Stage 3 is our advanced English and Thinking Skills course for Years 5 and 6, aimed squarely at the Selective High School placement test and scholarship preparation. Year 5 and Year 6 students run on parallel word lists and calibrated difficulty — including reading benchmarks set well above school level for our Year 6 cohort.
Four ten-week terms, each pairing a major writing genre with comprehension strategy work, precision grammar, an intensive vocabulary cycle and Thinking Skills. Year 5 and Year 6 students study parallel spelling lists so siblings and returning students never repeat material. Assessment runs continuously — weekly timed tests, work set above school level, timed writing under exam conditions and end-of-term exams — detailed on the assessment system page.
Stage 3 has a strong focus on writing. Students are taught many different types of writing, covering both the Australian national curriculum and the Cambridge curriculum, while extending their skill set to an advanced level in Literacy. Each text type is taught explicitly against its own criteria — not left to instinct — and rehearsed under timed exam conditions until structure is automatic and every minute of the exam goes into quality.
Dense and varied texts, including poetry and multi-text extracts, worked with a specific taught approach for each question type: inference, main idea, comparison, word meaning in context, author's purpose, and the harder cloze (gap) and extract formats. Year 6 reading benchmarks are set well above school level, so the real test reads as familiar difficulty rather than a jump.
Precision grammar and literary devices taught to a level beyond the primary classroom, alongside a relentless weekly vocabulary cycle — challenging word lists studied, applied in students' own writing, tested weekly and consolidated in cumulative end-of-term exams.
The full range of question types in the Selective paper — argument, assumption, logic, ordering, spatial and visual reasoning — each with a specific taught method. See our Thinking Skills guide.
A dedicated poetry and literature strand, taken to a depth most primary students never see — including Shakespeare in Year 6.
Why poetry in primary school? Because decoding imagery, connotation and layered meaning is precisely what the hardest Selective reading questions demand — and because students who can interpret Shakespeare in Year 6 walk into high school English with years of headroom. Every unit in Stage 3 is sequenced to keep paying off after the test, not just on it.
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