Every year, I meet hundreds of families exploring schools for their children. Most arrive with a list of questions prepared: academic results, class sizes, university destinations, facilities, curriculum options. They are all valid questions, and important ones.
But after spending years working in admissions, marketing and school events, I have become convinced that these are rarely the factors that ultimately drive a family’s decision.
What parents are really looking for is much harder to articulate. Parents are looking for a feeling…
It often happens halfway through a school tour. The conversation pauses for a moment while a class walks past, or a student stops to say hello to a teacher. Sometimes it happens during an Open Day, when parents observe students interacting with each other without realising they are being watched.
The questions continue, but something has changed. The family is no longer evaluating the school on paper. They are imagining their child there.
“Can I picture my son in this classroom? “
“Would my daughter find her people here?”
“Would they feel happy walking through these doors every morning?”
These are the questions that rarely get asked out loud, yet they are often the most important ones.
As schools, we spend a lot of time talking about measurable outcomes. We publish results, university offers and inspection reports. We showcase our facilities and programmes. We carefully prepare presentations and brochures. All of these things matter and play an important role in helping families make informed decisions.
Yet the strongest impressions are usually created by things that cannot be designed or scripted.
The atmosphere in the corridors, the way teachers interact with students, the confidence with which children express themselves or just the feeling that people genuinely know each other.
In many ways, choosing a school is less about selecting a curriculum and more about choosing a community.
Children spend thousands of hours at school. They will learn mathematics, science and languages, but they will also learn who they are. They will build friendships, develop confidence, overcome setbacks and discover passions that may shape the rest of their lives.
That is why I sometimes think schools focus too heavily on what they offer and not enough on how they make people feel.
The schools that families remember are not always the ones with the most impressive buildings or the longest list of achievements. More often, they are the places where people feel welcomed, known and valued.
Perhaps that is because education has always been, at its heart, a human endeavour. Long after students forget individual lessons, they tend to remember the teachers who believed in them, the friendships they built and the communities where they felt they belonged.
The next time you visit a school, look beyond the presentations and statistics. Pay attention to the conversations happening in the corridors, the interactions in the playground and the atmosphere in the classrooms.
You may discover that the most important things about a school are the things that never appear in a brochure.
Francisca Tenreiro
Marketing & Events Team
English