Admissions Is the Beginning of Understanding
As the admissions season for many private schools draws to a close, there is an opportunity to reflect on the process. Most private school admissions processes are designed to answer one question: is this child (and family) a good fit for our school and does the child have the grade level skills to seamlessly integrate into the classroom? It is a reasonable question, but depending on how it is asked and answered, it can set in motion a way of relating to children and families that either serves the school's mission or quietly works against it.
A Developmental Lens
When I developed the admissions observation protocol I used at an elementary school in San Francisco, I was working from the same multidisciplinary framework that shaped everything else I brought to that school. I had spent nearly a decade at a school in New York City for students with speech and language impairments, learning to read a child across multiple developmental domains simultaneously. That training has sharpened what I notice in a classroom, what I target in a learning plan, and what I look for in an admissions observation or interaction. I see the potential for learning based on a developmental profile rather than focusing on academic skills already acquired.
A standard admissions checklist is organized by measuring academic levels and classroom behaviors. Is the child engaged? Does she follow directions? Does she interact appropriately with peers? Does she know her letters, numbers, or letter sounds? And many private school parents believe that coming to the school knowing the alphabet or how to count will be what impresses the admissions committee most.
A developmental observation asks different questions, and those are the questions that can more accurately determine how successful a child will be in a given setting. For example, in the communication section of the protocol I developed, it maps how the child communicates across a continuum from ignoring adult prompts, to responding with action, to using single words, to full sentences with prepositions and embedded clauses. That continuum is a quick developmental picture. It tells you where this child is in her language development, which is information that matters not just for the admissions decision but for everything that happens to her once she is enrolled.
There’s also a motor development section and a regulation section. Each of those responses describes a different readiness for the academic classroom, and each of them has different implications for how a classroom teacher will need to support that child. Knowing this information before August when designing classroom routines and setup is a very different situation than discovering it in November, after a teacher has already spent months trying to understand what is happening.
The Admissions Lens Can Impact Teaching Staff
There is a dimension of this work that school leaders feel acutely and that does not often appear in conversations about admissions: the impact on teachers. When a child enrolls and the school does not yet have a developmental understanding of who that child is, the responsibility falls on the teacher, who is also responsible for designing the learning environment and navigating parent communication. If the school does not have a structure for supporting the teacher in making sense of what is happening in class, the teacher will carry that uncertainty alone, and over time, this can contribute to the burnout that school leaders hope to prevent.
A developmental admissions process does not solve this problem entirely, but it does have an impact. When a teacher begins the year with some understanding of who the students are developmentally, the moments that would otherwise be confusing become more actionable. A child who struggles with transitions is not a behavior problem to be managed; she is a child who may need a preview, visual, or a warning before a transition. A child who cannot yet sustain a pencil grip is not failing at writing; he is a child whose motor development the teacher knew about and addressed before she handed him a pencil. This context does not eliminate the challenge, but it replaces confusion with understanding, and a teacher who understands what she is seeing is a teacher who can respond with intention rather than label herself as a failing teacher.
I believe that a thoughtfully designed admissions process is as much a staff retention and teacher support strategy as it is a family relations strategy. The information collected when a child first visits a school, if it is gathered with a developmental lens and passed on in a meaningful way, becomes part of the professional knowledge that sustains a teacher across a school year. It is one piece of a larger conversation about how schools can structure the flow of developmental information from the first point of contact through enrollment, into the classroom, and into conversations with families.
Next Steps
What does your current admissions observation, checklist, or assessment actually measure? Is it developmental or is it a set of skills and knowledge?
What happens to what you observe? The developmental picture gathered during admissions is most valuable when it travels with the child in a form that is accessible and useful to the adults who will work with her. There are ways the support team can synthesize the information to help teachers create a deeper understanding and a space where that specific group of children can succeed.
Does the teaching and support staff give feedback on admissions from previous years and is there an invitation to do so?