IGNITE Schools Guide South Australia

IGNITE is the umbrella name for the Department for Education (South Australia) full-time accelerated gifted-and-talented streams at three designated Special Interest public secondary schools. Unlike statewide selective systems in NSW or Victoria, IGNITE is school-based — each campus runs its own cohort, intake and application window. Registration opens through ACER's online system on dates each school publishes on its own IGNITE page; there is no live statewide application hostname families should bookmark.

Programs are zone-free, operate inside standard public-school fees, and use ACER ability testing rather than school-curriculum exams for entry. For component-by-component assessment detail, see our IGNITE assessment format spoke. For what to practise once the school and paper are clear, see IGNITE practice resources.

The Department for Education's official special-interest schools list names the IGNITE program at Glenunga International High School, The Heights School and Aberfoyle Park High School only. Confirm each campus on its own site before you apply: Glenunga IGNITE, The Heights IGNITE, and Aberfoyle Park IGNITE. Other South Australian specialist programs — such as the Australian Science and Mathematics School, STEM streams, and separate language or music specialist programs at Unley and Woodville High Schools — are separate applications with their own labels on the department list.

The table above is restricted to those three IGNITE campuses so families do not confuse acceleration streams with unrelated specialist schools.

Start on the IGNITE page of the school you intend to nominate. Glenunga International and The Heights both publish that registration runs through ACER's online system and that families should apply to only one IGNITE school and sit at their first preference; Glenunga also states a student may sit the assessment once and only at one IGNITE school. Attribute that one-school instruction to those school pages — not to the department list and not to a retired portal hostname.

Glenunga's page says registration information for its 2027 assessment will be made available towards the end of Term 3 2026 (no narrower open/close date published there). The Heights titles its sitting the ACER Ignite assessment, held in late February each year; its page also publishes cycle-specific open/close and fee detail for that school's sitting — read the live Heights page for the cycle you are in, because closed dates are not evergreen statewide rules.

Aberfoyle Park's live IGNITE curriculum page describes the Year 7–10 programme but does not publish assessment dates, fees or registration steps there; treat Aberfoyle as an IGNITE campus on the department list and as an ACER HAST / Ignite Program participant on ACER's participating-schools list, then confirm entry steps with the school. Primary intake is Year 6 into Year 7; Glenunga also accepts a small number of Year 5 applications by principal recommendation. Confirm window, fee and sitting date on the relevant school page before you commit to a campus.

Paper choice drives practice. Glenunga International and Aberfoyle Park appear on ACER's HAST participating-schools list under Ignite Program, and families preparing for those campuses should treat the ACER HAST sample materials as the matching official practice set. The Heights School titles its sitting the ACER Ignite assessment on its own IGNITE page; that school-published title is the one to use when naming Heights practice, even though The Heights also appears on ACER's HAST participating-schools list under Ignite Program. Do not collapse Heights into "standard HAST" wording without that school-page title.

Once the campus (and therefore the paper) is fixed, Abstract Reasoning is the component Year 6 families most often under-practise before the first mock — that is our observation from mock reviews, not an ACER statistic (aset-mistake-bank). Move next to IGNITE practice tests and resources for official samples, labelled Braintree modules and a mock plan inside the Year 5–6 weekly ceiling (prep-philosophy-weekly-caps) — that is the school-to-practice handoff this directory is meant to start.

The Department for Education list names which schools run IGNITE but publishes no statewide applicant total, place count or acceptance rate. Each school runs its own intake, and outcomes depend on the strength of that year's applicant pool against the places available — not on a fixed pass mark published by the department. Braintree Coaching Australia does not quote acceptance percentages for IGNITE on this page because no official school or department page publishes them. For how percentiles are reported after the sitting, see our IGNITE results spoke.

IGNITE refers specifically to the gifted-and-talented streams at the three schools in the table.

South Australia also runs STEM programs at Adelaide Botanic High School and Norwood International High School, a French bilingual language program at Unley High School, and a music specialist program at Woodville High School — each is a separate Special Interest application that may also use ACER HAST but is not labelled IGNITE on the department list. (Unley and Woodville sometimes use programme names such as Summit or Astra on their own sites; those labels do not appear on the department special-interest list.) Confirm any non-IGNITE nomination limits with the relevant school or department page for that programme.

Do not treat this page as a directory of every specialist high school in Adelaide, and do not use it as a general gifted-education replacement guide — its job is the three IGNITE campuses and the handoff into paper-matched practice.