Most classroom furniture fails at the joints, not the surfaces. When a procurement spec focuses only on tabletop finish and paint colour, it misses the four decisions that actually decide whether a desk survives ten years of daily use: frame gauge, weld quality, fastener type, and edge banding.
Start with the steel. A 1.6mm tubular frame will flex and eventually crack at the welds under the load a full classroom puts on it; 2mm is the floor for institutional use. Ask for the actual gauge in the spec, not just "heavy-duty steel", because that phrase means nothing on a tender.
Then look at how the frame is joined. Spot welds hidden inside the tube outlast bolted brackets that loosen every term. Finally, insist on 2mm PVC edge banding that is hot-pressed, not glued on — glued edges peel within a year in humid classrooms, and a peeled edge is where every desk starts to come apart.