Part One of a Four-Part Series on “Choosing the Right School for Your Child“
by Brian O Maoileoin
Visiting a school is an essential part of choosing one, but it asks a great deal of a relatively brief encounter.
You may spend an hour or two walking around an organisation in which your child could spend the next five or ten years. You see classrooms, meet a handful of people, listen to a presentation, perhaps speak to some students, and from that relatively brief encounter you begin to form a judgement.
You do not arrive as a blank slate.
You are comparing what you see with other schools in the same city, with the school your child has just left, and often with an idea of where they may go next. You are also carrying your own assumptions about what a good school looks and feels like, some explicit and some less so.
So the task is not simply to decide whether a school is “good”. It is to work out what kind of place it really is, whether its strengths are the ones you value and whether there is enough continuity to make the move worthwhile.
I think there are five things worth paying particular attention to: Clarity; Relationships; Learning; How the school sees children and families; and Coherence.
None is decisive on its own. What matters is the pattern they create.
This is the first of four pieces on choosing a school. The next will look at what should give you pause, then at what may be missing entirely, and finally at the question of fit: what makes a school right for your child.
Kumar Galhotra of Ford once compared car manufacture with car sales. He called it: “100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision.”
I wonder whether school choice has a kind of corollary. A school is certainly the product of thousands of decisions that parents never see: whom to employ, what to teach, how to assess, how support works, how to organise the day, which furniture to buy, how to prioritise spending, and how to respond when things go wrong.
As a prospective parent walking around a school, you are doing something rather different. You notice the way a teacher speaks to a child who has made a mistake. You notice whether students hold doors for adults, and whether adults also hold doors for students. You notice whether children look comfortable asking questions.
Most of these are barely judgements at the time. They are impressions: something feels easy, or slightly off, or reassuring, or harder to place. By the end of the visit, though, they have accumulated.
Perhaps school choice is hundreds of small emotional judgements in search of one considered decision.
The point is not to distrust those reactions. It is to understand what may be producing them.
Clarity
Most schools can tell you what they value.
They will talk about curiosity, wellbeing, excellence, inclusion, character, independence, creativity and the whole child. These are all worthy ideas, but they become useful only when someone can explain what they mean in practice.
If a child begins to struggle with reading, what happens? If a student is repeatedly unhappy at break time, who notices? If a child is doing very well, how does the school make sure they continue to be stretched? If a parent raises a concern, what happens next?
Good schools do not necessarily give simple answers. Children are complicated and schools are complicated. But the answers should have substance. People should be able to explain who does what, how decisions are made and what usually happens next.
There is a difference between complexity and vagueness. Complexity is normal; vagueness can be a sign that the language and the laminated posters are doing a lot more work than the systems are.
Relationships
A tour tells you something. The moments between the formal parts of the tour often tell you more.
Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” School visits have their cracks too: the unplanned moments when the presentation falls away and you get a glimpse of how the place actually works.
You should peer through those cracks. Listen to how adults speak to children, especially when they are correcting them, redirecting them or simply moving them along. Listen to how children speak to adults in return. Are they relaxed enough to ask questions, admit they do not understand something, or disagree?
Listen to how children speak to one another. Do they make room for each other? Is the tone generous? Do older students acknowledge younger ones?
And watch the adults. Do the teachers seem to like one another? That may sound trivial, but I do not think it is. Many work settings are social, but schools are intensely so, and children spend years inside cultures shaped by the quality of adult relationships. You can often sense whether colleagues trust each other, enjoy one another’s company and share some common purpose, or whether their interactions are merely functional.
The small courtesies matter as well. Children holding doors open for adults, for example, might be normal in most schools but watch for adults doing the same for children. Who steps aside in the corridor? Who says thank you? How do teachers speak to support staff? Does anything change when someone senior enters the room?
None of these gestures proves much by itself. Together, though, they tell you something about whether respect runs in one direction or in both.
These are often the most revealing parts of a visit: a conversation in a corridor, a teacher responding to an interruption, two colleagues greeting one another, an adult holding a door for a child. The culture of a school is often easiest to see when nobody is trying to demonstrate it.
Learning
One of the most useful things you can observe in a classroom is a child being wrong. What happens next?
Do students put their hands up when they are unsure? Are they willing to offer an answer that might not work? Do they try something difficult without first checking that they are likely to succeed?
A school may tell you that it values curiosity, resilience and risk-taking. The classroom will usually give you a better sense of whether that is true.
