P1 application season: a survival guide for parents losing their minds

I want to write something useful about Primary One applications in Hong Kong. But to do that, I first have to admit what I did during my daughter's P1 application year, which was to behave like a person who had temporarily lost contact with reality.

I researched seventeen schools. I attended four open days where I asked questions about "educational philosophy" while internally calculating proximity to MTR stations and alumni employment rates. I paid for interview preparation classes that taught my four-year-old how to sit up straight and say she enjoyed reading when her actual favourite activity was putting stickers on things. I cried in the car outside a school in Tai Po after our first rejection. My husband cried too, which shocked me, because I didn't know he had invested that much, and he didn't know he had either until that moment in the car park.

This is what P1 season does to sane, reasonable, financially literate people in Hong Kong. It turns them into a version of themselves they do not recognise.

Let me tell you what I know now, after doing this once and watching friends do it several more times.

The official channels are not the whole picture. The Hong Kong P1 allocation system has a balloting component, a proximity component, and a Christian/Catholic priority if you chose a church-affiliated school in the hope that God would give your child a head start. Many families take this route with a pragmatism that would impress the most hardened admissions consultant. The insider network at your church matters. The deacon who also happens to be on the school's parent committee matters. Hong Kong runs on relationships and P1 admissions is no exception.

The interview coaching industry is a racket, mostly. I say mostly because I know parents who swear by it, and I don't want to dismiss what worked for them. But the premise — that a four-year-old can be coached into being impressive — is both slightly absurd and slightly sad. The schools doing this kind of interview are looking for children who are alert and communicative, not children who have memorised the correct way to hold a pencil. My daughter, despite her sticker obsession, was perfectly fine in her interviews when she was allowed to just be herself. The sessions where she'd been prepared were the ones where she seemed strange and stiff.

You will make more applications than necessary. We applied to eleven schools. We needed one. The eleven-school strategy makes sense as insurance, but it also means eleven sets of administrative fees, eleven parent visits, and eleven rounds of hope and dread cycling through your nervous system. Think carefully about how many you actually want, not how many you think you should apply to.

The second school they attend will teach them just as much as the first. I know this sounds like something a person says when they don't get into the school they wanted. I'm saying it because I've watched enough children go through enough schools now to believe it. The P1 cohort my daughter didn't get into — I know children from it. They are not visibly more educated or well-adjusted than my daughter. They go to tutorial centres too. Some of them are more anxious than she is. The school brand is doing less work than we think.

The class WhatsApp group will begin immediately. This is perhaps the most important thing I can tell you. The moment your child is allocated a class, you will be added to a group with thirty other parents who will immediately begin competing in a different, subtler way. Someone will post about the curriculum enrichment books they've already bought. Someone will ask whether we should hire a class tutor to supplement the school's teaching. Someone will suggest a study group. This is when you decide what kind of parent you are going to be for the next six years. I recommend making that decision consciously.

What actually matters in P1. Your child needs to be able to sit for reasonable periods, listen to someone who isn't you, ask for help when confused, and not dissolve into crisis when they don't understand something immediately. These are the skills. Not Cantonese reading levels or correct pencil grip or knowing how to answer "what is your favourite book" in a way that sounds credible. If your child has the above four things, they are ready for P1 regardless of which school accepts them.

The application process will end. It will feel like a very long time while it's happening. It is not the beginning of your child's education; it is the administrative prologue to it. Keep that in perspective and you will get through it with your marriage, your sanity, and your relationship with your child intact.

I got through it. You will too.