Media personality Carol Ofori and her husband Greg have launched Ratings For Schools – an exciting new nationwide school finding platform that offers parents, students and educators the opportunity to find schools based on their individual needs.
According to a statement issued by the couple’s publicists on Wednesday (12 January), the platform’s goal is to “assist parents across the country by making the process of finding the right school for their children simpler than ever before.”
How Ratings For Schools works
Ratings For Schools is free to use and parents can use it to find schools from creche to high school level. It aims to work with schools across the country to help them foster partnerships and strengthen their service offerings.
Additionally, the platform seeks to build an ecosystem of schools that can network in the hopes of encouraging peer-based partnerships and competitive pricing.
Parents can find the perfect fit for their child based on their budget, location and other features like aftercare and holiday care, extramural activities, sports offered and the school’s facilities.
The platform also shares details on the school’s curriculum, government registration status and fee structure, ensuring parents have all the information they need. Users can compare their schools of interest at a glance to help make the right decision when enrolling their children.
Ratings for Schools aims to provide users with trustworthy information about schools. Reviews are provided for by like-minded users through feedback from actual experiences. Schools are provided with the tools they need to drive their brand and image growth on the platform. They are encouraged to engage with users and participate in mutually beneficial campaigns.
How idea came about
The platform’s idea came to life after parents Greg and Carol Ofori relocated to Durban in the middle of the pandemic and had to enrol their children in a new school. The process proved incredibly difficult since information about schools was scarce and scattered. In a conversation, the couple discussed how effective it would be to have a platform that allowed parents to find and compare schools in their communities based on fees, facilities and other unique features.
An inspired Greg subsequently collected information on over 2,000 schools around the country. He consolidated the data on a centralised school-finding platform complete with intuitive and detailed search functionality. The result was a free-to-use, user-friendly platform set to connect parents and schools in a way never seen before in South Africa.
“Being a parent and having gone through the experience of finding a suitable school for both our children, I realised how daunting the task could be. The process should be simple and straightforward, but sadly, it isn’t,” Greg explains.
“We decided to create a platform where parents can find the ideal school for their children by finding schools based on their most important criteria. At the same time, we wanted to provide schools with an equal opportunity to be discovered by the people who live within those communities.”
Carol adds, “I wish ratingsforschools.co.za was available when I relocated to Durban last year because finding a new school in a new city can be so daunting. I am so excited that parents and guardians can now go to a website and find exactly what school they are looking for.”