Frequently Asked Questions: Why WSA?

What is WhichSchoolAdvisor.com?
WSA provides a dedicated, authoritative, continually updated space for advice and information on education and schooling. Its aim is to help you in determining which school is right for you or your children.

What are your qualifications to do this?

Our editors are independently qualified by BSO to conduct school inspections. 

One of the most important decisions parents have to make is to which school to entrust their child’s education. This can present real challenges for expatriate parents where there is often a dearth of quality information about the schools in a particular area. Our aim is to create a quality site that offers a focal point for information and provide answers, where possible, to the questions being asked.

The team all have experience of their children being educated at various school levels internationally, and at UK boarding school. One of the founding members of the team was a headteacher with many years experience in the UAE, another is a former teacher. All are well versed in the challenges and concerns that parents face when educating their children overseas.

Read the About Us here...

How do you get the information that's on this site?
In multiple ways. We visit schools, and we extract information from schools, parents and inspectors. In many cases the information is out there, we 'simply' identify it and pull it together by way of reference in this site. A great deal of time and energy has gone into this task researching schools. We try to provide both factual information, but where we think we can be balanced anecdotal and qualitative information as well. This helps give parents and students a better sense.

Can you be really honest?
Very. The information presented is fair and honest. Important in this is that the schools themselves also have the opportunity to advise us of any inadvertent errors that may have been made further ensuring the accuracy and currency of the site.

So, what are the best schools?
We are not side stepping when we say that this is 'horses for courses'.

All too often, the criteria used to make these judgments are limited and driven by external examination results and therefore, by their very nature, may exclude excellent schools that add real value to a child’s learning and wider education.

A better question for parents to ask is: which is the right school for my child? This site aims to give you the tools and information you need to answer this question.

Does it matter what the best schools are if you cannot get your children into them?
Oversubscription of schools has been a real challenge faced by many parents and those who move from one school section to the next when there is not a through school opportunity for their child. It is however MUCH less of an issue than it used to be - there are a huge number of new schools that have opened up internationally.

That said choice and growth in school places has been restricted often to specific sectors and areas. Outside these areas demand for places within 'good' schools often continues to outweigh supply.

It is first important to check with the school as there maybe vacancies and/or a short waiting-list in the actual year for which you seek admission, the school can advise you as they are rigorous with their waiting-list.

For those schools with debentures where priority is given, for example, to corporate debentures, there maybe an admission opportunity should you be entitled to access one of these debentures.

Another area worth exploring is sibling policies where rules may result in siblings being viewed favourably on the school waiting-list.

Do you rank the schools?
No, but we do believe that over time the parents comments will lead to a better understanding of which schools offer the best education in a range of areas.

What information do you provide that I cannot get from elsewhere?
Even if we provided little that was new, you would need a great deal of time to put together what you will find collated for you on these pages. However you will find material here you will not get anywhere else, across our reviews, guides, and surveys.

What information do you provide that I cannot get from an 'official' inspection report?

In many markets we are in there are no official reports.

 Where they do exist school inspection reports are usually evidence-based documents that focus on the specific areas of that year’s inspection.

There are areas of the school that may not have been reported on such as the arts or the quality of the extracurricular activities. This site starts to present these areas also and, although not evidence-based research, they will be areas of interest and strengths that have been identified by the stakeholders. Over time we have also added qualitative and anecdotal aspects and offer a more general overview of the school as it relates to the day-to-day business of children, young adults, their learning and development.

Can you really evaluate schools when there is no real data?
Yes! Just visit a school and within a short time you will get a sense of the quality of that school as it relates to you and your cultural needs, more importantly, your son or daughter’s needs. That ‘gut feeling’ brings all of the senses together to enable you to make a value judgment. It is not specifically evidence-based as in an inspection, but is usually fairly accurate. I suspect that if you asked a school inspector their opinion, they would also say the same and something they sensed with a short time of being in a school.

There is also data. Over time we are teasing it out of schools even where it is not a legal requirement to provide it.

How will you develop the site?
Perhaps a better question is how will you as a parent contribute to the development of this site? We will undertake a continuous cycle of review of the information on the site to ensure the current nature of it. We will also start to develop WSA by adding features and information that are relevant to parents as they travel through the school years with their sons or daughters and also face the challenges that this may throw up. A little extra information or that reassuring comment of ‘that is quite normal for this age range’ may help parents and schools a little as learning and youngsters just growing up can be challenging at times.

Anyone who has been using this site over the last seven years, knows how much it has developed already.

Isn't this the job of education regulators?
Regulators will oversee school education in their regions. They apply and monitor the laws to ensure a minimum quality of schooling and that nothing untoward is happening in the schools. This is a huge task in itself in countries where there are so many different styles of school. These are regulatory bodies and this site will offer a source of information that goes beyond the regulatory and, over time, will offer a real insight into the culture of the schools. This is more likely to be anecdotal whereas the regulatory bodies can only deal with the facts as the evidence shows. 

Can parents use WSA to make their decisions on which school?
Parents can, do and have for many years been using the site to make the decision on which school is best for their son or daughter, based on answers to a range of personal criteria which may vary from one family to the next.

Some school reviews are quite limited...
The information on each school has been drawn together from a range of sources and, to be honest, some schools have limited information upon which to draw. Often there is no published inspection report on a school, which further limits our abilities to write a comprehensive review. 

We ask all schools to complete a questionnaire that further informs WSA, and parents, students and teachers to complete our surveys. This is fed directly into each review, and creates a live data tab on the site.

Do you think school fees are too expensive?
Have you ever heard anyone say that I think school fees are not? This depends upon your point of reference for fees as in some cases they are cheaper than elsewhere! Generally, the fees will reflect the quality of the school, its building, ICT provision and general resourcing, particularly the cost of its teaching staff. Schools recruit from the international field and/or that of the home country of curriculum of the school where market conditions prevail and to attract the best staff to a school can be expensive.

Will you publish the waiting lists for school admission?
Yes, on every review there is a tab for Admissions info. This is a new feature of the site, and schools have the ability to enter the data onto our content management system. We rely on them to do so.

Are you launching the site because schools are communicating poorly with parents?
No. Naturally, there is a range in schools with some being far more effective than others in communicating to its stakeholders, prospective parents and the community. But for all schools this is an ongoing challenge and WSA can offer another route that will help schools in this. It is hoped that this new WSA communication route is seen by the schools as a supporting and mutually beneficial initiative and not a challenging one.

There is another point worth raising and that is that the social media can no longer be ignored by schools and those that learn to embrace it will find it and sites such as this a powerful communicator that will further connect them to their community.

Final comment
For parents finding the right school for their children is one of the most important decision that they will make. In building an appropriate relationship with the school and its staff to further develop the learning partnership between parents, student and school is crucial to the success in realising their son or daughter’s potential. The aim of this site, WhichSchoolAdviser.com, is quite simply to support parents and schools in this process, as better informed parents and schools will benefit the learner at all stages of their school-based education.

We look forward to your support in this.