The interview is the part of 13+ entry that parents can do least about — which is precisely why an industry has grown up promising to do something about it. Interview coaching, question banks, model answers, mock panels. Almost all of it rests on a misunderstanding of what the day is for, and some of it actively harms the children it is sold to.

Here is what senior school interviews actually assess, what the day typically involves, and the honest version of how to prepare — which is shorter and cheaper than the coached version.

Why the interview exists at all

By the time a child is interviewed, the school usually already holds their attainment data: the ISEB Common Pre-Test or the school's own assessment, a reference from the current school, sometimes a taster-day report. The interview is not there to re-measure what the tests measured. It exists to answer questions no adaptive test can touch:

  • What is this child actually interested in? Not what is on their CV — what makes them lean forward.
  • How do they think when they don't know the answer? Do they reason aloud, take a guess and test it, ask a clarifying question — or shut down?
  • Are they engaging with the person opposite them, or reciting at them?
  • Would they thrive here? Every school has a texture — pace, ethos, the kind of child who flourishes in it — and the interviewer is matching, not just ranking.

Notice what is absent from that list: knowledge, polish, extraordinary achievement. An interviewer does not need your child to have read Dostoevsky at twelve. They need to see what happens in a twelve-year-old's mind when it meets something interesting.

What the day usually involves

Formats vary by school, and any school's admissions office will describe its own — ask them, not the forums. But the common shapes:

  • A one-to-one or two-to-one conversation, typically twenty to forty minutes, with a senior member of staff. It opens gently — journey, school, weekend — and moves to interests, reading, and a few questions designed to stretch.
  • An open-ended stimulus. A picture, a poem, an object, a graph, a moral scenario, a puzzle. These have no right answer by design; the interviewer wants to watch a mind at work, and will often nudge — "what if it were the other way round?" — to see how the child responds to having their first idea disturbed.
  • Sometimes a group activity, especially at boarding schools: a small team task while staff watch who listens, who includes others, who can disagree pleasantly. This assesses exactly what it appears to assess, and it cannot be rehearsed.
  • Sometimes a parents' conversation in parallel — which is mostly the school answering your questions, and occasionally the school checking that the family's expectations and the school's reality are the same place.

Why coaching backfires

This deserves to be said plainly, because it is the single most useful thing a parent can know about interviews: a coached child interviews worse.

Interviewers meet hundreds of children. A rehearsed answer — the practised anecdote, the suspiciously fluent "why do you want to come here?" — is recognisable within seconds, partly because the same coaching services circulate the same model answers. And recognition is the better outcome. The worse one is what happens next: the interviewer, doing their ordinary job, asks a follow-up that leaves the script — and the child, who has been taught that there is a correct answer and that they possessed it a moment ago, freezes. A child who was never scripted would simply have thought aloud.

There is a deeper cost, too. Coaching teaches a child that the interview is a test with right answers and that their own actual thoughts are not good enough. That is exactly the posture that reads as flat in the room — and it is a miserable thing to teach a twelve-year-old about themselves in any case. Schools are not naive about this: many say explicitly in their admissions guidance that they can tell, and that they discount what they detect.

What genuine preparation looks like

None of this means "do nothing". It means the useful preparation is conversational, not curricular:

  • Talk at the table. The best interview practice is a family habit of real conversation — where the child's opinion is asked for, taken seriously, and pushed back on kindly. "Why do you think that?" over supper, a few times a week, does more than any mock interview.
  • Let them hold real interests — and go one layer deeper. A child who genuinely loves fishing, or Minecraft redstone, or the Romans, interviews beautifully on it. The depth is what shows. A child hastily equipped with an impressive-sounding interest interviews badly on it, because the second question exhausts it.
  • Practise being stuck, pleasantly. Puzzles, estimation games, "how would you work out…" questions — not for the answers, but to build the habit of saying "I'm not sure, but here's my thinking". That sentence, meant sincerely, is worth more in an interview than any fact.
  • Rehearse the logistics, not the answers. A dry run of the journey, what to wear, who they will meet, roughly how long it lasts. Certainty about the shape of the day frees a child to be themselves inside it.
  • Say the true thing the night before: the school is choosing whether it suits them as much as the reverse, nobody expects them to know everything, and being interested is the whole job.

One honest caveat: a child sitting a formal interview benefits from having met the format once — a single low-stakes conversation with an adult they know less well, a teacher or family friend, asking open questions. Once. The line between familiarisation and scripting is the line between confidence and coaching.

Nerves, shyness, and the child who isn't a performer

Parents of quiet children worry most about interview day, and mostly needlessly. Interviewers are professionally experienced with nervous twelve-year-olds; putting a child at ease is the first part of their craft, and they distinguish easily between shyness (warms up when a real interest is touched) and disengagement (doesn't). Schools are not selecting for extroversion — a reflective child who thinks before speaking is not at a disadvantage with a good interviewer, and good interviewers are what schools send.

If your child freezes under pressure more generally — in timed papers as well as conversations — that pattern is worth working on for its own sake, gently and well before exam season; we have written about it in the 11+ context in when a child freezes in timed conditions, and the principles carry.

The reassuring conclusion

The interview is the one part of the 13+ process that asks your child simply to be the person they already are, in conversation with an adult who is skilled at drawing that out. It rewards curiosity, honesty and thinking aloud; it penalises almost nothing except pretence. Which means the best preparation is years of ordinary richness — books around the house, conversations that take a child seriously, interests allowed to go deep — and the worst preparation is a script.

Nothing about that can be bought in a six-week package. Most of it is probably already happening at your table.

FAQ

What do senior schools assess in a 13+ interview?

Curiosity, how a child thinks aloud when a question stretches them, whether they engage genuinely with the person opposite, and whether the school judges the child would thrive there. Interviews are not oral exams: the pre-test has already measured attainment, and interviewers are explicitly not looking for polished, rehearsed answers.

Should I coach my child for a senior school interview?

No — and most schools say so directly. Interviewers meet hundreds of children and recognise a rehearsed answer within seconds; when a follow-up question leaves the script, a coached child often freezes, which reads worse than an honest fumble. Preparation should mean conversation practice and knowing their own interests, not memorised answers.

What questions come up in a 13+ interview?

Common ground includes the child's interests and reading, something they have enjoyed learning, and open questions with no right answer — a picture to respond to, a puzzle to reason through, a "what would you do if" scenario. Some schools include a short group activity to watch how children collaborate. The precise questions vary and matter far less than the manner of engagement.

What if my child is shy — will that count against them?

Interviewers are experienced with nervous twelve-year-olds and distinguish shyness from disengagement. A quiet child who warms up when their real interest is touched does fine. Schools want to see a genuine person, not a performer, and a good interviewer's first job is to put the child at ease.

Duke Harewood runs aitutors.me and has a daughter in Year 8. Updated 1 September 2026.