Our story
We applied for JK and were turned down. A year later our child had K offers from St. George's and Collingwood. He was the same child both times — what changed was what we were able to say about him.
The year we got it wrong
We applied for Junior Kindergarten and did not get in. Not one offer.
We had assumed our half was paperwork. The assessment was where it would really be decided, we thought, because that was the part where they would actually meet him. That is not how it works. The written answers and the parent interview are weighed too — and ours were the weakest thing in the file.
What we had actually written
Reading it back afterwards is the part that still stings. We had written that he was kind, curious and never gave up. Every sentence was true and not one of them was about him.
Nine out of ten families write those same three words. An admissions reader sees them several hundred times a season, and by the fiftieth they have stopped meaning anything at all. We had handed over a form that could have described any four-year-old in the city.
The hard part was never the writing
It was the remembering. The application asks who your child is, and you sit there knowing a hundred small true things about him — and not one of them comes when it is called for.
What changed our answers the second time was one specific morning. A real thing that had happened, with a detail nobody else could have known. That is not a writing skill. It is a question problem, and questions are the thing that solves it.
We did it again, without a consultant
The second year we applied for Kindergarten. Offers from St. George's and Collingwood. No consultant — the quotes ran CA$3,000 to CA$10,000 and we could never see what we would be buying.
Several Vancouver schools now discourage consultant-written applications, and they are right to. An application written by somebody else is a false introduction, and the interview twenty minutes later will find it out.
What EarlyGuide does not do, and we would rather say so
The group assessment matters. Schools watch how a child shares, waits, joins in, recovers when something does not go their way — and we cannot help you with any of it.
That is not an application problem to be solved in an afternoon. It is parenting: the same things taught patiently, over years, long before anybody is being watched. Anyone who tells you a product fixes it is selling you something.
What we can help with is the part that really is a telling problem — the written questions, and walking into the parent interview knowing your own stories. That is what we got wrong the first year, and it is the whole of what this is for.