IGNITE program FAQ: twelve parent questions answered

Twelve answers sit in the block below. This page opens with the part a FAQ format handles badly: the decisions a South Australian family actually has to make, in the order they arrive. Braintree Coaching Australia prepares children for the IGNITE assessment each cycle, and the questions that reach us in November are rarely about the paper. They are about which school to nominate, how to prepare for a standard nobody publishes, and how to practise on paper when every other test has gone digital. If the fundamentals are still open, start with the IGNITE program preparation hub, and use the IGNITE schools guide for a campus-by-campus comparison.

How do you choose one IGNITE school when you only get a single nomination?

The nomination is the first irreversible step of the cycle, and it is taken at the point when a family knows least: before a diagnostic means much, before the sitting date is confirmed, and before anyone has seen how your child handles an unfamiliar paper against a clock. That argues for settling it on what you can observe today rather than on a guess about how the year will go. In our experience, the families who leave the decision until the week registrations open choose on the least durable evidence available: a school website, a friend's opinion, one open evening. Do it early, in one sitting, with all three program pages in front of you.

Three things should carry weight, and none of them is a number.

The first is the journey. IGNITE entry is a six-year commitment from Year 7 to Year 12, and the school that looks manageable in a car on a Sunday can look very different at 7am in July with a wet uniform and a rehearsal after school. Drive it in peak hour before you decide. If public transport is the plan, ride the actual route with your child once.

The second is which paper the school runs. The Heights uses ACER's dedicated IGNITE assessment; Glenunga and Aberfoyle Park sit on ACER's HAST participating-schools list. Preparation transfers between the two, so this is not a reason to rank one school easier than another. It matters because the registration route, the sitting date and the confirmation details come from the school, and those are the things people miss.

The third is what the school itself puts in writing. Read the program page of each school rather than a summary of it, including ours. Schools change their pages between cycles, and the page is the only place a claim about that school is authoritative.

What should not carry weight is a comparison of how competitive each school is. The department publishes school names and program labels for the special-interest list and nothing about volume, so there is no published basis for ranking the three by difficulty. If you see one, ask where the figure came from.

What does an unpublished entry standard mean for how you prepare?

Parents ask us what score to aim at. The honest reframe is that a target score is the wrong planning instrument for this assessment, because there is nothing to calibrate it against. Replace the target with a shape. The question worth returning to every few weeks is not how close the child is, which nobody outside the school can tell you, but which component would cost the most if it stayed exactly where it is today. That question has an answer a practice paper can give you, it moves as the weeks pass, and it is what should decide the Sunday session.

The reframe changes how you prepare in a specific way. Chasing a number encourages a family to drill the component the child is already good at, because that is where the score moves fastest and it feels like progress. Ranking rewards the opposite. A profile that is solid across every component beats a spiked profile with one weak leg, because the weak leg is what a ranking sees.

Practically, that means running a short diagnostic across all components early, then spending most of the preparation time on the two weakest. Revisit the strong components enough to hold them, not enough to polish them. If you want the detail of how results are reported and what the score document actually tells you once it arrives, that belongs on the IGNITE results page rather than here.

It also means being sceptical of precision. Any percentile figure quoted for IGNITE entry is somebody's estimate. We do not publish one, because we hold no first-hand IGNITE cohort data to publish it from, and an invented figure is worse than an honest gap when a family is making a locked decision on it.

How do you prepare for a paper test when everything else has gone digital?

This is the section families skip, and it is the cheapest gain on the page. It asks for no tutor, no new resource and no extra hour in the week: it is the practice you were going to do anyway, moved off the screen and onto a table. Our IGNITE assessment format guide covers the components and how the sitting is put together, so what follows is only about the medium your child rehearses in, which is the part most households get wrong by default.

Four habits close most of the gap.

Print the reading passages. Reading on paper changes how a child skims, annotates and returns to a line they half-remember. A child who has only ever read comprehension passages on a screen will underline nothing and re-read everything.

Work the mathematics by hand, on the page, with the working visible. Mental arithmetic that a calculator or a screen keyboard has been quietly propping up shows up quickly here.

Write the extended response with a pen, timed, on lined paper. Handwriting speed and legibility are part of the task, and a child who plans on a keyboard often has no plan when the keyboard is gone.

Sit at least a few full sessions in one block, at a table, without a phone in the room. The stamina of a whole sitting is a separate skill from any individual component.

Our IGNITE preparation strategies page sets out how to structure the weeks, and the IGNITE test day page covers the morning itself.

What should you check on each school's page before you register?

Five things change between schools and between cycles, and all five are on the school's own page rather than anywhere central.

1. The registration close date, and whether late registrations are accepted at all. At least one IGNITE school states plainly that they are not.
2. The fee and its refund terms, which are set per school rather than by ACER, and which differ in kind, not just in amount.
3. The sitting date, and how the school confirms it with you.
4. Whether your child's year level needs anything extra. A Year 5 application to Glenunga needs a signed principal recommendation letter sent to the school before you register, which means starting a conversation with the primary school well ahead of the registration window.
5. How to request special provisions, which are arranged at registration with documentation rather than raised on the day.

Check these in the term before registration opens, not in the week it closes. Every one of them has a deadline attached that sits earlier than the assessment.

What if this cycle does not work out?

Not every child who sits is offered a place. No IGNITE school publishes how many children apply or how many places it fills, so nobody outside the school can put a proportion on it, and we will not estimate one. What can be said plainly is that an unsuccessful outcome reflects a limited intake rather than a verdict on the child. It is worth saying that out loud to them before results arrive, not after.

Neither the Department for Education's special-interest list nor either school's IGNITE page publishes an appeal, review or reconsideration process for an unsuccessful outcome, checked again on 16 August 2026. What exists instead is time. The department's special-interest list carries many other programs at other public high schools, with their own applications and their own entry points, and a child who was close this year is a stronger candidate a year on. A family may also apply again in a later cycle.

The other honest answer is that the IGNITE pathway is not the only good one. A child who reads widely and is taught well does not need a specific stream to end up somewhere good, and treating the assessment as a verdict on ability is both inaccurate and expensive in a way that lasts.

Where does the published record stop?

We would rather show you the edge of what is published than paper over it.

The Department for Education's special-interest list names the schools that run IGNITE and the program label. It states no applicant total, no place count and no acceptance rate, so no statewide competitiveness figure can be calculated from official material, and we do not estimate one. ACER publishes the participating-schools list and the paper-only format, but not component timings, question counts or a permitted-materials list. Fees, dates and refund terms come from each school. The ACER IGNITE portal did not resolve to a readable page when we checked it on 16 August 2026, so anything attributed to the portal should be confirmed with the school.

Primary sources, in the order we would read them: the Department for Education, South Australia special-interest list, Glenunga International High School, The Heights School, and the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) for the HAST format and its student support page. Facts on this page were checked against those sources on 16 August 2026.

Next step: book a paper practice session with your child this weekend rather than another screen-based one. Our IGNITE practice tests and resources page lists what to use and in what order.