had the opposite effect.

By taking top-performing students out of comprehensive public schools and turning selective schools into a prize, the government has created what parents now perceive as a two-tier system of premium and second-rate public schooling.

Parents have come to see the private system as the middle ground that the public system is missing, prompting a decades-long abandonment of government high schools (helped by government funding policies). As they flee, the level of disadvantage and need in the comprehensive public system increases and the vicious cycle continues.

We also know that selective schools haven’t helped high potential and gifted kids. Since the early 2000s, the performance of NSW’s top students has gone backwards in the key subjects of science, literacy and maths, according to international benchmark tests known as PISA. In the 2022 test, Western Australia – which has one selective school – had the same proportion of high performing students in maths and literacy as NSW.

Some argue that while selective schools distort the system, they can be good for individual students because they allow them to learn with like-minded peers. But that’s not always true, either. Research points to the “big fish, little pond effect”, in which a student’s belief in their academic ability is influenced by the students around them. So a kid who is at the top of their class in a comprehensive school is likely to feel better about themselves than the same kid who is at the bottom of their class in a selective school.

Some kids thrive on the competition, but for others, this shrinking confidence leads to anxiety, overwhelm and burnout, which can have a life-long impact. This stress is compounded by the travel – some kids commute for more than two hours a day – and the after-hours coaching, which they usually continue in high school, just to ensure they can keep up with their classmates. It’s a hamster wheel they can’t get off.

Education ministers understand the problems with selective schooling better than their premier bosses, who can’t shake the idea that they’re vote winners.

“I hate them,” says Rob Stokes, who was NSW’s education minister from 2017 to 2019. “It’s a bit like we’ve created an addiction to create specialist schools, and once we started we never weaned ourselves off.” His predecessor, Adrian Piccoli, agrees. “I think they are a bad idea. They’ve turned into quite elite public schools.”

The government needs to hold an inquiry, not only into how this year’s selective school exam went so spectacularly wrong, but into everything that fed into the debacle – the pressure on the children who sit the exam, the way the system has facilitated a booming and sometimes-exploitative coaching industry and the data long held within government, and long ignored, about the system’s flaws.

When this illustrates that the selective system is a failed experiment, politicians must have the courage to dismantle it, even if that means upsetting parents. After all, their ultimate duty is not to feed parental delusions or to serve their own political ambitions. “No doubt it would be very difficult to do – to turn some selective schools into public comprehensive high schools,” says Piccoli. “But that’s what the job is. It’s to do things that are in the state’s best interests.”

Jordan Baker is chief reporter of The Sydney Morning Herald. She was previously education editor.

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