For all systems, we should decide how many years of school are typical and at what age it begins and ends. Some governments mandate this so that it’s against the law to skip it; the parents are typically the ones responsible for ensuring it happens and the ones punished for refusing, not the child, but we don’t have to do that. The child could be punished instead. The problem with doing so is that children understand consequences less than adults, but if you had to complete your homework to get any food, you’d learn the lesson pretty quickly. We can be inventive with this. While that seems cruel, maybe an invented species of ours values self-reliance and isn’t above teaching hard lessons.
Are students expected to be separated from parents at any point in their education, living at a school or with a teacher (a boarding school)? This may be only on school days, through a semester or school year, or until graduation. Does segregation exist, such as by gender, species, race, ethnicity, social class, blood line, delinquency, or other elements? Does the school have facilities, such as dorms, gyms, libraries, labs, and other specialty rooms mingled with classrooms, in a separate building, or away from school altogether? These details mostly matter if we’re setting a story at school or a character has been impacted, such as not seeing their family for years. But we can also drop little details into stories, such as a wizard’s lab being crowded with students after school hours because it’s off campus, and now our wizard character must contend with people being in the way.
