Selective season is the one time of year when parents want more from you, not less. Families arrive in the months before the test, they want to see movement every week, and they're comparing you to the centre down the road in a group chat you'll never read. Here's how to run it from your material, and how to keep the family when it's over.
What the season looks like from your side
Enrolments build in the months before the test. Most of the families are new to you, they've paid for one outcome on one day, and they're anxious. They talk to each other, they compare notes, and silence from the centre reads to them as nothing happening.
Meanwhile the work itself is heavy. Timed practice is the whole game, and timing, marking and collating paper tests eats the tutor's week. The papers are your edge, built over years, and they can't sit in a drawer, but they can't leak either.
Paper can't show a parent weekly movement. It can barely show you.
Timed sets, on their phones
The unit of selective preparation is the timed set. A reading set, a mathematical reasoning set, a thinking skills set, a writing task, each on the clock.
On your own platform, your practice papers become timed sets your students sit at home during the week. Set the duration per component, lock the order if you want it locked, and the set runs under the clock on the student's phone. Marked the moment they finish, against your key, with a worked example from your paper when a question type trips them up.
The week changes shape. Saturday after class, assign a timed reasoning set and a reading set, due Wednesday. Sunday to Wednesday, students sit them. Thursday, you see the cohort. That's two timed sets a week per student without a photocopier, an invigilator or a Sunday.
Accuracy by component
What you see on Thursday is the thing paper never gave you: accuracy by component, across the cohort, and the students slipping on timing.
The class heatmap shows which question types the cohort is missing and which students are missing them. A student strong on mathematical reasoning and weak on thinking skills is visible in a glance, and so is the one who's accurate but running out of time. That's Saturday's lesson, decided on Thursday, from evidence rather than a feeling.
It's also the answer to the anxious parent. "How's she going?" stops being "well, I think" and becomes "reading accuracy is up since she started, thinking skills is where we're working, here's the number."
Your practice-paper library is the edge
The thing that makes your selective program yours is the papers. Years of sets tuned to the test, in your sequence, with your keys. That's what a family is buying when they choose you over the centre down the road.
So it matters where they live. On your platform they sit in your centre's space, isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, and never shared with or reused for anyone else. They're not a generic bank, and every item in the platform cites the page of your paper it came from. Nothing appears that didn't come from your material, and you approve every item before a student sees it.
The selective and scholarship prep page has the material list and the week in detail. The guide to running a selective prep program covers the program design, and the New South Wales page has the local calendar.
The report during the run-up
Every second Friday through the season, each parent gets a one-page report with your logo, from your address. Accuracy by component. The trend since enrolment. What's next before test day. A line from the tutor.
This is what the group chat can't argue with. A parent holding a report that shows reading accuracy across six weeks, with the numbers, has something to say when another parent asks how it's going. The parent with nothing in hand says "I think it's fine" and starts wondering.
Review each report before it goes or let them send automatically. Most owners read the first fortnight's closely and then let them run.
Keeping the family after the test
Here's the part most centres lose. The test is sat, the season ends, and the family that came for one outcome leaves with it, whatever the result.
The report is what changes that. A family that has seen a term of fortnightly proof, by component, in writing, from you, has a reason to stay that a family who received nothing between sessions does not. They've watched a skill move. They know what the next one is.
So the report keeps going after the test, and the next program starts before the result arrives. The next year level's material, the next scholarship round, whatever your centre teaches next. "Here's what we'll start with next term" in the last report of the season is a very different ending from a final invoice.
What to do this week
Pull your best practice paper, the one with the cleanest key. That's the first thing to convert. List every selective family by enrolment date so you know who's been with you long enough to have a trend. Then decide what the last report of the season will say about what comes next, and write that line now, before the season gets busy.