Frequently asked questions

Start with the stage your child is at, kindergarten, primary or secondary. Then narrow it down:

• Where, by district, or by walking distance from an MTR station
• Funding, Government, Aided, Direct Subsidy Scheme, Private or International
• Curriculum, HKDSE, IB, British, American and others
• Language, the medium of instruction, where a school publishes it. Most teach in English; some teach in French, German, Japanese or Korean; others teach bilingually or trilingually alongside Putonghua and Cantonese
• Hours, whole day or half day, at kindergarten

You can also tap an area on the map, or search by name. Search handles the punctuation Hong Kong school names are full of, so “st andrews” finds “ST ANDREW’S”.

One rule worth knowing: a filter narrows by what you chose, never by what a school failed to publish. Pick a district and the list really shrinks. But a school that has not published its fee still appears, marked as a gap, rather than quietly disappearing.

Language is the thinnest of these, and it is worth saying why: only 130 schools publish what they teach in, so that filter lifts the ones that have said rather than hiding the 2,195 that haven’t. A school running more than one stream counts for each of them, so the French International School is listed under French as well as English. A fuller picture of which local schools teach in Chinese and which in English is something I’m still working on.

The Hong Kong Education Bureau. HKSchoolPal carries its complete official register: 2,187 schools across all 18 districts: 997 kindergartens, 697 primary and 631 secondary. It is not a curated selection. Every registered school is here.

Names, addresses, sessions and funding types come from the Education Bureau’s school register. Kindergarten fees come from the Kindergarten Education Scheme profile, which publishes a real figure for 952 of the 997. Fee ranges, age ranges, photographs and contact details for international, Direct Subsidy Scheme and Private Independent schools come from the Bureau’s international schools directory.

Every school page names its source and the date it was checked, so you can verify anything we show.

We never invent a figure. Where a school has published nothing, the page says “Not published”. That is an honest answer, and it is the reason you can trust the numbers that are there.

You can search all 2,187 schools without an account. There is nothing to sign up for and no tracking.

Your shortlist is stored by your browser, on your own device. It never comes to me, I can’t see it, and clearing your browser data clears it.

If you join the beta list I keep what you enter on that form, and use it to tell you when the app opens and to ask what you think. I don’t sell your personal data.

The full detail is in the privacy policy, including how to ask for a copy of your data or have it deleted.

Tap the heart on any school. No account needed, and nothing to sign up for.

Signed out, your shortlist is stored by your browser on that device. Quick and private, but it won’t follow you to another phone, and clearing your browser data clears it. Sign in and it travels with you instead.

Either way, which schools you saved stays yours. Nobody else can see your list.

Encouragement, mostly. The hardest thing to find out about a school is what it is actually like, and the only people who know are the families already there.

If you have been through an admissions cycle, you have thoughts. Strong ones, probably formed at 11pm in a WhatsApp group. The leaderboard is a way of pointing them somewhere a stranger can find them.

Scoring is ten points for each published review, plus a point for each school you save, capped at ten. The weighting is deliberate: a save is one tap, a review is moderated writing about a named school. If they counted the same, this would be a heart-tapping contest by lunchtime.

You appear under a pseudonym, never your name. It shows how many schools you have saved and never which ones. In a city this size, naming six schools names the family. Reviews only count once a moderator has published them, so nobody can tell you reviewed a school while it is still waiting.

HKSchoolPal is built for the phone, and you can use it as one today. Open it in Safari or Chrome, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. It gets an icon and opens full screen, without the browser around it.

An iOS app is in progress, with Android to follow.

Me, Kanwal. A social scientist, a mum of two, and someone with no technical background whatsoever.

At 7 months pregnant I went looking for a whole-day kindergarten place for my son. There was no time and far too much information: untranslated government forms, contradictory advice across WhatsApp groups, and fee figures that turned out to be wrong. I found a place only because a friend had already visited the schools.

That’s the problem. The information is public, but getting to it depends on who you happen to know. HKSchoolPal exists so it doesn’t have to.

Reviews from families, what a school is actually like on an ordinary Tuesday, from the people who are there. Moderated, with a right of reply for schools.

Guides to the admissions routes: kindergarten, Primary One Admission, Direct Subsidy Scheme, private and international, in plain English. Plus an explainer on the whole system for families who have just arrived.

The iOS app, then Android.

Please tell me. Email [email protected] with the school name and what’s wrong, and I’ll check it against the Bureau’s own record and correct it.

Getting this right matters more than getting it fast. A wrong fee on a school page is worse than no fee at all.