How to choose a private school in Nigeria

The short answer

Ask for approval status, exam results by cohort, the complete fee schedule, and how many teachers left last year. A good school answers all four without tension. The fourth is the one that predicts your child's next three years.

1. Is the school approved, and by whom?

Private schools are approved and registered by the education ministry of the state they operate in. Ask directly whether the school is approved, and for the registration details. An unapproved school may still be a good school. It operates outside the only oversight that exists, and that has practical consequences when examinations, transfers or disputes come up.

Ask separately whether the school is a registered examination centre for WAEC or NECO, or whether pupils sit elsewhere. If elsewhere, ask where and why.

2. Read the results honestly

Every school advertises results. The advertisement is almost always the best possible framing of them. Three questions convert it back into information:

• How many pupils were in the year group, and how many sat the exam? A school with a spectacular pass rate and a shrinking exam cohort may simply be preventing weaker candidates from sitting.
• What proportion of the whole cohort got five credits including English and Mathematics? This is the standard threshold that matters for what comes next, and it is the number most likely to be quietly replaced with something friendlier.
• Can I see the results from each of the last three years? One strong year is a cohort. Three is a school.

3. Get the complete fee schedule in writing

The advertised termly fee is rarely the amount you will pay. Ask for everything, for a full year, in writing, including whichever of these apply: development or facility levies, admission and registration fees, uniforms and sports kit, books and stationery, examination fees, excursions, ICT or laboratory levies, transport, and the notice period required before withdrawal.

Then ask the question that actually matters: how much have fees risen in each of the last three years? You are committing for years, and a school that raises fees sharply mid- stream is expensive in a way the first invoice does not show.

4. Ask how many teachers left last year

This is the question that separates schools, and almost nobody asks it. Teacher turnover is the clearest available proxy for how a school is run internally: whether staff are paid on time, whether the head is reasonable, whether class sizes are survivable.

A school where most of the teaching staff has changed in a year is a school where your child will be taught by people still learning the curriculum and the pupils. Ask how long the class teacher for your child's year has been there, and how long the head of school has.

What to look at on the visit

• Go during a normal school day, not on an open day. Ask to walk past classrooms while lessons are running.
• Count children in a class. Then ask what the school claims its class size is, and compare.
• Look at the toilets and the water. Consistently the most honest indicator of whether a school spends money on children or on the reception area.
• Ask about safeguarding specifically. Who is allowed to collect a child, how visitors are logged, what the policy is on corporal punishment and whether it is actually followed, and who a child tells if an adult frightens them. A school that has thought about this will answer fluently. A school that has not will improvise.
• Ask what happens when a child falls behind. The answer reveals whether the school teaches the class or the top of the class.

How we treat school information

School facts are the area where an unsourced number does the most damage, because parents act on them. We hold school facts with a source and a date attached and only display the ones we have verified. Where we do not have a verified fact, we show nothing rather than an estimate. That is also why you should treat any directory, including this one, as the starting point of the enquiry rather than the end of it.

The same reading discipline applies to school reviews as to any other: count and specifics before average, and read the complaints for pattern.

Bottom line

Approval, three years of results with cohort sizes, the full annual cost in writing, and teacher turnover. Visit on an ordinary Tuesday. The school that welcomes all four questions is usually the one that can afford to.