I Rejected Children Who Had Been Through Interview Coaching. Here's Why.

I want to be direct about something that the interview coaching industry would rather I not say: I could identify coached children, and I scored them down for it.

Not because I wanted to be cruel or contrarian. Because what the coaching produced was the opposite of what I was actually trying to assess.

What interview coaching looks like from the other side of the table

The coached child arrives with a set of rehearsed responses. This is immediately apparent from several features.

The latency is wrong. Genuine responses to genuine questions have a human processing delay — the child thinks for a moment, then answers. Coached responses have almost no latency. The answer is already queued. When you ask "what do you like to do?" and the child answers in under one second with a perfectly formed sentence, you are not hearing a preference. You are hearing a recording.

The specificity is wrong. A child who genuinely loves dinosaurs will tell you specific things about dinosaurs that nobody taught her to say. A child who has been coached to say she loves dinosaurs will say something like "I like dinosaurs because they are interesting and I like to learn about them." The coached version is grammatically superior and informationally empty.

The eye contact is wrong. Genuine children maintain eye contact in their own uneven, human way — they look away when thinking, they look back when interested, the pattern is irregular. Coached eye contact has been practised. It is steady and deliberate and feels like it's aimed at a point slightly behind my face.

What I was actually trying to assess

Readiness is not a curriculum. It is a developmental state. At three and a half, I was looking for: genuine curiosity about the world, the capacity to attend to a novel task and stay with it, the social rudimentary awareness that allows a child to function in a group, the beginnings of self-regulation, the ability to recover from a small difficulty without collapsing.

None of these can be coached in any meaningful sense. They either exist at a three-year-old's developmental level or they don't. They are products of environment, attachment, and the ordinary developmental process — not of six weeks of weekly coaching sessions.

The coaching cannot produce readiness. What it produces is a performance of readiness that is distinguishable from the real thing, at least to someone who has seen both as many times as I had.

The parents who spent the most money on coaching

These were often, paradoxically, the children who performed worst in the genuine assessment components. This makes sense when you understand what the coaching produces. A child who has been trained to give correct answers to expected questions loses something important: the tolerance for not knowing. The spontaneity that indicates genuine cognitive flexibility.

When I deviated from the expected assessment format — asked a question that wasn't in the coaching manual, introduced an unexpected task, responded with mild surprise to something the child said — the coached child often froze. The unexpected had not been prepared for, and unprepared territory was frightening because the entire preparation had been about covering expected territory.

The uncoached child who was simply ready — who had been read to, who had been allowed to play, whose parents had had real conversations with her about the world — that child was usually fine with unexpected. She was used to operating on her own.

What coaching does to the child

This is the part I actually care about most, more than its effect on my assessment.

The child who has been coached knows she is performing. Some of this is implicit — she doesn't consciously understand the dynamic — but the experience of six weeks of rehearsal communicates something to her about the stakes. About what is required. About the fact that who she naturally is may not be sufficient.

This is a damaging message to give a three-year-old before her first institutional experience. It sets up the frame for her entire educational career: you are not enough as you are; you need to be improved; performance is what matters; be ready to produce the right answer on demand.

What I recommend instead

Read to your child. Have real conversations. Play without an agenda. Let her be bored and figure out what to do about it. Take her to places where she encounters new things — the market, the park, a museum — and let her wonder about what she sees without immediately correcting her interpretations.

If she is ready, she will be ready. If she is not ready, six weeks of coaching will produce a brittle performance that any experienced assessor will recognise and that will cost the child more than it costs you.

The child who is genuinely ready is a pleasure to assess. You can feel her in the room. She is present, curious, responsive, and at some level — you can see it — enjoying herself.

That is what I was looking for. No coaching programme produces it.