Turnover and retention of pupils in an international school is a challenge.

This is usually a symptom of how international schools operate, with international workers being moved by their employers every few years

However, this is not always the case. Sometimes pupils leave to attend another school nearby instead - whether it’s another international school or a local school.

In this instance, understanding why they leave becomes more important and complex.

Setting the scene 

In our setting in New York, we are split into three schools: early years, lower school and upper school.

Our upper school students finish at the same time as those in local middle schools. At this point, they tend to move on to local high schools.  

As such, it would make sense for pupils to stay with us throughout the first three school levels before moving on.

However, we had identified a trend: we were losing a lot of pupils between early years and lower school. This was confusing because our parent satisfaction surveys had shown parents in these areas were particularly happy with the offering. In fact, they were 100 per cent happy within almost every aspect of our offerings.

So, if our parents were happy, what could be causing them to take their children elsewhere when they could stay with us instead?

As we had ended the 2020 academic year online, then spent the next year working to keep everyone in person, we were now more settled into returning and could therefore address this.

We had to find out what was going on and plan our next steps to overcome the problem.

Collecting feedback

By the end of October, we had started to receive our parent intention feedback - including those thinking of sending their children elsewhere at the end of the academic year.

The head of early years decided to invite some parents in to have an informal conversation about why this was. The feedback we gathered hit on two themes.

Firstly, parents were confused as to the difference between our early years offering and our lower school.

We start lower school at Year 1 - this is kindergarten in the local schools. Parents were planning to take their children out of our school and pursue a kindergarten class.

Secondly, parents wanted to get their children into gifted and talented programs. They were clearly unaware that we were offering the challenge and differentiation in the classroom to push the children to reach their full potential.

Without using a term that they recognised, such as gifted and talented, there seemed to be a lack of awareness that high-ability children were being challenged, so we knew that we had to bridge this gap in the parents’ minds.

What we did about it

It was clear we needed to get the message across that the children make strong progress as they move through the school, and explain clearly how our school structure aided their educational journey.

This was a top priority so that we could get our early years families intrigued by what the lower school had to offer.

We had plenty of data to draw on to show this internally. But while spreadsheets and charts may help teachers to identify progress and attainment, they are not the best for grabbing the attention of the parents and engaging them in our classroom success.

We also knew from feedback that our school community and interactions with teachers were some of the most popular elements of our school.

So, rather than crunch numbers with the parents, we decided to carefully plan a tour of the school so that the parents would go on an expedited version of the progressive educational journey the children would go on, see the resources they work with and talk to their teachers.

Invites were sent and we were delighted that a large proportion of our families decided to attend.

Outlining the plans

For the first part of the visit, I led a presentation that shared the philosophy, pedagogy and benefits of lower school.  

This decision to shape our presentation like this was carefully planned and clearly had an impact, as it led to questions from parents that we had often not been asked before about how we teach and develop our pupils.

We then presented snapshots of the highlights of the lower school and some of the activities children undertake, before embarking on a tour around the school to see the sort of work that pupils do.

We created displays on either side of the hallway - one focused on English and the other maths. Each of these boards included work from each class that demonstrated progression. This was an excellent focal point for the tours.

The parents were then free to explore the classrooms, with teachers available to take questions and show off the learning that takes place throughout the school and the hands-on approach we can take with our pupils.

Teachers were ready to jump onto resources for demonstrations, with puzzles and challenges at the ready. However, we found that the parents were much more interested in chatting with the teachers and getting to know them through informal conversations - which is key for helping build the strong community spirit we always aim for.

Next steps

What was clear from all this is that sometimes the most important way a school can solve an issue is to do some research - such as our parent feedback forms and informal chats - and then act on that information: by showing off what we offer to children in subsequent education phases.

Of course, getting families into the school during Covid has not been easy, but when we have been able to it has been clear this can have a big impact - with parents asking lots of questions and being engaged in what the teachers say.

We’ve definitely seen a shift in parents now considering keeping their child in the school and, although Covid has once again limited our ability to invite parents in, it is a model we will continue to refine for the future.

Matt Payne is head of lower school at Nord Anglia International School New York