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Before you fly: setting up the trip
The schools you visit should already be a shortlist of three, not a casting call. If you arrive with seven schools to assess, you will see none of them properly. Use the virtual tour stage to narrow down, then commit to the three that look most promising and the one or two backup schools you would tour only if a Tier 1 option falls through. Our virtual school tour evaluation guide covers the shortlisting stage in detail.
Once the three are chosen, book the visits at least four weeks ahead and ask for a specific time of day. Mid morning between 9:30 and 11:30 is the strongest window. The school day is in full flow, lessons are running normally, and the senior leadership is usually available. Avoid the start and end of the school day; the corridor noise will mask the data you are trying to read. Ask the admissions team to schedule the tour during a normal week, not during a major event or inset day.
Ask each school in writing for three things in addition to the tour itself: a 45 minute conversation with the head of year or section, a coffee with one or two current parents in your child's year, and either an assessment session for your child or a sample lesson if the child travels with you. The strong schools agree to all three. The weaker ones offer the tour only and decline the rest. The pattern of yeses and nos before you fly tells you something about each school's confidence.
Build the broader trip into the same week. The school visits are the core but the rest of the move benefits from being on the ground. Use the spare half days for housing viewings, the destination bank account, a meeting with a tax adviser, and a coffee with one or two existing expat families. Our family relocation checklist shows where these tasks slot into the wider month by month sequence.
Day zero: arrival and orientation
Land the day before the first school visit. A 12 hour flight followed by an immediate tour is a poor use of the trip; the family is jet lagged, the children are tired, and the day one visit becomes a blur. Spend day zero walking the destination city in the neighbourhood where you would most likely live, looking at the food shops, the parks, the commute to the first school, and the general feel of the area on a normal day.
This is also the day to test the basics. Buy a local SIM. Note the route from the hotel to school one. Take a taxi or a metro at the time of the school run to feel the traffic. Check whether the broadband is fast enough in the area you plan to live. None of this is decisive, but the cumulative impression of the city shapes the school decision more than parents expect.
Keep the evening short. Eat early, hydrate, and sleep before 10 pm if at all possible. Day one is long.
Free trip planner
Send us your dates and three shortlisted schools and we will draft the day by day plan: tour times, parent introductions and neighbourhood routes. The Get Help form is free for parents. For wider visa and budget context, the Relocate hub bundles every checklist into one place.
Day one: first school and neighbourhood walk
Begin with the school you suspect is your second favourite on paper. The first visit anchors the day; making it the middle ranked school gives you a calibration baseline before you see the strongest contender. Arrive ten minutes early. Use the time to watch the children arrive, the staff greet them, the parents who linger, and the language being spoken in the carpark. This pre tour window is often the most honest five minutes of the visit.
During the tour, ask the head of admissions to walk you to the specific year group your child would join. See the actual classroom, not the showcase room. Look at the wall displays, the noise level, the relationship between the children and the teacher in the room you pass. Stand quietly for a moment in the corridor and listen; a school's character is audible. Take photographs only if the school explicitly permits.
After the tour, sit with the head of section for 45 minutes. The questions that work are the same set we use in our 10 questions every parent should ask before choosing a school piece. Pick the four or five that matter most for your child and ask them directly. Save five minutes for the questions the school is least likely to expect: what would you change about this school in the next two years, and which type of family is not a good fit here. The answers reveal more than the prepared material.
Spend the afternoon walking the neighbourhood within reasonable commuting distance of the school. Family transport is often underestimated; a 30 minute one way commute costs the children seven hours of their week, every week, for as long as you live there. Our housing near international schools piece breaks down the catchments by city. End the day with a structured evening evaluation (see below).
Day two: second school plus parent coffee
Day two takes in the school you considered the strongest contender on paper. The format is the same: arrive early, watch the morning arrival, take the tour, sit with the head of section, ask the difficult questions. Compare the answers, not just on content but on tone. A school with a comfortable institutional confidence answers difficult questions directly; one that hedges or deflects is usually less secure than its marketing suggests.
