Community guidelines

Most of what parents know about Hong Kong admissions never gets written down. It lives in group chats, and it stays there because writing it in public feels risky. These rules are what make writing it down safe enough to do.

They are short on purpose. Four rules, and a clear answer for what happens when one is broken.

Say what happened to you. Don't tell us who is bad.

No insults, no pile-ons, and no verdicts. "Avoid this school" is a verdict. "We were offered a place in March and still had no answer on the bus by August" is a thing that happened, and it's far more useful to the next parent anyway.

No names of teachers, principals, admissions officers, staff, children or other parents. Not even initials, and not "the head of the primary section" followed by enough detail to find them.

The same goes for a school you are writing about badly. Describe what happened without turning it into a named warning.

A person who is named here can't reply, and most of them are doing their job in a system that isn't entirely theirs either.

You can be honest about a hard experience without being unkind about the people in it.

There's a difference between "the interview felt rushed and we were out in 10 minutes" and "what a waste of an interview". One is information. The other is a mood, and it lands on whoever reads it next.

This is not the place to tell another parent they chose wrong, prepared wrong, or feel wrong about their child.

Some of us coach, some of us don't. Some send their child in with no notice, some spend months on it, and some have no choice at all. Every one of those parents is doing their best with what they've got, which includes what they can afford.

If you disagree with how someone else is doing admissions, this isn't the thread for it.

Every report is read by a person. A comment that breaks these rules is removed, and it stays removed. We do not put it back because the person who wrote it disagrees.

Removals are not silent. If your comment is removed it is still there for you when you are signed in, marked as removed, so you can see what happened rather than wondering where it went.

Breaking these rules repeatedly ends the account. That is a last resort, and it has to be reachable, because the alternative is a comment section nobody wants to read.

A display name here is a pseudonym generated from your account, like “Quiet Parent” or “Harbour Family”. It is stable, so the same person reads as the same voice every time. It is never your real name, and you cannot set it yourself.

You can also post as Anonymous parent instead. An anonymous comment is read by a person before it appears, because a comment with no name attached is the one most likely to need a second pair of eyes.

Signing in proves an account exists. It does not prove a child attends any particular school, and we never present it as if it does.

You can edit or delete anything you wrote, at any time, from the comment itself. Deleting removes the words, not just the visibility of them.

Editing sends the comment back for a quick read before it reappears. Without that, a published comment could be rewritten into a different one after the fact, and the review it went through would stop meaning anything.

Every comment written by somebody else has a Report button on it. Reporting needs an account, so the queue cannot be filled by a script, and you can only report the same comment once.

Reports are read by a person. Tell us what is wrong if there is more to it than the category, and that note helps more than you would think.

If you would rather write to a person directly, send me a note here.