Pre-dawn alarms and 17-hour days: The extreme commutes of Sydney’s top students

The moon is still shining when 12-year-old Reyansh Shroff leaves for school. To make the bell at the selective Sydney Boys High School from Bella Vista, he must leave by 7am if catching the metro, and 6am if he is being driven.

But he isn’t alone in his early morning migration.

In 2026, across NSW, year 7 selective high school students hail from more than 380 postcodes, 40 more than last year, new figures from the NSW Department of Education obtained under Freedom of Information laws show.

The area from North Sydney to Hornsby and Parramatta are home to about 1800 academically selected students this year, the largest cohorts in NSW, well ahead of the next most popular region – south-western Sydney with about 600. Sutherland and the northern beaches recorded the lowest numbers, about 120 each. The data is approximate because the department refuses to provide exact numbers if fewer than five pupils live in a postcode.

At Sydney Boys High, at least one year 7 student makes a journey estimated to be 67 kilometres and boys come from 100 distinct postcodes, the largest geographic spread of any selective school in the state.

Sydney Girls High draws from more than 80 postcodes, with the average distances travelled at both schools roughly 20km each way, measured in a straight line.

This year, 17,000 students sat the entrance exam, vying for 4338 places. They will learn their fate on August 19.

For Reyansh, who travels 40km each way, the daily commute can be gruelling.

“It can be a little scary sometimes,” said Reyansh. “But it is also cool to see the sunrise every morning. I set up a lot of alarms for myself.”

On days when he has extracurricular activities he does not get home until 10pm or 11pm.

Suburbs popular with new migrants are sending kids to the broadest range of places. In Wentworthville, students go to 20 different selective schools; Baulkham Hills and Marsden Park have 18 different school uniforms leaving homes. Kellyville and Carlingford send pupils in 17 different directions. In Blacktown, first on the list of top suburbs by proportion – 11.9 per cent of the population record their country of birth as India.

For NSW’s top four ranking selective high schools – North Sydney Boys, James Ruse, North Sydney Girls and Normanhurst Boys – the largest portion of the 2026 cohort came from just five suburbs: Kellyville, Carlingford, Epping, Baulkham Hills, and Castle Hill.

At Gosford High School, the average commute was 40km each way. The 2026 year 7 cohort has just 34 students from Gosford. The rest are spread across greater Sydney, coming from suburbs such as Homebush, Parramatta, Epping, Hornsby, Avoca Beach and Wyong.

Reyansh’s mum, Shilpa Trivedi, said her son’s choice of school came with sacrifices. “We had to reshuffle our life,” she said. She and her husband, who immigrated to Australia from India, sold their home in Baulkham Hills to move to Bella Vista, to be closer to the metro line.

A 2025 national survey of Australian students’ daily commutes by University of Sydney academic Jennifer Kent found the most common reason parents enrolled their child in an out-of-area public school was the pursuit of a better or higher-ranked school.

“It is because of a disinvestment of funding in public education that we have these discrepancies between what is a good public school and what is a bad public school, and parents are obviously picking up on that,” Kent said.

She noted that children who travel long distances to school miss out on their local community. “Everything for them is going to be located further away,” Kent said. “They are not going to have that opportunity to grow up in their local neighbourhood and connect with friends. We should feel comfortable enrolling our kids in our local public school.”

Trivedi said public schools in her children’s area could not compare to the selective school system.

“The perception is, if you are from an Asian background that you are going to go for selective school,” she said. “But most of the parents from the Asian background, they want that kind of community. They want their children to feel safe. They are going there for education.”

UTS academic Christina Ho specialises in selective school research. She said many of the selective school students have parents who are skilled migrants, generally from Asian countries.

“If you look at the stats from migrants from India or China, places like that, they have very high levels of people with university degrees, way more than the Australian average,” Ho said.

“They really believe in education, and they come from countries where their education system is really competitive. They know how to work hard. They know the value of education. They know how to navigate complex education systems.”

Year 11 Sydney Girls’ High student Aleeza Ahmad lives in Edmonson Park. Every day she travels 90 minutes each way. She began working towards getting into Sydney Girls in kindergarten, pushed on by her parents, who immigrated to Australia from Pakistan.

“When I was younger, they always told me the same thing: your first priority is being respectful to us, and then second priority is your education, always,” Aleeza said.

She finds the daily commute exhausting but worth it.

“It’s Sydney Girls, it’s a great school, one of the top in the state,” she said. “It’s good for my future, good for my ATAR. It wasn’t really me who decided, it was more my parents.”

Aleeza is grateful her parents pushed her. “I’m pretty confident that my future is pretty much set just because of the opportunities that I have being in this school,” she said.

“We are all in it together. A lot of the teachers are also doing the same commute.”