NSW selective schools hold one in five places for equity and never tell families who got one

Around 18,000 children sit the NSW Selective High School Placement Test each year. About one in four gets a place.

Up to 20 per cent of those places are set aside under a scheme called the Equity Placement Model. There is no separate application. Every child is considered for it automatically. And no family is ever told whether their offer came through it.

For a community that has invested more in this test than almost any other in Australia, those three facts are worth understanding properly, because most of what circulates about them is wrong.

What the model actually reserves

The Equity Placement Model applied for the first time at the March 2022 test, for Year 7 entry in 2023. At launch it set aside 850 places out of 4,248.

The department’s wording is that up to 20 per cent of student places at each selective high school and opportunity class are held under the model. The word each matters. This is not a system-wide quota that could be met at a handful of schools. It applies school by school.

The 20 per cent is divided into four categories, and this is where most summaries go wrong by describing it as a single disadvantage quota.

Ten per cent is for students from communities of low socio-educational advantage. Five per cent is for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. Two and a half per cent is for students from rural or remote New South Wales. And two and a half per cent is for students with disability.

So the largest component, half the total, is about the socio-educational profile of the community a child comes from. The rest divides between Indigeneity, geography and disability.

Nobody applies for it, and nobody is told

The department is explicit that “students will be automatically considered for equity placement when submitting a standard application”. There is no form, no box to tick, and no evidence to lodge.

It is equally explicit that families are not informed of the basis of an offer. Asked directly whether families are told, its answer is: “No. This is because of student privacy, equity and wellbeing considerations.”

Two further statements matter for anyone tempted to guess. The department says that “just because a student might belong to or identify with an equity group, doesn’t necessarily mean that their offer is an equity place”. And it says that “schools will not be told if a student has received an offer through equity placement”.

That design is deliberate and defensible. A child who arrives at a selective school labelled as an equity placement carries that label for six years, from teachers and from classmates. The department chose not to create the label.

It also makes the model impossible to scrutinise at the level of the individual, and impossible for a family to know what actually happened to their application. Both things are true at once.

The number that shows what it has and has not done

Martin Graham, Deputy Secretary at the NSW Department of Education, gave the headline result in August 2025: “For placement in year 7 in 2025, 21.5 per cent of all accepted selective high school places were by students from under-represented groups.”

That is the model working as designed. More than a fifth of accepted places went to students from the four categories.

Set beside it a second number. In 2024, just 2 per cent of students in fully selective schools came from the lowest quartile of educational advantage. In 2018, before the model existed, it was 1 per cent.

Several years of a 20 per cent reservation has moved the composition of these schools from 1 per cent to 2 per cent of the most disadvantaged quartile.

Those two figures are not in conflict. Offers are a flow and composition is a stock, and a stock changes slowly when only one year group turns over at a time. But it is also the case that the equity categories are broader than the lowest quartile, that an offer is not the same as an acceptance and an enrolment, and that families who decline offers are not evenly distributed.

The honest reading is that the model has changed who is offered places considerably faster than it has changed who is sitting in the classrooms.

What the research says about who is already there

Associate Professor Christina Ho, of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, has done the most cited Australian work on the demography of selective schools.

Her 2019 paper Ethnic Divides, analysing 2017 school data, found that on average 83 per cent of students in Sydney’s fully selective schools were from a language background other than English. Seven of those schools exceeded 90 per cent. James Ruse Agricultural High School, the most sought after in the state, was at 97 per cent. Across NSW government schools as a whole, the figure was around one third.

She is not a straightforward opponent of the model, and quoting her as one would misrepresent her position. In 2022 she said “I think the government is right to be concerned about that and to try to make the schools more equitable”, while warning in the same interview: “I do worry if this policy is going to increase that anxiety among families because they feel that the competition is even higher now.”

Her sharper criticism is aimed at the test rather than at the equity places. In August 2025 she described selective schools as having become “like the jewel in the crown of public education”, and made the point that goes to the heart of the issue: “The resources that you now need to invest to be successful in the test really undermine their accessibility as public schools.”

That is a criticism of coaching, not of equity placement, and it points at the part of the system nobody regulates.

The father who says preparation is no longer optional

Mohit Gupta lives in West Pennant Hills, in Sydney’s Hills Shire. His twins, Anika and Shivin, were in Year 6 and hoping to start selective school in 2026. Their examination was rescheduled after the disruption to testing in May 2025.

He sent them to a coaching institute for a few months before the test, and he was clear about why. It was not that he thought they needed it academically. It was that their classmates were doing it.

