What Parents Really Look for in a School: Insider Insights from Selina Boyd

Kai Vacher (0:00)

What makes a good school?

How can schools help parents understand how good they are?

And with ISC Research data suggesting that the global international school sector is growing by around 2% a year, that's equivalent to net growth of roughly 300 schools over the next 12 months. We'll also be asking, what seems to be important to parents when establishing a British school internationally?

So to help me explore these questions and a few others, it's a pleasure to welcome Selina Boyd to the Educators Corner. Selina is International Director at The Good Schools Guide. Selina, it's a real pleasure to have you with us today. How is your week shaping up?

Selina Boyd (0:49)

Morning Kai, thank you. It's only Tuesday and it's been a busy week already speaking to schools and parents. It's the start of the new school year, so we're speaking to schools who we hope to visit this year and speaking to parents who are still asking questions about the schools that their children are starting in this year.

Kai Vacher (1:11)

So it's a fantastic service, I think, which The Good Schools Guide provide. But for those listeners out there who perhaps haven't heard of The Good Schools Guide before, could you briefly tell us in a nutshell, what is The Good Schools Guide?

Selina Boyd (1:26)

The Good Schools Guide is a trusted, independent voice helping parents navigate school choices. There's huge amounts of information out there. If you're a parent and you're looking for a school, you can look on websites, you can go to ChatGBT or AI, and you can pull up a list of schools in about two seconds. What's missing is that trusted, independent insight into what that school is really like and whether it's going to be right for your child and your family.

The Good Schools Guide has spent over 40 years visiting schools, talking to parents, and writing about them in a way that defines or helps a parent understand the spirit and character of a school.

We've been doing this for over 40 years. We've visited and reviewed over 1300 schools in the UK and over 330 around the world. And parents trust us because they know that schools don't pay to be in the Good Schools Guide. So we're truly independent. We publish the reviews on our website for parents to read. And we also offer a one-to-one education consulting service for families who want to dive a little bit deeper.

Kai Vacher (2:45)

What parent wouldn't want a trusted and independent guide to help them make that very important choice of where to send their child. So from a school's perspective, and that's where we're going to be looking at this very much today, from a school's perspective, sounds like a great guide to be in.

How do you get to feature in it? Because you've said very clearly, you don't pay to feature in it. So how do you get to feature in it?

Selina Boyd (3:12)

So it's a really big part of what we do is having our ear to the ground and listening to the schools that parents are talking about. So we have a network of experts across the UK, across the world, who are very sort of ground in their local community. They're often parents themselves. And this network is listening to what families are talking about. The schools that we hear parents are interested in learning about, the ones that they think that they want to send their child to. We then do a bit of work in the background, a bit of research, to try to understand what parents are saying, whether we think it's a good school.

We don't have a tick list. It's not a question of it must have X facilities and Y programs. It's very much about what parents say is going on in the school, whether they feel their children are flourishing.

When we hear of these schools, that we think they're good schools, we reach out to the schools and we invite them to join the Good Schools Guide. At that point, we hope for an invitation to visit the school in person. We would never write about a school unless we had actually visited that school ourselves. We want to walk the corridors, we want to meet the people, we want to meet the heads of schools, all of the senior leaders. And then a really big part of what we do is talking to parents. And we will try and talk to families who've been at the school for a long time, families who have recently arrived, perhaps families with children who've been the entire way through. Particularly important for international schools is talking to families of different cultures, of different nationalities, trying to understand a range of expectations and what families believe the school is doing for their children. And we look for the stories, the common threads that come out. It's no good us hearing from one person that they think this is a good school. It's about us hearing on repeat from many families that they think this is a good school that they would recommend to their friends.