In the next four blog posts, I’m going to go into the qualities and work the following four children did in order to be offered a spot at their idea selective school.  This post will focus on Perth Modern School.

Here’s fantastic feedback I got from a parent of one of the children that when through our 4 course package program and prepared for Perth Modern School:

So what qualities made this boy successful in getting into a selective school?

• He was already getting high grades such as As and B+ in most subjects at school.  Selective schools are there to select the top performing students in other schools and put them in one school so you have a group of very high performing students who can study together and motivate each other.  It is very difficult to get into a selective school if you’re getting Cs or Ds in your current school.
• He did regularly did the course work.  Exam preparation, especially for things like a writing test cannot be crammed (for most people anyway).  Also, it’s a different skill to learn.  In school, you don’t have time limits and you learn the curriculum.  In an exam, you supposed to demonstrate skills in speed and reasoning (something you can be taught - there’s university level classes on reasoning!).  You need to work towards it each week.  This child did his weekly writing pieces and went through the coursework.
• He took on feedback.  It’s great if your child is already achieving As at school but it doesn’t mean they’ll automatically get into the school of their choice.  Little things may be missing such as how a specific sentence is structured, what adjectives to use.  A tutor provides ‘fresh eyes’ on your own work and a good tutor will give you specific feedback to implement and improve for next time.  The key is the student taking on the feedback so their writing piece is better than the previous attempt.  This student did exactly that!

When you look at points 2 & 3 above as doing something regularly and implementing feedback, these are the type of skills that one would need throughout life to improve on anything really.  So regardless of whether a child gets into the school or not, doing the above points is good from just a growth perspective.

In this case, this child got an offer and it was well-deserved!!!!

Congratulations Dennis :-)