Families are active agents in school systems and apply different strategies of educational advantage to help their children succeed at school. These strategies are planned and enacted by families with their children in mind, but they are always a response to the broader education system design. This article explores how through their strategies families engage with school system structures. A comparative approach which takes up Turner's typology of education systems examines the Australian comprehensive ('open-contest') and the German tracked ('elite sponsorship') school systems. The two systems are not typically studied together. Families in both systems employ various strategies differently according to their local context, but there are some important shared practices that reveal recent structural changes in both the Australian and German education systems at a subnational level, and, above all, a common concern amongst families for their children's futures increasingly predicated on success at school.