Where day two differs is the parent coffee. The school should have arranged for you to meet one or two current parents in your child's year group, ideally over a 30 to 45 minute coffee on neutral ground rather than in the school's reception. These conversations are usually the most useful 30 minutes of the entire trip. Bring five questions: what would you change about the school, what has surprised you compared with the brochure, how does the school communicate with parents, how was your child welcomed in the first month, and would you choose this school again. The answer to the fifth question is usually quick and instinctive.
If the school has not arranged a parent coffee by the time you arrive, push politely; this is a request that costs the school ten minutes to fulfil. A school that declines is signalling that it does not want you to talk to its current customers. Treat that as data.
The afternoon is the right time to make the housing viewings happen, while the school context is still fresh. Walking from a viewed flat to the school gate at school run time is the single best test of whether the commute is realistic. Schedule at least one such walk if the geography allows.
Day three: third school and assessment
The third school is often the dark horse on paper. Visit it with the same rigour, not a tired version. By now the comparisons between schools are starting to take shape; resist the urge to confirm yesterday's instinct and look for genuine differences. Each school has at least one quiet superpower that does not appear in the marketing; the third visit is usually when those features surface.
If your child has travelled, day three is the right day for the assessment session at the school you currently consider strongest. Tier 1 international schools usually run a half day assessment for new joiners and many will accommodate this during a planning visit. The benefits are twofold: the school gets the data it needs to consider your application, and your child gets a real half day inside the building, with real classmates, which is the best possible test of whether they would settle.
While the child is in assessment, spend the morning on the housing and city tasks that did not fit into day two. Many families pencil in a meeting with a tax adviser, an open a local bank account appointment, or a meeting with the relocation agent if they are using one. Our tax implications of moving abroad guide covers what the local adviser is likely to flag.
The evening evaluation routine
Every evening of the trip, run a short structured evaluation. Half an hour with a notebook is enough. Five questions for each school visited that day. What was the best moment. What was the worst moment. What surprised you. What would your child have noticed that you missed. What is the one question you wish you had asked. Write the answers down before you eat dinner or open the phone; the discipline of capturing them in the same hour makes the memory usable a week later.
Daily evening checklist
- Five evaluation questions per school, written down before dinner
- Photographs and notes filed in a single cloud folder per school
- Brief debrief with partner, with each of you scoring the school out of ten privately first
- Compare scores and identify the differences (the gaps are the conversation)
- Send a short thank you email to the head of admissions while the visit is fresh
- Update the shortlist if the day's school has now moved up or down
After you fly home: the decision sequence
Within a week of returning, run a single decision meeting. Each parent independently ranks the three schools first, second and third, and writes one sentence for each ranking. Compare the rankings before discussing reasoning. Where the rankings agree, the decision is straightforward; where they diverge, the conversation focuses on the reasons, not the conclusion. Most families discover they agree more than they expected once the reasoning is on the table.
Then commit. Schools hold informal places for a fortnight after a serious visit; if you let the offer hang for a month, you give up the seat to a more decisive family. The strongest move is to email the chosen school's head of admissions, by name, within 48 hours of the decision meeting, accepting the place and confirming the deposit. The slower the email, the slower the school will be in confirming back.
If the trip produced no obvious winner, do not pick the school you visited most recently or the one your child happened to like most. Either revisit the schools virtually with the specific questions that the in person trip raised, or schedule a one school second visit. A single ambiguous trip rarely converts into a confident decision over time.
FAQ
Three is the sweet spot. Two does not give you enough comparison; four to five exhausts the family and blurs the memory of each visit. With three schools spread across two and a half days, you have time for proper tours, a coffee with current parents, and at least one evaluation conversation between visits.
Yes for the children old enough to share a meaningful opinion, typically eight and above. Younger children find back to back school visits exhausting and rarely add to the decision. If only one parent can travel, plan the trip carefully and use video for the second parent in the most important meetings.
Budget two and a half hours per school: an hour for the tour, 45 minutes for the senior leadership conversation, and 30 to 45 minutes for either an assessment session or a parent coffee. Anything shorter and the school is treating you as a casual prospect; anything longer and the visit becomes harder to compare against the others.
For most families, yes, provided the shortlisting work has been done in advance and the trip is well structured. A second trip is usually only necessary if a Tier 1 application is borderline and the school has asked for a further conversation with senior leadership.