I honestly thought being in catchment meant we could skip the interview. That was my first mistake. A few weeks ago I started hearing from other parents nearby, their Prep interview letter had landed. Mine hadn’t yet, and for a couple of days I genuinely wondered if we’d fallen through a crack somewhere. We hadn’t even sent back the enrolment form at that point. Then ours turned up too, and off we went.
If you’re in the same spot right now, wondering why a school is interviewing a child who’s already entitled to a place there, you’re not missing anything. It really is standard. I checked this properly afterwards rather than just assuming, and Queensland’s own enrolment guidance confirms an interview is part of the ordinary process at most state schools, in catchment or not — it’s where the school works through your paperwork with you and gets a first look at your child, not a test with a pass mark. We’d already covered the Prep age cut-off and the rest of the application steps here if you want the fuller picture, but the interview itself deserves its own post, because nobody warned me what it would actually involve on the day.
Why you get an interview even when you’re already zoned for the school
Once a school has an Enrolment Management Plan in place, which most established Brisbane public schools do once they’re getting close to capacity, every family goes through the same intake steps regardless of address. That’s set out on the Queensland Government’s own school enrolment page, which describes the enrolment interview as a fairly standard meeting with the principal or deputy principal, usually after your documents have already been checked over. Being in catchment gets you the right to a place. It doesn’t get you out of sitting down with someone from the school first.
We hadn’t done anything wrong by not having the enrolment form back yet, is the short version. The letter and the form just seem to move on their own timelines. Ours arrived in that order too.
What they actually had her do
Our school, our day, our kid, worth saying that upfront, because I’ve since compared notes with two other Brisbane mums and neither of their interviews matched ours exactly. So take this as roughly what to expect rather than something to drill her on beforehand.
They handed her a blank page and told her to draw whatever she wanted, no topic, nothing to go on. I kept waiting for a prompt to follow and it never came, so she just went for it and ended up with something she described, at length, as a dog that was also maybe a house. Nobody blinked, so I’m assuming that was exactly the right amount of dog-house.
Colours and shapes she had down cold, all ten colours and all four shapes, rattled off without a second’s hesitation. Then they showed her a shape in a specific colour and asked her to draw the same one straight back, matching colour included, and that one made her stop and think in a way the naming hadn’t. I hadn’t realised until then that copying something accurately is a completely different skill to just knowing what it’s called.
Writing her name was the part I’d actually tried to prepare for, and the part where I discovered I’d prepared wrong. We’d spent weeks on dotted tracing sheets at home, and it turns out tracing over dots and writing your own name cold, on a blank page, with a stranger watching, are not remotely the same skill. She got there in the end, a bit shaky, and I’ve swapped out half our tracing sheets since for just handing her plain paper and saying go.
Head, eyes, ears, nose, mouth went by quickly with no trouble at all. Then, out of nowhere, a bit of pattern spotting I genuinely wasn’t expecting in a Prep interview: a row of fruit emoji, apple lemon strawberry apple lemon, and what comes next. The same idea again with coloured dots, and then sorting animals, food and vehicles into their own little piles. Somewhere in there she also had to point out what was on, under, behind and beside various things, and she mixed up behind and beside more than once, which I can’t really judge her for, since so do I most days.
Numbers were easy going, nought to nine, counting up to twenty, one small sum thrown in. Phonics is where she wobbled, and I don’t think I’d properly clocked why until I watched it happen. She can sing her way through the alphabet without missing a beat, but asked what sound a particular letter makes, on its own, out of context, she stalled more than once. Knowing the letters and knowing the sounds turned out to be two completely separate things for her, and nobody had told me that.
Scissors were the one thing I hadn’t braced for at all. Straight line first, then a gentle curve, and whether she thought to turn the paper with her other hand rather than wrestling the scissors around it. The straight line she managed fine. The curve got away from her a bit, and she gripped the scissors the exact way she grips a fork when she’s concentrating too hard.
The last thing they did was bring out a picture book and ask her to point out which part was the words and which part was the pictures, then have a go at reading a page herself. She didn’t really read it, she narrated it, working out roughly what was happening from the pictures and saying it with total confidence as though she were right. I don’t think anyone there was checking her accuracy. I think they were checking whether the whole idea of a book, that the marks on the page carry a story, had landed for her yet.
What schools ask you, not just your child
The interview isn’t only about the child either. Expect the school to ask you things too, usually fairly ordinary stuff like your child’s personality, what they’re interested in, where their strengths are, and whether there’s anything the school needs to know going in, language support, food allergies, any extra learning needs. Nothing unusual there.
Where it can get more searching is at the more sought-after, fully-subscribed private schools. A lot of these are church schools, and it’s genuinely common for them to ask whether the family holds a particular faith or attends religious services regularly, since faith-based independent schools make up a sizeable chunk of the non-government sector in Australia. If you don’t have a religious background, being upfront about that is completely fine. What seems to land better than pretending otherwise is showing genuine respect for the school’s faith and some openness to learning more about it. I’ve also heard from other parents that some schools pay attention to what you do for work, and form a view of the family based on that, though that one’s harder to pin down than the faith question, and I’d take it as something to be aware of rather than something to worry about.
What I’d do differently next time
She had most of the basics covered going in, her name, her colours and shapes, counting, scissors that more or less cooperated. If I did this again I’d spend less time on tracing sheets and more time just handing her a blank page and asking her to write cold, and I’d start on letter sounds early instead of assuming the alphabet song already had that covered, because it clearly hadn’t.
Past that, I’ve tried not to read too much into our particular list of questions. Every school seems to run its own version of this, and I haven’t heard of a single child being turned away over a wobbly triangle. It’s a look at where they’re at, not a gate they have to clear. And if you’ve already got your catchment proof sorted and you’re bracing for what Prep is actually going to cost once uniforms come into it, I went through the real numbers here, which honestly hit harder than the interview did.
If you’ve sat through one of these at a different Brisbane school recently, I’d like to hear what came up for you. Right now it feels like everyone’s just piecing this together after the fact, same as we are.