This Petition appeals to all parents/caregivers and students within NSW to VOTE AGAINST the process of pre-selecting a list of 3 schools in order of their preference in the application stage of the Selective High School Placement Test. #SayNO_to_preselecting_schools.
LET STUDENTS TAKE AN INFORMED DECISION about their school preferences. The process needs to allow students to choose their preferred schools after the test results are declared, thus ensuring students can select a school based on their performance and convenience, eliminating the guesswork!
The Petition calls out to the NSW Department of Education, Hon. Sarah Mitchell, Minister for Education and Early Childhood learning, Hon. Dr. Geoffrey Lee, Minister for Skills and Tertiary Education, to spare the students from this mental trauma of pre-selecting schools in the application stage.
In NSW, the Selective test expects students to choose schools in order of preference even before writing the test. This process creates undue mental stress and psychological pressure on the students who are merely 11-12 years of age. The current process forces students to fetch marks within the cut-off range of their pre-selected schools if they want a seat in any of these highly desirable Selective schools throughout NSW, especially within Sydney suburbs.
With year on year increase in the number of students taking this test, cut-throat competition has ramped up. The current system loophole is glaring. Even after securing high marks in the Selective Test, students cannot qualify in any selective schools just because they could not fetch marks within the cut-off range of their three pre-selected schools. In such cases, even if the student has marks high enough for a 4th school, he/she is not eligible for a 4th option.
The timed window to change school preference soon after the test is also quite ineffective for many students. In most cases, the students are not sure about their relative performance in the test. Hence, they are not able to either change their school preferences or make wrong decisions altogether.
How is the system expecting an 11-year-old to gauge his/her performance in such a highly competitive test and change school preferences accordingly in the application form? Isn't it asking too much from a year-6 student?
Why are students being forced to play blind with their future? Why can't we make an informed decision and choose schools after the test results are declared?
Why can we not have a process that operates in 2 steps, where students first write the test, get their marks in hand, and then select three schools in order of preference based on their marks? In this case, students also get a chance to consider their daily commute to school and their convenience, which is a major factor while selecting schools? THE PROCESS WILL BECOME MORE TRANSPARENT. It can provide data on how many students could not make it successfully through a particular school's cut-off, which might further pave the path for increasing seats or ensuring more Gifted and Talented (G&T) classes are available in our comprehensive schools.