Selecting the Right School for Your Child

There comes a time in parents’ life, when they have to send their child to a school. Going to school is almost a norm for a child, but selecting the right school is a parent’s responsibility. A school plays a major role in the formative years of a child and it can totally break or make a child’s personality. So, it is essential to make a conscientious decision in choosing a school for your child.

You can follow these simple steps while selecting the right school for your child:

Explore the available options
Find out the schools in the vicinity and make a list of them. Research and see if you have covered all the options in your list. Check the internet and talk to your neighbours and acquaintances to add good options to your list.

Set the priorities for your child’s development
It is very essential that you decide in advance the kind of development you are expecting for your child. That decision will aid you in choosing the school relatively good in meeting your expectation. Your child in that raw age may not be able to voice out his expectation; but you can study the behaviourial pattern of our child and work out a plan conducive for his natural development.

Verify the credibility of the school
Before you finalize the school for your child, verify the credibility of the school. It is essential to ensure whether it is the place you can trust to shape your child’s future. You can find out what kind of student crowd comes to the school. Further, you can also survey the locality in and around the school. Apart from proper schooling, a school should also provide safe environment for your child to flourish.

Meet the teaching and non-teaching staff of the school
Visit each school you have finalized and meet the teaching and non-teaching staff there. Personal meeting with teachers will help you to get an idea about the level of knowledge of the teaching staff and will give you enough opportunity to study their behaviourial pattern. Ask the school staff relevant questions to get enough insider information about the school. Though the staff will not give away all the secrets, but a personal interaction with them will help you in forming a realistic opinion about the school.

Ensure that the school provides quality education and amicable environment
Check the academic performance of the school over the years. Try to find out the teaching methods used in the school, and see if the school focuses on quantity or quality education. Few schools include many subjects in their curriculum just to lure ignorant parents. Such schools trick the parents into believing that their child will become smart by learning many subjects. But what’s the use of studying hundreds of subjects if none of them is learned with perfection. You should take additional effort to verify the curriculum designed by the school for different levels, and find out whether the school has properly trained teachers to teach that curriculum.

Find out the academic and extra-curricular activities in the school
School is a place which contributes to a child’s overall personality. What a child learns in the school remains with him throughout his life. This is the reason why your child must get exposure to extra-curricular activities apart from good academic training. As an aware parent, it is important to send your child in a school that is good in academic as well as extra-curricular activities. You should search for a school that provides various options for activities such as, music, dance, painting, sports and so on and so forth. In case, you have already found out an extra-curricular activity that interests your child then you must see to it that the selected school encourages your child in pursuing his interest.

(Please Note: This is not an exhaustive list, but I have tried to cover almost all the key points.)