Private school interview questions are more predictable than parents expect. Nearly every interview draws from the same core set about your child’s life, school experience, interests, and hopes, and not one of them has a right answer. I asked versions of these questions across twenty years of admissions interviews, and every one is a door, not a test item: the interviewer isn’t scoring what comes through it, they’re hoping a real kid does. This page decodes the set, what each question is actually asking, so you can prepare your child without scripting them.
What are private school interviewers really asking?
The decode principle. Behind every question on this page sits the same real question: who are you, and what’s it like to talk with you? “Tell me about yourself” isn’t requesting a résumé. One true sentence (“I really like figuring out how things work”) beats a list of activities. “Why do you want to come here?” isn’t testing research. It’s listening for whether any honest reason exists. Once you hear the questions this way, preparing your child stops meaning “better answers” and starts meaning “more comfortable truth.”
What questions are asked in a private school interview?
The four families of questions. About your child (yourself, your family, your friends); about school (favorite subject, least favorite, a teacher they’d remember); about interests (what they do outside class, a book they’ve read, what they’d change about the world); and, the part kids don’t expect, their questions for the interviewer, where genuine curiosity (“what do kids do at lunch?”) outscores anything clever. Each family, and the fifteen most common questions inside them, gets a full decode in the articles below.
Are there trick questions in a private school interview?
The ones parents worry about are the safest. “What’s your least favorite subject?” is not a trap: “math isn’t my favorite, but I’m getting better” sounds honest and self-aware, while a kid who claims to love everything sounds coached. “What would you change about the world?” rewards the simple and believable over the profound. One steer worth knowing on the interests questions: enthusiasm is the asset, and the subject almost doesn’t matter. With one exception: “I play video games” is not what a school wants to hear. If that’s your child’s honest first answer, reach for the next true thing. The sport, the project, the series they can’t put down, and aim the enthusiasm there.
How do you prepare a child for interview questions without scripting?
How to prepare without scripting. Scripts collapse on the first follow-up, and a child reciting isn’t in the conversation. Instead: talk through the question families conversationally, teach the two habits that cover almost everything: “yes, and” for expanding a true answer, “let me think about that for a second” for the blank moment, and stop when your child can handle the families comfortably, not perfectly. About a paragraph out loud is the right size for any answer: the answer, one reason or example, then stop.