We toured a private school two weeks ago and liked it enough that we booked an interview almost on the spot. Then, being the fairly relaxed parents we are, we did basically nothing to get ready for it. We didn’t even know if the interview would be aimed at our son or at us. We just showed up.
If you’re staring down a preschool interview letter right now and Googling frantically the night before (no judgement, we’ve been there with Prep interviews too), here’s exactly what our morning looked like.
We Turned Up Not Knowing What to Expect
Our son, is three. At home we speak Mandarin almost exclusively, so any English he has comes from daycare. I mention that because it matters later.
We got a quick hello from his prospective teacher and then went almost straight into it. There was no long warm-up chat, no ice-breaker games to ease him in. One minute we were saying hello, the next the teacher was crouched down at his level, asking him questions.
My partner and I stood off to the side the entire time, watching and trying not to grin too obviously. Honestly, I was a bit stunned by how much he understood and could answer back in English — we hadn’t drilled a single word of it beforehand.
What the Teacher Actually Did With Him
The first thing was easy, a card, what colour is this, and he got it without blinking. Then came the square. She asked him to draw one and what came out was closer to a potato than a square, and I actually braced a little, waiting for her to gently steer him back to it. She didn’t. She said “good job” like she meant it and moved straight on. I don’t know why that got to me the way it did. I catch myself correcting his drawings at home without even noticing I’m doing it.
Then she handed him a pair of scissors and my stomach dropped a little, because at home we don’t let him near scissors unless one of us is basically hovering over his shoulder. He cut, slowly, tongue poking out with the concentration of it, and nothing went wrong. She said a sentence and he repeated it back almost exactly, in that accent that kids somehow pick up faster than we ever will. Nose, ears, knees, he got through all of them without missing one. Counting he flew through, barely looked like he was thinking.
The blocks were the bit where he actually loosened up. Building things is basically his whole personality at the moment, so for the first time in that whole twenty minutes he looked like he was enjoying himself instead of just going along with it. Near the end she did some small action, touching her head then her shoulders I think, and asked him to copy it, and he did, badly, arms flailing more than the movement called for, and both of us had to work quite hard not to laugh out loud.
The bit that actually stuck with me, though, wasn’t any of that. It was watching him hit a question he genuinely didn’t know and just say so. “I don’t know,” shrug, wait for the next one. No panic, no going quiet. She just rephrased it or gave him a hint and kept moving, like it was the most normal thing in the world, which I suppose to her it is.
Once the questions to him were done, she turned to us. Was he toilet trained? Did he feed himself? A couple more like that. Nothing about our values, nothing about why we’d picked the school. Start to finish, the whole thing took twenty minutes, and we were back in the car park before I’d even properly worked out I was supposed to be nervous.
That’s honestly the part that stayed with me the longest. Standing in that fairly ordinary car park, my partner turned to me and said almost word for word what I was already thinking: he’s really grown up. Nothing to do with the interview anymore by that point. Just two parents standing next to the car having a moment about their kid.
If You’ve Got One of These Coming Up
I wouldn’t rehearse him within an inch of his life. She seemed to care more about how he handled getting stuck than whether he nailed every single thing. I also wouldn’t stress about the parent questions turning into some big conversation about values, ours were entirely practical, and if English isn’t the main language spoken at home, I wouldn’t assume that counts against him. Whatever he’s picked up at daycare clearly carries further than we gave it credit for.
Things Other Parents Have Asked Me Since
Do private preschools in Australia interview the child alone? Not alone — we were in the room the whole time — but almost everything is directed at the child, not at you.
Will they ask about toilet training and feeding? Ours did, briefly, right at the end. It felt like a standard readiness check rather than something you need to prepare a speech for.
Is it normal to get almost no notice between the tour and the interview? It varies by school, but a quick turnaround like ours didn’t seem unusual, especially when a school is trying to fill preschool spots before the older year levels open up.
What age is this kind of interview usually for? This one was for a preschool place. If you’re looking further ahead, our notes on Prep age cut-offs and how to apply cover the next stage up.
If you’re weighing up the private system more broadly, we’ve also written about what switching from public to private school was actually like and what private school actually costs for international student families.