Victorian selective entry: what Year 5 and 6 parents need to know

The short version

If your child is in Year 5 or 6, you have probably already heard the names. Melbourne High. Mac.Robertson Girls'. Nossal. Suzanne Cory. These are Victoria's four government selective entry high schools.

The most important fact for a Year 5 or 6 family is the timing. These schools take students into Year 9, not Year 7. Students sit the entry exam while they are in Year 8, so for a child in Year 5 today, the exam is still around three years away.

That changes what preparation should look like now. It also means that if you are thinking about a test your child would sit in Year 5 or 6, you are most likely thinking about a private school scholarship test for Year 7 entry, which is a different pathway. Both are covered below.

Always check the current rules on the Victorian Department of Education's selective entry high schools page, as details can change from year to year.

How Victorian selective entry works

• The four schools: Melbourne High School (boys, South Yarra), The Mac.Robertson Girls' High School (girls, Melbourne), Nossal High School (co-educational, Berwick) and Suzanne Cory High School (co-educational, Werribee).
• Entry year: Year 9. A small number of places may come up in Years 10 and 11, managed by the schools directly.
• Who sits the exam: students in Year 8 who have not sat the Year 9 entrance exam before.
• When: the exam is held in June each year. For 2027 entry, it was held on Saturday 20 June 2026.
• Who runs it: the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) runs the applications, exam and offers process for the Department.
• Places: about 1,000 Year 9 places a year across the four schools. Most are offered on exam results, with some places set aside for equity and principal discretion categories.

The Department describes the exam as testing higher-order thinking, problem solving, reasoning, creative thinking, comprehension, interpretation and applying known concepts. The knowledge needed does not go beyond the Year 8 curriculum.

What Year 5 and 6 families can usefully do now

There is no need to start exam preparation for Year 9 selective entry in primary school. The skills the exam rewards build slowly, though, and the habits that help most are ones worth having anyway.

Read widely and talk about it. Fiction, non-fiction, opinion pieces and poetry. Ask what the writer meant, how they know, and whether they agree. Comprehension and interpretation grow from years of this, not from a few months of test papers.

Keep number skills quick and flexible. Mental arithmetic, times tables, fractions and percentages that feel easy. Then puzzles and problems that do not look like the textbook, so your child gets used to working out what a question is really asking.

Write regularly, with feedback. Short stories and persuasive pieces, once a week or so. One thing that worked and one thing to try next time is enough.

Protect the balance. Sport, friends, play and sleep matter at this age. A child who still enjoys learning in Year 8 is in a far better position than one who is tired of practice by Year 7.

Scholarship tests: the ones sat in Year 5 or 6

If you want a test your child sits in primary school, it is most likely an independent school academic scholarship test. These are offered by many private and some Catholic schools, usually for Year 7 entry, with the test sat in Year 6. Some schools also offer Year 5 or Year 6 entry, with tests sat in Year 4 or Year 5.

Scholarship tests are run by providers such as ACER, Edutest and AAS, on dates each school sets. They are separate from government selective entry, with their own registrations, fees and question styles.

• For the big picture, start with our scholarship test prep hub.
• To see how the providers differ, read ACER vs Edutest vs AAS.
• For timelines by entry year, see the Year 7 entry guide and Year 5 and Year 6 prep.

What good preparation looks like, for either pathway

Working through practice papers is useful but not enough on its own. Children need to understand why an answer is correct, not just drill until they recognise patterns.

For maths and reasoning, the goal is flexible thinking. If your child can only solve a problem one way, they will struggle when a test presents it differently. Looking at a problem from more than one angle builds the adaptability these tests reward.

For writing, the skill to practise is planning under time pressure. Children often either spend too long planning and run out of time, or launch straight in without a structure. Practising quick plans, not just timed drafts, helps.

Does tutoring help?

It can, when it targets the specific skills a test assesses rather than general homework support. A good tutor knows the format your child will face, gives honest feedback on where they are falling short, and builds exam technique explicitly: pacing, checking work and deciding when to move on from a hard question.

What does not help is drilling past papers without building understanding. Children who prepare this way can look ready on practice tests and then struggle when the real questions take a different form.

What to do now

If your child is in Year 5 or 6 and you are interested in Victorian selective entry, note that the exam is sat in Year 8, keep an eye on the Department's page for each year's dates, and focus on strong reading, flexible maths and regular writing in the meantime.

If you are weighing up a scholarship for Year 7 entry, check each target school's scholarship page now for the provider, test date and registration deadline, because these tests are sat in Year 6 and some schools test early in the year.

---