NSW Selective results 2026: reserve lists, appeals and what happens next
Placement outcomes for Year 7 entry in 2027 are released on 19 August 2026, through the online application portal, using the account you applied with.
There are three possible outcomes: an offer, a place on a reserve list, or no offer this round.
This page covers what each one actually means, the one deadline that matters this week, and what the result does and doesn’t tell you about your child.
If you received an offer
Accept or decline through the portal by the date shown on your outcome. An offer you don’t respond to can lapse.
If your child received an offer from a school lower on your preference list, you can still hold a reserve position at a higher preference. Accepting one does not automatically forfeit the other — check the portal wording for your specific case rather than assuming.
If your child is on a reserve list
This is the outcome most often misread, and the one where a hasty decision costs the most.
Do not withdraw from a reserve list unless you are certain you don’t want that school. Withdrawing cannot be reversed.
Reserve lists move. They move because families who received offers decline them — because they took a place at a higher preference, moved out of area, chose a private school, or changed their minds. That process continues well past results day, and in many years it continues into the following term.
Two things worth being clear-eyed about:
- Your reserve band matters more than your position feels like it does. The portal shows where your child sits. That’s the information to reason from.
- Past years’ reserve movement is history, not a forecast. How far a list moved last year tells you how many families declined last year. It does not predict this year’s demand at that school.
The correct default on a reserve list is to hold the position and wait.
If your child did not receive an offer
Far more children sit this test each year than there are places. Not receiving an offer is the ordinary outcome, not the exceptional one.
You have options that are not the appeals process: the reserve lists at other preferences, applying again for Year 8 entry where places exist, and the ordinary local high school your child was always going to be fine at.
The appeal deadline: 11:59pm, 26 August 2026
Appeals close seven days after results are released. Before spending that week on one, two facts change most people’s decision:
- An appeal will not tell you your child’s test score or placement rank. If your reason for appealing is to find out what happened, an appeal is not the mechanism.
- Disappointment at not receiving an offer, or at not being placed on a reserve list, is explicitly not valid grounds.
The valid grounds are narrow and procedural — they concern circumstances affecting the application or test process, not the outcome itself. Read the department’s stated grounds first and check whether your situation genuinely falls inside them. Most don’t, and finding that out on 25 August is worse than finding it out today.
If your child was ill or something went wrong on the test day itself, that is an illness/misadventure matter and has its own process and timing. It is not the same thing as appealing an outcome.
On scores and cutoffs
Every year, parents look for the number their child “should” have hit. There isn’t one.
Minimum entry scores are relative — they are set by how many children applied to that particular school in that particular year and how they performed, not by a fixed standard. The same score can win a place at one school and miss at another. Last year’s cutoff for a school does not set this year’s.
This is why comparing your child’s outcome to a number you saw in a forum thread tells you very little.
What this means for Year 4 and Year 5 families
If you’re reading this because your child sits the test next year, the useful thing to take from today is the timeline.
Today’s results come from a test sat on 1–2 May 2026. The Opportunity Class test was sat on 8–9 May 2026, with those outcomes released on 9 September 2026. Both tests now sit in early May, a week apart — the OC test is no longer an August event, and the Selective test is no longer in March. A lot of older advice online still assumes the old calendar.
For the next cycle, NSW has not yet published dates. On the pattern of recent years, expect applications to open around November 2026 and close around February 2027, with both tests in early-to-mid May 2027. Confirm against the NSW Department of Education site before planning around those dates — the department states dates can change.
Which means: if your child sits it next year, you have roughly nine months, and the application window opens in about three.
A closing note
This test measures a narrow band of things — reading, mathematical reasoning, thinking skills and writing — on one particular morning in May, at eleven years old, against a fixed number of places that has nothing to do with your child’s ability.
Children who don’t get an offer go on to do well. Children who do get an offer sometimes struggle with the move. The result is information about one process. It is not a verdict on a child.
Dates and rules on this page were checked against NSW Department of Education published information on 17 August 2026. The department may change dates and processes — always confirm current details on education.nsw.gov.au before acting on them.