Questions to Ask About Education
Questions for talking with a teacher, a head teacher, a school board member or an education researcher, and for a discussion group that wants to get past slogans. They cover what schools are asked to measure, who the current arrangement serves poorly, homework, technology, teacher retention, and what students can actually do by the time they leave.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What do you think school is for? If you had to pick one thing it must deliver, what would it be?
Why ask it
Almost nobody asks practitioners this, and the answers differ sharply between teachers, administrators and parents at the same school. Whatever they name, literacy, employability, citizenship, keeping children safe, explains most of their later answers about testing and discipline.
What does a good day in your classroom look like, and how often do you get one?
Why ask it
The frequency is the useful part. A teacher who says one week in four is telling you something about staffing, cover lessons and interruptions that no policy document will. It also gets a concrete description rather than an opinion about education.
What are you required to measure, and what do you wish was measured instead?
Why ask it
The gap between the two is where most frustration in schools lives. Listen for whether the alternative they name is actually measurable, since that is the honest difficulty, and for whether reporting requirements have grown without anything being removed.
Which of your students is this arrangement working badly for right now?
Why ask it
Framed this way it invites a specific case rather than a defence of the school. The answer usually names a group the system was not designed around: a child two years behind, one far ahead, one with an unmet diagnosis, one whose home life makes homework impossible.
Where does your week actually go, and how much of it is teaching?
Why ask it
Ask for a rough breakdown. Marking, data entry, cover, meetings, safeguarding paperwork and parent contact routinely consume more than outsiders expect, and this single question explains most of what people mean when they say teachers are overloaded.
What is the last change from above that helped, and the last one that did not?
Why ask it
Requiring one of each prevents both a complaint session and a defence of leadership. The change that helped is often small and logistical, which tells you where authority is genuinely useful, while the one that did not usually arrived without time or training attached.
How do you find out whether a class has understood something before the test tells you?
Why ask it
This is a question about craft, and good teachers answer it in detail: a question everyone answers at once, work sampled mid lesson, deliberately asking the quiet child. An answer that goes straight to formal assessment suggests the feedback loop is too slow to act on.
What happens here to a child who is two years behind in reading?
Why ask it
Trace the actual sequence: who notices, what is assessed, who delivers the support, how many minutes a week, and who else covers their class while that happens. This is the clearest test of whether intervention is a system or a good teacher's private effort.
How much does what a child arrives with determine how they leave?
Why ask it
You are asking a practitioner to be honest about the limits of school, and the answer is neither everything nor nothing. Someone who claims the school fully overrides background is overselling, and someone who says it determines all of it has stopped trying to find out.
How much homework do you set, and what do you do with it once it comes back?
Why ask it
The second half exposes homework that exists for parents and inspectors rather than for learning. Anything set but not read, or read but never acted on, is a cost paid mainly by the households with least time and space.
What happens here when a student's behaviour is a symptom of something else?
Why ask it
Ask for the pathway rather than the philosophy: who is told, how long a referral takes, whether there is anyone on site, and what happens in the weeks while a child waits. Schools differ enormously here and it rarely appears in any published material.
Where does technology help in your classroom, and where has it just created work?
Why ask it
Practitioners are usually specific and unsentimental: useful for practice with immediate feedback and for reaching absent students, less useful when a device sits between a teacher and a discussion. Anyone entirely positive or entirely negative is arguing a position rather than describing a room.
What do you do with students who are well ahead of the class?
Why ask it
Often the group with the least provision, because they cause no visible problem. Look for something concrete, harder work rather than more of it, a different set, an outside competition, rather than being asked to help others as the whole answer.
If you had one more pound or dollar per student, where would it go, and why not smaller classes?
Why ask it
Forcing the comparison makes people reason about trade offs. Experienced answers often prefer more support staff, better teacher pay, or specialist reading help over a marginal reduction in class size, and the reasoning is more informative than the choice.
How are new teachers supported in their first two years, and how many are still here after five?
Why ask it
Retention is the number that best predicts whether a school is a functioning workplace, and it is knowable. Ask who mentors new staff, whether that person is given time for it, and what happened to the last three people who left.
Is there anything you are careful about teaching, and who decides that?
Why ask it
Every school has topics handled cautiously, whether because of curriculum rules, local politics or a complaint that once landed badly. The question is not an accusation, and the answer tells you where the pressure on this school actually comes from.
When a parent disagrees with you, how does that usually go? What is a useful thing for a parent to do?
Why ask it
Ask this if you are a parent and you will get advice worth more than any newsletter, usually about timing, going to the class teacher first, and being specific. The answer also reveals whether the school treats parents as partners, customers or a hazard.
What do students here actually leave able to do?
Why ask it
Push past grades toward capability: write something of length, read a difficult text, handle a number, speak in front of people, work with someone they did not choose. A school that can only answer in results is describing its measurements rather than its graduates.
What have you changed your mind about since you started teaching?
Why ask it
The revisions are usually about discipline, ability grouping, homework or how much a single teacher can compensate for. It is also the question that separates someone reflecting on twenty years of evidence from someone who has repeated one year twenty times.
If you were designing this school from scratch, what would you keep?
Why ask it
A better closing question than what they would change, because it surfaces what is quietly working and would be lost in a reorganisation. Expect answers about a particular colleague, a timetable arrangement, or a tradition that does more than it appears to.
How to use these questions
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Matching the question to the person
Classroom teachers
Best on what actually happens in a lesson, how they check understanding, where their week goes, and which students are being missed. Avoid asking them to defend district or national policy, since they did not write it and the question puts them in an awkward position.
Heads and administrators
Best on staffing, budgets, retention, intervention pathways and what constraints they are working inside. Ask for numbers here, teacher turnover, how many students are on support plans, waiting times for assessment, because these exist and are rarely volunteered.
Students, including recent leavers
Best on what teaching feels like from a desk, which subjects are taught by someone who wants to be there, and what they were unprepared for afterwards. Former students a year or two out are unusually candid and almost never consulted.
Researchers
Best on what the evidence supports and how strongly, and on why a practice that works in a study often fails in a school. Ask what the effect size means in practical terms and what conditions the result depended on.
What to check for yourself
- Inspection or accountability reports, read for the criticisms rather than the headline rating, and compared against the previous one to see what changed.
- Teacher turnover and the number of unfilled or long term cover posts, which affect a child's experience more than most published measures.
- Progress measures rather than raw attainment, since raw results largely reflect intake and tell you little about the teaching.
- How results and destinations differ between groups within the same school, which is usually where the real story is.
- Class sizes for the specific subjects and years your child would be in, not the school average.
- What the school asks families to provide, in money, equipment and time, which quietly determines who can participate fully.
Common pitfalls
Asking a question with a complaint inside it
Anything phrased as why do you still do it this way turns into a defence, and you learn nothing. The same point asked as how does this work here, and what would you change, tends to get you the criticism you were fishing for from the person best placed to make it.
Choosing the wrong moment
Corridor conversations at pickup, and anything during exam weeks or the first fortnight of term, get the shortest answers of the year. Ask for ten minutes at a time of their choosing and you will get a different conversation.
Generalising from one classroom
Variation between teachers in the same building is often larger than variation between schools. One vivid account, good or bad, is a data point about a person, and it takes several before you are learning about the institution.
Debating models instead of practices
Arguments about progressive against traditional education rarely survive contact with a specific question, such as how a child two years behind gets help. Keeping the discussion on practices keeps it answerable and keeps everyone honest.