Hi, we're Leonard and Wesley.
We've known each other since primary school, and we both grew up and went to school here in Brisbane.
Wes and I grew up in Asian families where education was a big deal, particularly achieving strong academic results. We're grateful for the education we received, but looking back at our own high school experiences, we know that school is about so much more than just getting good grades.
The friendships you make, the teachers who have an impact on you, and the opportunities you get through sport, music and social activities all help shape the person you become. Academic results are important, of course, especially when it comes to university entry, but there's so much about a school experience that can't be captured by NAPLAN or ATAR scores.
When I started looking into schools, I found it surprisingly difficult to get an honest picture of what the experience was actually like. The reviews I found online were often either overwhelmingly positive or negative, lacked credibility, or simply didn't have enough detail to be useful. So we decided to build School Insights ourselves, in the hope that it might help other parents going through the same process.
One thing we've been quite deliberate about is keeping our reviews as honest and unedited as possible. We pay reviewers a small amount for their time to write these in-depth reviews, not for what they say. We also verify that reviewers actually attended the school, whether that's asking for an old student ID, a photo of their senior jersey, or speaking with them in person. We leave their words as they are, including spelling mistakes and typos, unless something contains derogatory language or could identify someone personally.
You'll also notice that we don't rank schools, and that's intentional. We genuinely believe every school has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the school that's right for one child might not necessarily be right for another. I also come from a statistics background, so I'm very conscious of the limitations of drawing conclusions from a small number of reviews. Rather than assigning schools an arbitrary score or ranking, we'd much rather give you the information and let you form your own opinion.
I'm also a parent of a preschool-aged child, so this is something I think about personally. Even knowing the Brisbane school landscape reasonably well, I find it difficult to know which high school will eventually be the best fit for my own child. But I truly believe that you know your child best. Our hope is that what you read here helps you feel more confident about your decision, or at the very least, helps narrow down your choices.
School Insights is just the two of us, and everything we've built so far has been funded from our own savings. We have no outside investors, no affiliations with any particular school, and schools have no say in what we publish. We also won't use your personal details to send you spam.
We're still a small project, and we're always looking for ways to make School Insights more useful for parents. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, please reach out at hello@schoolinsights.com.au or send us a DM on Instagram. We check our inbox regularly and would genuinely love to hear from you.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and we hope School Insights makes your school search a little easier.
Leonard & Wesley
Co-founders, School Insights