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This book helps you make one of the hardest decisions you can take on behalf of your child. It deliberately doesn't tell you which private schools are the best in the country for exam success or rank the best for sport. It does not list the best headteachers nor frankly tell you 'the best' at anything.

What it does explain is why seeking out 'the best' for your child is one of the most unhelpful things you can do as a parent. It shows you where to focus your thoughts and what matters when evaluating different schools. You will see how marketing spin, league tables, awards and other unhelpful influences can get in the way. And it highlights the practical things which can make – or break – a choice of school. This book will tell you how to find the right school and be confident in that judgment.

By its very nature, education should be the process through which children have their eyes opened to the world. They get to see all the opportunities and possibilities which are available to them. Good teachers switch on light bulbs; they inspire and energise those in their care. This is vitally important in the primary years, when a child's thirst for knowledge is so strong. During this crucial time, your son or daughter will build the foundations from which to support all their subsequent learning – at senior school and beyond. Put simply, they will learn how to learn.

This book helps you make one of the hardest decisions you can take on behalf of your child. It deliberately doesn't tell you which private schools are the best in the country for exam success or rank the best for sport. It does not list the best headteachers nor frankly tell you 'the best' at anything.

This whole process has three partners: your child, the school and you. The trust you have in your child's school is a critical aspect in making it all work. It starts when you first choose the school and, like all relationships, you need to work at it by being active and engaged. During your child's journey through school, you will undoubtedly come across the occasional pothole in the road. Take the long view and trust in the school. Seek their advice and, above all, you need to remember why you chose it in the first place.

Let the school set the pace: weekends are for time together as a family, pursuing hobbies and interests. They are not for maths tutoring or an endless round of extra-curricular activities. Embrace the power of boredom. Your child (and the school) will thank you for it.

Nobody says it's easy being a parent. In most situations in life you use a combination of past experience and judgement to make a decision which, hopefully, turns out to be the right one. With schooling, past experience is a less useful ally as times have changed from when you set off each day, clutching a school bag. Some parents look back on their school days fondly and can easily critique the present as it doesn't match up to this rose-tinted nostalgia. Others have less favourable memories and this too can bring unhelpful comparisons.

This whole process has three partners: your child, the school and you. The trust you have in your child's school is a critical aspect in making it all work.

Whether we like it or not, our time at school is unhelpful baggage. We have to accept that it is not relevant when helping our own children, except perhaps as a source of amusing anecdotes. But even here you have to be careful – telling your child funny tales of how you avoided doing much sport at school will hardly inspire them to Olympic greatness. But better this than the parent who wants their child to make the 1st XV where they didn't; vicariously going back to school to re-write history is about as unhealthy as it gets.

There are few poems as oft-quoted as Larkin's This Be The Verse, not least for the impact of its opening line and the effect parents can have on their child. For me, however, the more damning sentence is the second: 'They may not mean to, but they do.'

Many years ago, I remember talking to a well-known prep school headmaster. Being somewhat new to the nuances of the education world, I put it to him that teaching prep school children represented a unique challenge. 'Oh no', was his instant response. 'You don't realise – educating the children is the easy bit. It's educating the parents, now that's the problem...

Perhaps the hardest part of parenting is knowing when to step back and be confident your child can handle a situation without your help.

This view might seem harsh but as parents we do need to check ourselves from time to time and ensure we are taking the best path. Of course, being a parent is the hardest challenge any adult will face so we cannot expect to get all the decisions right, all of the time. We need to be kind to ourselves and remember the old adage that a problem shared is a problem halved. And, of course, that's why sharing challenges with school – and working together in partnership so the messaging at home matches that at school – is so important for everyone.

Perhaps the hardest part of parenting is knowing when to step back and be confident your child can handle a situation without your help. Dr Tim Hands, the former Headmaster of Winchester College, summed it up neatly in an article for Attain, '...consider your child as a cake: you have provided the very special ingredients, and with great care you have selected the oven which will allow those ingredients to rise to a tasty perfection. Do not now ruin the cake by too frequent an opening of the oven door.' ¹

You know your remarkable child better than anyone. And you know what makes her or him happy. So you are already halfway to finding the right school: their happiness is the key to the whole process.