His assessment of where the system has landed is the most quoted line from that coverage: “I don’t think any kid can go without preparation to the exam anymore.”

And on what the test has become: “It’s too methodical right now, where there has to be some tuition and some tutoring on how to master it.”

That is one parent’s account rather than data, and it should be read as such. But it describes a dynamic that the department’s own equity design does not touch. Reserving places for disadvantaged communities does nothing about a test that families believe cannot be attempted without paid preparation.

The geography supports him. The Hills Shire generated more than 2,100 applications in 2024. Liverpool, with a considerably larger population of the kind the equity categories are designed for, generated about 900.

What coaching costs, from a source that does not sell it

Figures on tutoring almost all originate from tutoring companies. The independent consumer organisation CHOICE has published its own, and those are the ones used here.

One-on-one tutoring runs between $30 and $100 an hour. Kumon charges a $70 joining fee and then $120 per subject per month. One parent reported paying $64 for a four-hour session at a large coaching college, and others described facing an extra $300 or so per week.

The psychologist Jocelyn Brewer, quoted by CHOICE, offered a caution about what that money buys: “Someone who did well in their Higher School Certificate might have some skills to offer in understanding the content.”

[Unverified] There is no independent measurement of how many candidates for the selective test are coached, or of the size of the coaching industry. Every prevalence figure in circulation traces back to a company selling the service. The department has never published one, and it is the obvious question to put to it.

The people who objected, and what they objected to

When the model was introduced in 2022, a petition against it drew more than 4,000 signatures.

Bruce Fan, a North Sydney resident who organised it, raised a procedural objection rather than a principled one: “It is unfair that the policy has been retrospectively implemented on students who have already sat the tests this year.” His constructive alternative was that “the government should set up more selective schools in lower socio-economic areas”, which is a serious proposal and remains unadopted.

Yashwant Desai, of Kellyville, put the case in terms of fairness: “It’s not giving everyone a fair go.” He also asked the question that most animated the opposition, which was why selective schools in particular were the target of an equity intervention when the rest of the system was untouched.

Carrie Zhang, a Hurstville parent, was direct about the consequence for her own family: “My son’s ranking will go down.”

Mark Long, principal of Penrith Selective High School, welcomed the change, saying he was “really happy that all of the work by so many people over a long period of time is now in policy”. Penrith is exactly the kind of catchment the model was designed to reach.

When to apply for 2028

[Unverified] The department has not yet published dates for 2028 entry. As at the end of August 2026, its application and placement test pages carry 2027 entry only.

The verified 2027 timetable is the guide. Applications opened on 6 November 2025 and closed on 20 February 2026. The test was held on 1 and 2 May 2026, and outcomes were expected on 19 August 2026.

On that pattern, applications for 2028 entry should open in early November 2026 and close in February 2027. The department’s own caveat is that these dates are subject to change, and families should check rather than rely on the pattern.

There are 21 fully selective and 27 partially selective schools in New South Wales.

What a family should take from this

Do not try to work out whether your child received an equity place. You will not be told, the school will not be told, and belonging to one of the four groups does not mean an offer came through the model. Guessing produces anxiety and nothing else.

Understand what the 20 per cent is and is not. It is not a quota against any particular community. Half of it turns on the socio-educational profile of the area a child comes from, which cuts across every ethnicity in the state, and includes many Indian-Australian families in Western and South-Western Sydney who are outside the coaching economy of the Hills District.

And weigh the coaching decision on its merits rather than on what the neighbours are doing. The independent figures suggest a family can spend $10,000 or more across a preparation year. That is a real decision with a real alternative use, and the only Australian research on who is in these schools suggests the test rewards preparation heavily enough that the question deserves more thought than it usually gets.

The department has moved offers from 1 per cent to 2 per cent of the most disadvantaged quartile in six years. Whether that counts as working depends entirely on what you expected a placement policy to fix, in a system where the test itself has become something families believe they must buy their way into.

Sources

Every date, figure and quotation in this article is drawn from the sources below. They are listed so you can check the record yourself.

• NSW Department of Education, "Equity Placement Model"
• NSW Department of Education, "Fair access to selective high schools"
• NSW Department of Education, "Selective high school and opportunity class placement, key dates"
• ABC News, "NSW education aiming for equity of access to selective schools but numbers of disadvantaged students remain low"
• ABC News, "NSW selective schools admission changes promote equity"
• ABC News, "Petition against NSW selective schools equity placement changes"
• Centre for Policy Development, "Ethnic Divides"
• University of Technology Sydney, "Christina Ho"
• CHOICE, "Coaching colleges and tutoring"
• NSW Department of Education, "Selective high schools"