NSW Selective School Test 2027: Dates, Applications and What Changed

If your child is in Year 5 this year, the 2027 selective test is closer than it looks. Applications open on Thursday 5 November 2026, a few weeks from when we are writing this, and the test is on Thursday 13 or Friday 14 May 2027. Between those two dates there is a short list of things a family has to get right, and a couple that catch people out every single year. Here is the whole cycle in order, with the official dates and what each one means in practice.

The dates

	Date	Your child is in
Applications open	Thursday 5 November 2026	Year 5
Applications close	Monday 15 February 2027	Year 6
Placement test	Thursday 13 or Friday 14 May 2027, one allocated day	Year 6
Make-up test (approved illness or misadventure only)	Friday 11 June 2027	Year 6
Last day to change school choices	Friday 25 June 2027	Year 6
Outcomes	August 2027, date not yet published	Year 6

The NSW Department of Education publishes these on its application process page and its placement test page. If anything on this page ever disagrees with those two, trust them. The one date the department had not released when we wrote this is the outcomes date. Last cycle's outcomes came out on 19 August 2026, so August is a safe assumption, but check the dashboard before you plan a holiday around it.

Applying: November to February

Everything happens in the department's online application dashboard. Your child's school is not involved and will not lodge anything on your behalf.

Eligibility is wider than a lot of parents assume. Children at NSW public schools, non-government schools, home study, interstate schools and overseas schools can all apply. The condition is residence: the family has to be living in NSW by the start of the 2028 school year.

When you apply you list the selective high schools you want your child considered for, in order of preference. You are not locked in. Both the schools and the order can be changed in the dashboard right up to Friday 25 June 2027, six weeks after the test. What cannot be changed is the closing date. After 15 February 2027 the window is shut.

Our advice is dull but earned: apply in November. The test date does not move, there is nothing to gain by waiting, and every February we hear from a family who meant to do it over the summer holidays.

Before the test: the admission ticket

Some time before May the dashboard issues a Test Admission Ticket. It tells you which of the two days your child has been allocated and which test centre they will sit at, usually a public high school somewhere near their primary school. Print it. A photo of it on a phone is not accepted at the door, and of all the things that go wrong on test day this is the one that is entirely avoidable.

From 2026 the test is held only in NSW. If you are interstate or overseas you can still apply, but your child has to come to NSW and sit it at the allocated centre.

Test day: 13 or 14 May 2027

The test is done on a computer, at the centre, on the one day. The four sections run back to back with breaks between them: Reading for 45 minutes, then Mathematical Reasoning for 40, Thinking Skills for 40 and Writing for 30. With the breaks the day runs to about 3 hours 55 minutes. That is a long time for an eleven year old to concentrate, and it is the reason we push families towards full-length practice in the last weeks instead of single sections.

Into the bag: the printed ticket, two 2B pencils, an eraser and a sharpener, a clear water bottle and a snack. School uniform. Glasses and an ordinary non-smart watch are fine, and so is medication such as an EpiPen or inhaler, along with any disability adjustments that have been approved in advance.

Not into the bag: calculators, rulers, dictionaries, notebooks, pens, phones, smart watches and pencil cases. If it can compute, photograph or send a message, it stays at home.

If your child is sick on the day, or something else goes badly wrong, you have five business days to lodge an illness or misadventure request through the dashboard, with documents. Holidays and forgotten dates are not accepted, and we would not try. Approved cases sit the make-up test on Friday 11 June 2027.

After the test: June to August

Two things are left. School choices can still be reordered until 25 June. Then, in August, outcomes appear in the dashboard with a placement score report that shows your child's result in each of the four sections. Every school you listed gets its own outcome: an offer, a place on that school's reserve list, or unsuccessful. Reserve lists keep moving for months as families decline offers. In the current cycle they run until 3 December 2026. There is also an appeals window, which closed on 26 August 2026 last cycle, a week after outcomes. We have written separately about how results and entry scores work.

What is different from the test you remember

Most parents either sat a paper test in a school hall or remember one. The 2027 test is not that, and the differences change how a child should prepare.

It is on a computer, so your child cannot underline a line in a passage or cross out a wrong option. It is sat at a test centre on an allocated day, not at their own school. It is sat only in NSW. And the Reading section now uses on-screen question formats in which three of the 17 questions have several parts, so there are 38 responses in total, each worth one mark. A child who rushes a multi-part question gives up several marks, not one. The Reading guide shows what those questions look like, with free examples you can try.

What has stayed the same: four sections at 25% each, no calculators, each section timed on its own, and no pass mark. Places go by placement score, and each school's entry score moves with the strength of that year's applicants.

What to do this month

Put the two application dates in your calendar and apply when the window opens. Read the NSW Selective School Test guide for the full format, then the subject guides for Mathematical Reasoning, Thinking Skills and Writing. The schools directory has the entry score history for every selective high school, which helps when you order your choices. And if you want a sense of where your child stands before you do that, the free Selective Test Calculator takes their recent practice marks and shows which schools are within reach.