School visits - would you take your child with you?

[GillL]

I'm going to arrange some visits to schools so we can decide which ones to apply to. Is it worth taking dd with us or should we wait until she's actually been offered a place?

I don't know if the schools allow children to come on the school visits - certainly there was a 'no children' policy at both schools I visited...

Yes, I always did. I think it is a really good indicator to watch how school staff interact with your child on a visit. I learnt a lot by watching and listening.

I have never known a no child policy and TBh that would put me off before I even got to the door.

We took DD on a number of school visits, state and private and no one said a word.

I didn't, because I didn't want DD to get fixated on one particular school before we had had a chance to think about it ourselves. But we did take her to an open day at our preferred option once we'd narrowed it down, to see what she made of it. Fortunately, she loved it, so that helped us make up her mind.

I have taken my children everytime. The school we chose was the one that when the deer from the next door wood come on to the school field the teacher turned round and helped my child onto the desk so they could see i too.

It was good to see how they responded to the kids.

When we moved to a different area we took both boys to look at 5 different schools as at the age of 6 and 8 we felt they could have a say - they also asked questions we would not have thought of.

I have always only ever done 1-1 visits, never organised ones with other parents. I can imagine how that makes it harder to take a small child. We took DD to open Days too.

I did, slightly different as we were moving form abroad so came over and saw 5 schools in 2 days.
There was a marked difference how the Head Teacher & other staff interacted with DS, it did affect my decision.

We didn't for several reasons:

1. Our DS was (is!) very opinionated but we felt it was our decision which school was right for him and we didn't want to be persuaded by a three year old.
2. He loves monopolising adult conversation so it would have been very difficult to talk with him there.
3. He is very able and we had some questions to ask that we didn't really want him to hear at the age of three.

But I know many people who did and their children were extremely welcome. It was just a personal choice for us.

Thanks all for sharing your experiences. I think I will take her with me. She is quite shy so I doubt she will talk to anyone there. Also, she thinks she is going to go to the same school as her cousin. That is unlikely so it might help to get her excited about some other schools.

In those circumstances, I think I would agree. The concept that there is more than one version of "school" could be hard to grasp at her age!