Sport Excellence schools in Australia

What a sport excellence program is

A sport-excellence program is a named sporting stream attached to an otherwise ordinary school, under published names like “Basketball Academy”, “Sporting selective entry — AFL, cricket, football, rugby, netball, rowing & more” and “Sporting excellence programs”. What we hold is that tag and that name; we do not hold the squad, the sports on offer this year, the training load or the cost. 7 rows here were recorded from a page that names the school; the other 7 are derived by us from a flag in the NSW feed, carrying a name and an entry marker of ours rather than anyone else’s — see “Where these rows came from” below.

None of the 14 carries a selectivity label or an Opportunity Class flag in our data, so nothing on this page says the school is selective — only that a program inside it is recorded. By type they are 12 secondary and 2 combined, every one of them a government school.

How entry works, and what the labels on these rows mean

Entry is set by each school or its department, never by us, and it differs school to school even inside one category. What this page carries is a marker per row — a short label of ours for the kind of entry that row is about — and, in the states that publish one, a selectivity label. Where a marker came from is not the same on every row, so the first definition below is the one to read first:

Where these rows came from

7 of the 14 rows were recorded from a page that names the school and carry that page's own words. The other 7 are derived by us: the NSW feed records that the school has a specialisation, a selective stream or an Opportunity Class, and we turned that flag into the row. The program name is our wording, not a name anyone published; these rows carry no entry marker — we could guess one from the flag, but nothing states it, so we show none; and the “source” link goes to the department’s general specialisation page, which does not name the school. What the process actually is — the tests, the dates, the criteria, how many places — we do not hold at all for these rows.

By trial / selection · Capped program places

The entry markers on this page, 5 marked “By trial / selection” and 2 marked “Capped program places”. A marker is our short label, never the school's wording and never the rule. On the 7 rows recorded from a page that names the school, it summarises what that page describes. The 7 rows we derived from a feed flag carry no marker at all: nothing we hold says how entry works there, so we show none rather than guess. “By trial / selection” on a row is the whole of what we hold about getting in there: it does not tell you when, on what criteria, or how many places there are.

No selectivity label at all

14 rows carry neither a selectivity label nor an Opportunity Class flag. That means we hold no label, not that the school is not selective — the only selectivity labels we hold anywhere come from one state's feed, and no row in this category carries one. Never read a blank as a “no”.

Specialty category

“Sport Excellence” is our grouping, applied so that similar programs can be found together. 3 of these schools sit in another category as well, and appear on that page too.

What this page can and cannot tell you

Nothing in that second list is guessed at on this page: where we hold no figure, we say so rather than print something plausible.

What to do next

1. Open the school, not just the row. Each school’s page carries its sector, size, year levels, the area figures for its suburb, its catchment zone where we hold one, and attendance where we hold that — plus the source link for this program.
2. Go to the school for anything with a date on it. Entry windows, tests and criteria live on the school’s own site or its department’s, and we mirror none of them. On the 7 rows we derived, our link goes to the department’s general page rather than to anything about that school, so the school’s own site is the place to start.
3. Ring the school and ask the specific question. “Is the sport excellence program running next year, how do you get in, and what does it cost?” is a two-minute call and it is the only authoritative answer.
4. Combine it with what else matters to you. The directory filters the same 185 tagged schools by state, sector, type and specialty program together, and Zone check tests a real address against a mapped zone — we hold boundaries for NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, TAS & ACT only, so it can answer nothing for a school elsewhere.