How do I prepare my child for the selective school test?

Every year in Sydney, thousands of families begin preparing a Year 5 child for the Selective High School Placement Test, which is sat in Year 6, and most begin with the same instinct: buy practice papers and sit them. It is the wrong first step for a reason that becomes obvious once the test is understood. The test has four components ( reading, mathematical reasoning, thinking skills and writing ), and it is designed to reward reasoning under time rather than recalled content. A child who sits practice papers before the reasoning has been taught learns to guess faster, not to think better.

Thinking skills is the component families underestimate and the one that decides most placements, because it is the least taught. It asks a child to follow an argument, spot the flaw in it, deduce what must be true from a set of statements, and do so in seconds. None of this is on the primary curriculum, and most children meet it for the first time on a practice paper. Taught explicitly as logic, with the reasoning talked through aloud, it is entirely learnable, and children who learn it first find the rest of the test easier because reading and mathematics are both, at bottom, reasoning tasks.

Reading on the test is not the reading a child does at school. It asks for inference: what the writer implies, why a character acts, which sentence supports which claim, all under a clock that does not allow a second pass. Children who read widely have an advantage in vocabulary and stamina, but breadth alone does not produce speed. Timed comprehension sets, marked and debriefed, teach the child to find the answer in the passage rather than in their memory of it, and to leave a question they cannot answer rather than sink the paper into it.

Mathematical reasoning extends beyond what a Year 5 or 6 classroom covers, but it is not advanced mathematics; it is ordinary arithmetic and geometry applied to unfamiliar problems. The preparation that works is not a race through the Year 7 syllabus but a steady diet of problems that require the child to decide what to do before doing it. Speed comes later, from familiarity, and it should not be forced early: a child drilled on speed before method learns to skip the thinking that the questions are designed to reward.

Writing is the component most often neglected because it is the hardest to mark at home. The child is given a prompt and a short time, and is assessed on ideas, structure and control. The single habit that lifts most children is planning: a minute spent deciding the beginning, middle and end before writing produces a complete piece in the time available, where an unplanned start produces a good beginning and no ending. Writing to the clock weekly, with criteria-based feedback, turns a child's fear of the blank page into a routine.

Full mock papers belong at the end of the runway, not the beginning, and they belong on a schedule. A child who sits a complete paper every second weekend in the final term, each followed by a marked debrief, walks into the real test having already sat it five or six times and treats the next one as routine. That familiarity is the last advantage the preparation confers, and it is the one parents can see on the morning: a calm child, a known format, a plan for the clock.

Families sometimes ask whether a child who is not yet strong should attempt the test at all. The honest answer is that preparation of the kind described here lifts most children, because the components reward skills that are rarely taught and therefore rarely developed, but it does not turn every child into a candidate for the most competitive schools. A written projected placement score range, revised each term as the mocks come in, is the fairest way to keep expectations aligned with the evidence, and it lets a family choose preferences in the final months with their eyes open.

Edward MaDirector, MA99 Education