What to Check on a School Campus Visit: A Parent's Checklist

A school tour is easy to enjoy and hard to judge. The lobby is polished, the children are smiling, and every corridor seems to lead past the best classroom in the building. This checklist is built from the official record: what CBSE requires its affiliated schools to publish and certify, and what the IB's Programme Standards and Practices require every authorised IB World School to maintain. Read it before the visit, use it during, and find the official sources at the end.

Start with the record, not the brochure

Do the desk work before the drive. A CBSE school must run a Mandatory Public Disclosure page on its own website: its affiliation letter, declared fee structure, safety certificates, teacher numbers, campus area and three years of board results. Cross-check the affiliation number on CBSE's SARAS directory, and use our guide to the disclosure page if you have not read one before. For an IB school, confirm the exact programme on the IB's Find an IB World School directory with our IB verification guide. Walk in knowing what the school has already declared on record; the visit exists to test whether reality matches it.

What to check on the campus itself

Six areas cover most of what matters. None needs specialist knowledge, and each has an official benchmark sitting behind it:

Five questions that are hard to dodge

1. 1What is the full first-year cost in writing: admission fee, annual charges, term fees, transport, meals, books, uniform and activity charges? Compare the answer with the fee structure the school published on its disclosure page and ask about any difference before paying. Our school fees guide shows how to read a fee sheet line by line.
2. 2How many teachers left at the end of the last academic year? One or two is ordinary churn. A double-digit number, or no answer at all, tells you more than the tour will.
3. 3Who teaches my child if their teacher leaves mid-year? Listen for a process, such as a substitute pool or shared planning, rather than an assurance.
4. 4How are parents told about problems: an injury, a fight, a bullying complaint? Ask for the actual escalation route and who calls you.
5. 5What is the withdrawal and refund policy, and how much of the admission fee is refundable at each stage? Ask for the written policy, not a verbal answer.

If it is an IB school: checks from the IB's own rulebook

Every authorised IB World School is evaluated against the IB's Programme Standards and Practices, the document that sets out what a school must maintain to keep its authorisation. Five of its requirements translate directly into visit checks:

• A working library, not a showcase. The standards require the school to maintain "a functioning and active library consisting of adequate combinations of people, places, collections and services that aid and extend learning and teaching." Ask when it is staffed and how often classes are timetabled into it.
• A real programme coordinator. The standards require a coordinator who is empowered to run each programme. Ask to meet the coordinator for the programme your child would join; vagueness about who holds the role is telling.
• Protected planning time. The standards require the school to give teachers collaborative planning time, and the Primary Years Programme requires the programme of inquiry to be planned jointly by classroom and specialist teachers. Ask how many hours a week teachers plan together.
• Named learning support. The standards require the school to provide the staff, facilities and resources set out in its inclusion policy. Ask who the special educator or counsellor is, and which days they are on campus.
• Current teacher training. The standards require compliance with IB-mandated professional development. Ask when the teaching team last completed IB workshops.

Red flags worth pausing on

• The office cannot produce current safety certificates, or the framed ones on the wall have expired.
• The fees quoted to you differ from the fee structure the school published, without a clear written explanation.
• You are kept out of real classrooms because classes are running, and shown only a model room.
• Nobody can state the teacher to section ratio, even though CBSE schools publish it on the disclosure page.
• Every question is handled by the admissions or marketing team, and no teacher or programme coordinator is made available.

After the visit

Write down what you saw the same day, while the details are fresh, and compare it against the published record: the fee structure, the teacher numbers, the certificates, the directory listing. A school that passes the record check and whose campus matches the record has cleared a bar that most admission decisions never get tested against. If something does not match, ask the school about it directly; the answer, and how willingly it is given, is part of the checklist too.

Sources and what they establish