5 Questions Every Parent Should Ask During a School Tour

A good school tour can tell you everything you need to know. A great school tour will tell you even more, but only if you ask the right questions. Admissions teams are trained to showcase their school. Your job is to look past the polished presentation and figure out whether the school is genuinely the right fit for your child.

After visiting dozens of schools with families over the years, these are the five questions that consistently surface the information that matters most.

1. What is the teacher turnover like in this section of the school?

This is the single most revealing question you can ask. High teacher turnover is a warning sign. It can mean pay and conditions are poor, leadership is weak, or the school has a difficult culture. Low turnover usually means the school takes care of its staff, which translates directly into better teaching for your child.

A healthy primary school loses perhaps 5 to 10 per cent of teachers per year. Anything above 15 per cent year on year is worth investigating. Ask specifically about the phase your child will enter. A school might have a very stable secondary but a revolving door in primary, or vice versa.

Listen carefully to the answer. A confident admissions person will give you a number and explain why. An evasive or vague answer tells you something too.

2. How do you support children who need extra help or extra challenge?

Every child is different, and every class contains children who learn at different paces. Ask specifically what the school does for two groups: students with additional learning needs and students who are working significantly ahead of their peers.

You are looking for concrete answers. Not just "we have a learning support team" but "our SENCO works with class teachers to set targets, we have in-class support for maths in Year 3, and we run targeted reading groups twice a week." Not just "we stretch our most able" but "we run an after-school challenge club and extend students through project work and competitions."

If the answer is generic or vague, that tells you the systems may not actually exist in day-to-day practice.

3. Can I see a normal lesson, not a prepared one?

Most tours take you past carefully curated moments: the art gallery, the science fair, the well-behaved Year 5 lesson where the teacher has been warned you are coming. That is useful, but it is not the whole story.

Ask politely if you can look into a regular classroom that was not part of the planned route. A confident school will say yes. Watch how the children interact with the teacher, how the room is organised, and what is on the walls. Are the children engaged and calm? Does the work on display look like it comes from children who are being stretched, or is it superficial?

You can learn more from two minutes in a genuine lesson than from an hour in a showcase one.

4. How do you communicate with parents, and how often?

Parent communication is one of those things that separates schools with a genuine partnership mindset from schools that treat parents as an inconvenience. Ask specifically:

• How often do you send formal reports?
• Do we get regular informal updates (photos, newsletters, class blogs)?
• How quickly will a teacher respond to an email from me?
• What happens if I want to raise a concern about my child?

You want clear, specific answers. A good school will mention something like a weekly class newsletter, half-termly reports, open parent-teacher meetings twice a year, and a 48-hour response policy for parent emails. A school that struggles to describe its parent communication is usually not doing it well.

5. Why do students leave this school?

Every school loses some students every year. Some leave because their family is relocating. Some leave for financial reasons. Some leave because the school is not working for them. The last group is the one you care about.

Ask what proportion of departures are family moves versus dissatisfaction. A school with strong retention (over 90 per cent excluding relocations) is usually doing something right. A school where a meaningful number of families leave for other schools nearby is signalling an issue somewhere.

Do not expect a precise statistic, but watch for how comfortable the admissions team is with the question. The answer tells you a lot.

Bonus: trust your gut

After you leave, give yourself ten minutes alone to sit with your impressions. How do you feel? Calm and optimistic, or uneasy and uncertain? Could you picture your child walking into that school happy? Your instincts are rarely wrong when they are honest.

Take notes immediately after each visit. By the fourth school they all blur together, so write down your answers to these five questions while they are fresh. When you compare notes across your shortlist, the right choice usually becomes much clearer.