Children who feel secure in their learning are more willing to have a go. They can make a mistake without experiencing it as a public failure. They can change their minds. They can ask the obvious question. They can say, “I don’t know.”
A perfectly orderly classroom in which nobody wants to risk being wrong may look impressive for ten minutes. Over time, it may produce very cautious learners. What should interest you more than the correct answers is what happens to the incorrect ones.
Student work can tell you something too. Is there work on display? If so, whose work is it? Does everything look almost identical, or can you see evidence of individual thought? Are there drafts, questions, annotations, corrections or changes of mind?
There is nothing wrong with beautiful displays and there are excellent schools with very little on their walls. But when work is made visible, it is worth asking what the display tells you about the learning behind it. Usually the rough draft is more revealing than the polished final piece. In fact it always is.
How the school sees children and families
Schools often talk about student voice. The phrase has become so familiar that it is easy to stop asking what it means. But a student can be articulate without having much agency. They can answer questions confidently while still having learned exactly what kinds of answers adults prefer.
So listen for more than confidence. Do students initiate conversations? Can they explain what they are learning and where the learning is headed rather than simply describe the task in front of them? Can they disagree respectfully? Do they ever say something slightly unexpected?
The same principle applies to the admissions process.
Notice the underlying attitude. Do they make you feel as though you would be lucky to get into the school, or as though the school would be lucky to have your child?
Neither extreme is quite right.
A good admissions process should feel reciprocal. You are deciding whether you trust the school with your child, and the school should be trying to understand whether it can serve your child well.
Does anyone ask meaningful questions about them? Not just their date of birth, previous school or most recent report, but what they enjoy, what they are like when something is difficult, what seems to work best for them, what seems to get in the way and what you hope will be different in their next school.
If the whole encounter is about convincing you of the school’s excellence, I would notice that. The best admissions conversations feel less like a sales pitch and more like the beginning of a relationship.
Coherence
This may be the most important thing of all.
Do the different parts of the school seem to belong together? If the school says creativity matters, do children appear to make genuine choices? If inclusion is central to its identity, is there evidence that the school adapts when the standard approach does not work for a child? If relationships are described as foundational, do those relationships actually seem visible?
If academic ambition is a major theme, can the school explain how children are challenged, or does the conversation rely mainly on results?
No school gets this perfectly right. Every institution has a gap between what it wants to be and what it manages to achieve every day. I tend to trust schools more when they can acknowledge that gap.
It is also worth asking how long people stay. This needs some care, particularly in international schools, where movement is part of the landscape. Teachers relocate, families move countries and contracts end for all sorts of ordinary reasons. Turnover on its own tells you very little.
But how long have the teachers you meet been there? Are there people who have stayed for five, ten or fifteen years? How long has the leadership team worked together? Does the school seem able to retain good people?
Longevity is not the same as quality, and a school where nobody ever leaves is not necessarily a healthy one. What interests me is whether enough people choose to stay long enough for relationships, expertise and institutional knowledge to accumulate. And is there, nevertheless, a dynamism and a willingness to change and grow. If a school tells you it has a strong culture, the willingness of good people to remain part of it is one piece of evidence worth considering.
The larger question is whether the overall picture hangs together. Do the values, systems, language, classrooms and relationships broadly tell the same story?
When they do, there is usually a sense of coherence that is hard to manufacture.
It is easy to overinterpret a school visit. You meet one exceptional teacher and assume the whole staff is the same. A nervous student gives an awkward answer. A class happens to be noisy. Someone in reception is having a bad morning.
None of those moments tells you very much on its own. The useful evidence lies in repetition. Do several people explain things clearly? Do you see the same quality of relationship in different parts of the school? Are students willing to take risks in more than one classroom? Does the work you see match what the school says about learning? Does the admissions experience fit the culture the school claims to have?
Come back to the five things: Clarity, Relationships, Learning, How the school sees children and families, and Coherence. The individual moments matter because of what they add up to.
By the end of a visit, you may have made dozens, perhaps hundreds, of small emotional judgements. The aim is to turn them into one considered answer to a question that is both emotional and rational: Can I see my child here?
This piece is written by Brian O Maoileoin, Primary School Principal at UWCSEA in Singapore. To follow the rest in the series and read more about a school leader’s reflections on education and the work of building institutions worth belonging to, visit https://substack.com/@brianom