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NSW education aiming for equity of access to selective schools but numbers of disadvantaged students remain low
Anika and Shivin Gupta are keen to get into year seven at two Sydney selective public schools in 2026.
As the children of post-graduate educated parents, and residents of Sydney's north west, they are typical of students applying to NSW selective schools.
These prestigious public schools, which dominate the HSC distinguished achievers list alongside the top private schools, award places to only one in four of 18,000 applicants.
The NSW government implemented a fair access model in 2022 to allocate 20 per cent of selective school places to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
"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," NSW Department of Education Deputy Secretary Martin Graham said.
With an ABC analysis showing that just 2 per cent of students in most of NSW's 21 fully selective schools in 2024 came from the lowest educationally advantaged group, these schools have a long way to go to achieve equitable access.
In Australia, selective public schools that take only gifted students based on an academic entrance test is mainly a NSW phenomenon.
There are 21 fully selective schools and 27 partially selective NSW government high schools.
Christina Ho, an associate professor in social and political sciences from the University of Technology Sydney, said fully selective high schools dominate the HSC leader boards each year, in many cases outshining prestigious independent schools.
"In NSW, selective schools have become like the the jewel in the crown of public education," she said.
Dr Ho said all high potential students should have a chance to get into selective schools, regardless of family background.
Educational advantage is measured by the education and occupation of a student's parents by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority.
It is associated with how well students perform on the standardised NAPLAN tests.
Around 2 per cent of students in the 21 fully selective schools are from the lowest educationally advantaged quartile, up from 1 per cent in 2018.
Two rural agricultural boarding schools, where around a quarter of students are from the lowest educationally advantaged group, are the exceptions.
The Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage (ICSEA) measures the socio-educational advantage of every school.
Nearly half of the top 20 most advantaged schools in NSW are fully selective public schools, alongside the state's most prestigious private schools.
"They're [the selective schools] designed to be much more open and accessible than that and obviously we've gotten to a stage where it's nowhere near that," Dr Ho said.
The 20 per cent of students from under-represented groups who were accepted in 2025 were spread across fully and partially selective schools, but NSW education did not confirm the breakdown between the two categories.
The under-represented groups include Indigenous, rural and remote, disabled students and those from low socio-educationally advantaged areas.
Mohit Gupta, father of Anika and Shivin, said the twins were keen to go to a selective school because it was what other children at their primary school were aiming for.
The Gupta family live in West Pennant Hills in Sydney's Hills Shire, where large numbers of selective school applications are concentrated.
More than 2,100 of the around 18,000 selective school applications came from The Hills Shire in 2024, compared with around 900 in the Liverpool Local Government Area.
Dr Ho said the distribution of applicants was not surprising and the NSW government needed to do more to target families in Western Sydney.
"There is so much talk about about this [the selective school test] in those kinds of areas, which makes it really normalised for everyone's doing it. You don't really want to miss out," she said.
Mr Gupta's children were caught up in the selective school testing debacle in May that meant the twins' test had to be rescheduled.
A 2018 review of the test by NSW education found there were unintended barriers in the testing process that deterred students from disadvantaged groups.
Nearly 60 per cent of students who applied to sit the test had parents with Bachelor degrees or above, while only 11 per cent had parents with no post-school education.
Mr Gupta said his children attended a coaching institute for a few months before the test because their peers at school were doing it.
"I don't think any kid can go without preparation to the exam anymore. It's too methodical right now where there has to be some tuition and some tutoring on how to master it," he said.
Reforms following the 2018 review were designed to reduce "coachability" of the test.
Dr Ho said families were investing tens of thousands of dollars in private tutoring to get their children accepted.
"The resources that you now need to invest to to be successful in the test really undermines their accessibility as public schools," she said.
The department runs an advertising campaign to promote applications and specifically targets students in equity groups and engages with schools to ensure they are promoting applications to parents.
"The NSW Government is working to expand high potential and gifted education offerings in all NSW public schools, to ensure every student is challenged to meet their full potential," Mr Graham said.
