Choosing the “right school” for international assignees or expatriates returning to Australia is not a trivial exercise. Parents rightly assign a very high priority to choosing appropriate schools and expatriate parents are typically very concerned to ensure that an expatriate lifestyle does not impact on the schooling, or academic progress, of their children. We also often find that the location of schools is one of the chief determinates of where expatriates decide to live and choosing a private education is, of course, a very substantial financial undertaking.
We support the use of professional education consultants in this area for expatriates – particularly considering the problems expatriates may have in fully appreciating the choice of schools available, those that provide a potential “good fit” for individual children and the restrictions that waiting lists may impose on school entry.
Factors to Consider
The most important initial step in identifying the right school for your child is to do an assessment of your child’s strengths and weaknesses. Use any school reports or professional assessments you may have which highlight areas where your child has strengths or weaknesses overlayed by your own views of their personality.
Thereafter, consider the following criteria when assessing potential schools:
- Fees and Location
- Co-educational or single sex
- Culture
- School size
- Class sizes
- Academic performance
- Alumni
- “Reputation”
- Level of discipline
- Particular programmes (eg separate campus, cultural or sports)
Parents will often have settled on a particular school in advance – you should take the opportunity to test that preference by investigating a number of schools, even if it is only for comparative purposes. From a practical perspective it may also not be possible to arrange entry into a particular school at short notice, so you need to have developed a fallback option(s).
If you have no knowledge of the private schools available in your next location in Australia, then the website of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools (AHISA) – www.ahisa.edu.au – is a good starting point; it provides both useful background information and links to individual school websites.
Australian School Performance Rankings
The Federal Government maintains a website (www.myschool.edu.au) which compares school performance on reading, writing and arithmetic across the country. The information is drawn from annual NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) testing for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.