ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the main findings from the questionnaire survey. It reviews how families go about making a choice of a new school in terms of who is involved in the choice, where they obtain information from, and how they go about it. The chapter looks at the respondents’ ratings of the importance of the 73 reasons for choosing a school, dividing these reasons into four groups of decreasing overall relevance to choice, from very important to not important. It also looks at the correlations between these ratings to establish which of them are significantly covariant. The ratings are reduced, by principal components analysis, to seven underlying factors, which are used to explain the patterned variance in the majority of the reasons for choice. For most respondents, the most significant source of information used in making a choice about schools is a personal acquaintance, whether another parent, or a child at the school.
