It’s cold at 10.30 in the morning on a December day in London, and seems even colder when you’re peering through the windows of a brightly-lit reception classroom. Forbidden from entering classrooms (Covid), we took thirty-second turns to observe. Some children were playing, some were tidying an activity away, a teacher was working with an individual child. I turned back to the group of half a dozen parents, flexed my toes to stave off rising numbness, and tried to work out how I could possibly decide where my son should go to school for the next seven years.

When I’m observing a lesson, I spend most of my time wondering ‘What’s true about this lesson?’ and ‘What can I usefully say about what’s true?’. I find both questions incredibly hard to answer. But this felt far harder. Instead of conducting a observation, I was peering through a window for thirty-seconds. And the stakes felt far higher.

And in that moment of seeping cold and grey skies, I felt incredibly unsettled. Because after eight years in the classroom, reading over a thousand research papers, writing three books for goodness’ sake, I realised I had no idea how to spot a good school – or rather, the right school for my son – whatsoever.

I’d supposedly accumulated all this knowledge about education… but we were mostly considering things like how long the walk would be and how contented the families playing in the park outside our nearest school look. And school choice is supposed to drive school improvement! How could I make a better decision? I tried the obvious suggestions, didn’t learn much, and dug a bit deeper. This post maps out what we tried, how that helped (or didn’t), and how we ultimately decided.

Obvious ways to choose a school (and why they may not help)

There are some obvious things to do when looking for a school. The government recommends:

• visiting the school – most schools have open days

• reading the school’s most recent Ofsted reports

• checking school performance tables

• talking to other parents about what they think of the school

gov.uk

Visiting the school

Visiting proved difficult (Covid). But just the process of trying to visit proved revealing. At one school, the ‘home school liaison officer’ did everything possible to deter me. Every time I called, she told me that she had too many parents wanting to visit (you reckon?). It took half a dozen emails (mostly unanswered) and four or five phone calls to get inside the school. Trying to talk to the SENCO before the application deadline proved impossible, despite several requests.

Visits were interesting, although they revealed little about the learning or day-to-day classroom experience. Visiting one school during the school day, we were confined to the playground. Should I guess whether students were learning a lot? Visiting another school after the school day, we wandered around empty rooms. Should I judge the displays?

The real revelations came, not in the confident presentations, but in the answers our hosts let slip. In one school, the host described a boy who just ‘can’t behave’ and was going to ‘have to go to a special school.’ He’d been in Reception two months. At another, a parent asked whether all children would learn to read by the end of Reception. The deputy head prevaricated: “I’d say they’ll definitely make progress during Reception.”

Reading the school’s most recent Ofsted reports

I’m not wild about Ofsted inspections, and I’m not convinced they’re particularly revealing either – but I had a look. Two schools were ‘Outstanding,’ one was ‘Good.’ But the ‘Outstanding’ schools hadn’t been inspected since 2014 (still haven’t): the students who were in Reception when it was last inspected are now in secondary school – and we’ve had eight education secretaries since then. (The ‘Good’ school hadn’t been inspected since 2017 (still hasn’t).)

Checking school performance tables

The last valid data was from 2019. So when I looked at one school and saw its results were below average in 2018 and above in 2019, I could only guess whether this was a flash in the pan, or the start of a lasting improvement.

So if the obvious steps reveal little, what can you do instead?

If you have no idea how to choose a school, what do you do?

I talked to a lot of friends working in education about this choice. Three gave me particularly useful heuristics:

1) Work out what you care about, and what your child needs

One smart education writer told me he just sent his children to the local school. The most important thing, he thinks, was the friends they make. Going to the local school would be the best way for them to make friends.

One implication is that you should just send your children to the local school. Another is to think about what you really care about and need. Is it breakfast club? Drama club? The commute? A good choice of colours in the school uniform? What his advice reinforced for me was that this decision – what matters most? – is really up to you. If you need a school right next to your younger child’s nursery, so be it. That said, I found it tricky guessing what my son would need: would the strict school round the corner keep him in line, or elicit rebellion? Still, I found this really valuable advice. Instead of starting with what the schools offer, start with what you value and need. Look at the schools in that light.

2) Work out what you can (and can’t) compensate for

Laura McInerney reminded me that no school can do everything. There isn’t the time or the money or the people for a school to be good at literacy and numeracy and sport and drama and language and music and social skills and community work and nature and…

So Laura’s question was ‘How do you plan to respond to the weaknesses a school has?’ Let’s say the school doesn’t teach literacy well. Will you become a governor? Teach them yourself? Send them to tutoring? Or would you struggle? For example, my son seems to enjoy both languages and music. One school started both in Reception. Was that a compelling reason to send him there, or could we find out-of-school opportunities? Instead of focusing entirely on what each school offers, work out how you can complement what the school does, and compensate for what it doesn’t do.

3) Find out what the users think

Gaurav Singh suggested that when things are opaque, you should take as much account of the views of users as you do of what the school tells you. Ofsted’s Parent View wasn’t much use (do you sense a theme?): our three nearest schools had nothing published, since in the last three years, they had had ten responses between them. But we started asking around. Instead of focusing on what the school says, focus on what people say about the school.

What did we do?

These three heuristics made our choice much easier.

Work out what you care about. Our number one priority was inclusion. Our son has cerebral palsy, and we wanted a school which was going to support and include him. Chris Curtis (whose daughter has cerebral palsy) offered several valuable bits of advice: one was to find a school which had experience working with children with cerebral palsy. I wasn’t sure we would, but talking to one SENCO locally, they had.

Work out what you can compensate for. In the same vein, realistically, we can compensate for shortcomings in the school’s academic programme much more easily than we can shortcomings in their inclusion. If the maths teaching is ropy for a year, we can teach him maths. If staff find it too difficult to include him in day-to-day activities, our ability to influence them is practically non-existent.

Find out what users think. In our case, a subset of users’ opinions particularly mattered: parents of children with additional needs. Gaurav’s advice made me think to ask the SENCO if she could link me up with the parents of the children with cerebral palsy at the school. We didn’t manage to meet before the application deadline, but the mother’s initial email told us everything we needed to know: “I cannot tell you how incredible [the school] are! We are so very thankful to have found them and really would endorse them at every step of the journey we have had.”

So after all that, we sent our son to a school which isn’t the nearest, doesn’t have the highest Ofsted grade, and which we hadn’t even visited. We felt good about it when we chose, and three weeks in to his time there, we still feel good about it.

Final thoughts

Conventional heuristics (and the government’s advice) may help. What are the school’s results? What is the Ofsted grade? What are the facilities like? But where they fail to offer clear answers, I think these questions help more:

  • What do you care about?
  • What can you compensate for? What can’t you compensate for?
  • What do parents of kids like yours think?

Finally, it’s worth recalling that the decision isn’t irrevocable. You may not want to move your child’s school, but it can be done.

If you liked this, you may appreciate…

  • This great piece from Sam Baars, on choosing a primary school, here. Like me, he found that studying schools prepares you poorly to choose one. He describes the process they went through.
  • The wisdom of those who offered me good advice; particular thanks to Chris Curtis, Gaurav Singh and Laura McInerney.

Note to parents of children with EHCPs

Parents of children with EHCPs have a much earlier deadline to submit their choices. I’ve checked a few local authority websites: most say 31st October; where we live its even earlier. (I didn’t find this out until January.) In some local authorities you also submit a different form, not the normal admissions form. We were meant to have had a paper form in the summer (we hadn’t).