How to Choose the Right School in Nigeria: A Parent's Checklist

Ask ten Nigerian parents how they picked their child’s school and you’ll get more or less the same answers. Someone recommended it. It’s close to the house. The fees were manageable. The results looked good.

All reasonable. None of them tell you whether your child will do well in that particular classroom.

And this isn’t a small decision. Your child will spend something like 1,200 hours a year inside that building. Getting the fit wrong doesn’t just cost you money. It costs years of a child slowly deciding that they’re the problem.

Here’s a better way to go about it.

Start with your child, not the school

Before you look at a single school, get clear about who you’re placing.

You don’t need a formal assessment for this part. Sit down and answer these honestly:

• How does my child take in new information? Do they need to see it, hear it, or get their hands on it before it sticks?
• What’s their pace? Some children need to sit with an idea for a while. Others are bored inside ninety seconds and start looking for trouble.
• How do they cope with structure? Does routine settle them, or do they need room to move?
• How do they take correction? Some children shrug it off. Others carry it around for a week.
• Where does their attention go on its own? Not where you wish it went. Where it actually goes.

Write it down. That page is your brief. Every school you look at either fits that child or it doesn’t.

What to look at when you visit

School tours are marketing. The compound will be swept, the best class will be on display, and someone charming will walk you round. Your job is to see past all of that.

Ask to sit in on an ordinary lesson

Ask to observe a normal class in the year group your child would be joining. Mid-morning, ordinary day, no notice if they’ll allow it. If a school won’t let you see a working classroom, that tells you something on its own.

While you’re in there, watch the children instead of the teacher. Are they engaged, or just enduring it? Is one bright child answering everything while twenty others sit quiet? When a question goes out, do hands go up out of confidence or out of fear?

Look at the walls

What’s on the classroom walls tells you a lot. Is it the children’s own work, or laminated posters bought from a supplier? And is every piece identical, or is there some sign that children were allowed to arrive at different answers?

Twenty identical drawings usually means copying is being taught as learning.

Count the adults

In the early years especially, the adult-to-child ratio matters more than almost anything in the brochure. A wonderful teacher with forty three-year-olds cannot do that job. Nobody can. Ask how many adults are in the room across the whole day, not the number written on paper.

Ask about the teachers, not the results

Exam results tell you as much about who a school admits as about how it teaches. Ask these instead:

• How long has the average teacher been here?
• Who taught this class last year, and are they still with you?
• What training have your early-years staff had in the last twelve months?
• Who covers when a teacher is absent?

High turnover in the early years is one of the surest signs of a school that will disappoint you.

Watch how they talk about children who struggle

This is the most revealing question you can ask:

What do you do when a child in Primary 2 isn’t keeping up?

Listen closely to the answer. A school with real systems will describe a process: how they notice, who gets pulled in, what changes in the classroom, how they keep you informed. A school without them will talk about extra lessons, about parents doing more at home, or about the child needing to sit up and face his work.

That second answer means that if your child struggles, the school’s plan is to hand the problem back to you.

Questions that show you how a school really runs

Take these with you. How readily they get answered matters nearly as much as the answers themselves.

1. How do you assess children in the early years, and what do you do with what you find?
2. How often will I hear from my child’s teacher, and in what form?
3. What’s your approach when a child’s behaviour becomes difficult?
4. How do you handle a child who is ahead of the class?
5. What does a typical day look like, from arrival to dismissal?
6. How much of that day is the child sitting down?
7. What happens at break? Is there supervision, and is there space to run?
8. Can I speak to a parent whose child has been here three years?

That last one is the most useful and the one schools dodge most often. A confident school will put you in touch without blinking.

Red flags worth walking away from

• They won’t let you observe a class. There’s no good reason for that.
• Results with no context. Ask how many pupils actually sat the exam. A school that enters only its strongest candidates is managing its statistics, not teaching your child.
• Every answer comes back to facilities. Air conditioning and a swimming pool don’t teach phonics.
• Early-years children sitting down most of the day. Under-sevens learn by moving and playing. A silent, seated nursery class is an achievement in discipline, not in education.
• They brush off learning difficulties. If you ask what happens when a child has a learning need and you’re told they don’t have such children, they do. They just aren’t spotting them.
• Pressure to decide today. Urgency is a sales tactic.

What “good” looks like changes with age

For ages 2 to 5, look at ratio, warmth, play, language and movement. Formal academic work at this stage is mostly theatre for parents. What you want to see is talking, singing, building, sorting, and adults who get down to the child’s eye level.

For ages 6 to 8, look for proper structured literacy. Real phonics, taught in sequence, not just letter recognition. And early numeracy taught with physical materials before it moves to symbols on a page.

For ages 9 to 11, the question becomes whether the school notices individuals at all. Ask how they spot a child who has fallen behind without making a fuss about it, because by this age children get very good at hiding it.

Making the decision

Once you’ve been round your shortlist, go back to that page you wrote about your child and compare them against it. The question isn’t which school is best. It’s which school was built for this child.

A well-regarded school that suits your child badly will do less for them than a modest one that suits them well. That’s the part most families miss, and it’s the most common reason a child ends up struggling in a school nobody could fault on paper.

If you’d like help with this, our school placement advisory does exactly this work. We build a proper profile of your child, then shortlist schools to match it. We take no commission from any school, so the recommendation you get is the one we believe in.

And if you think the fit has already gone wrong, here’s what that usually looks like.