Every year, thousands of Sydney families sit down a few weeks out from an exam and realise the writing section is the one they can’t do much about. NAPLAN in March. Selective in May. Scholarship exams in February and July. ICAS in August.
Maths can be revised. Reading comprehension improves with practice tests. Even spelling responds to drilling.
Writing is different, and it catches families out every time.
I’ve spent thirty years teaching writing, and several of those years developing assessments for NAPLAN and UNSW ICAS. For the last eleven years I’ve run Clever Fox Education, helping thousands of children prepare for selective, scholarship, NAPLAN and ICAS writing exams. Writing resists last-minute preparation because it isn’t knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to become automatic under pressure, and automatic takes months.
What markers are actually looking for
Most parents assume writing is marked on ideas and creativity. It isn’t, or at least not only. A NAPLAN script is assessed against ten separate criteria, including text structure, ideas, vocabulary, cohesion, paragraphing, sentence structure, punctuation and spelling. Selective, scholarship and ICAS tasks are assessed in much the same way: the headings differ, but the qualities being measured are the same.
That’s the gap that surprises people. A bright child with wonderful ideas can sit squarely in the middle bands because her paragraphs aren’t doing their job, or her sentence structures never vary, or her vocabulary is accurate but ordinary.
Nobody starts from a blank page
The fastest way to lose a child’s confidence is to hand her a topic and tell her to write. Strong writing is built from structures, and structures have to be shown before they can be used.
So every lesson starts with a model: a full plan, a complete high-scoring exemplar, recommended vocabulary from the NAPLAN Marker’s Guide and a figurative language list. We read through it together and I explain why each choice was made. Only then do they write.
From there, students move through three tiers at their own pace, from working directly with our plans and exemplars, to using them as a springboard for original writing, to planning and writing from scratch under timed conditions. A child pushed to write independently before she has the architecture will simply reproduce the same mid-band piece every week.
Why weekly practice compounds
Each two-hour lesson covers two text types, and students write live, sharing their work as they go so I can respond in the moment. Homework is set weekly and returned marked against the official NAPLAN rubric.
The real gain comes from the same person marking everything. When I read every piece a child writes, week after week, the feedback stops being a series of unrelated comments and becomes a conversation. I know what I asked her to work on last week, whether she attempted it, and whether it held under time pressure. By week six, I’m not marking a script. I’m tracking a writer.
The part that isn’t published
The broad rubric headings for selective, scholarship and ICAS exams are publicly available. What separates a top-band script from a mid-band one within each category is not.
That knowledge isn’t in a textbook. It’s built by marking at scale against national criteria. It’s the difference between telling a child her vocabulary needs work and telling her which three words in paragraph two are costing her, and what to replace them with.
Writing and reviewing the exams taught me where those lines fall. Thirty years of teaching taught me how to pass it on.
What it produces
Clever Fox students have won more than $7 million in scholarships, including eight offers in 2026 alone. Eighty per cent score in the top 10 per cent for selective writing, and ninety per cent achieve the Top Band in NAPLAN Writing and Distinctions or above in ICAS.
Start earlier than you think you need to
The families whose children do best started a year earlier and arrived with nothing left to cram. A term of weekly teaching now is worth more than anything you can do in the weeks before an exam.
Term 4 begins on 16 October, and Term 1 places fill early.
Amber Fox is the founder of Clever Fox Education and a former NAPLAN and ICAS assessment developer at UNSW Global. Clever Fox runs small-group online writing classes for Years 3–8, preparing students for selective school, scholarship, NAPLAN and ICAS exams.
More information: cleverfoxeducation
