views on education in other countries

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I wondered about education systems in other countries and what people thought of them. Which ones seem to get it right ? How is further education funded? What hours are children educated?

It's all about hours of pracitce in the main :) so doesn't surprise me.

Alright then scaryteacher - what I mean is, if my son is as thick as mince, I'd rather he did a few courses in brick-laying and electrics than do "A-levels"!

Anecdotal but a G&T inspector I was talking to said that the Finnish system ranks highly in international comparisons because they bring ALL the kids up to a certain level BUT there is no capacity to let high fliers shine - little or no differentiation....

Out of interest

How do other countries deal with "choice" in schools?
Here in England it has created rising schools and sink schools
(with the distortion in London that there are just not enough places)
I know in the US you take the school district you live in or move.
How do other countries do it?

The French system is designed to be fully comprehensive (no streaming) from age 3 to age 15. Thereafter, it becomes increasingly selective.

The system does not serve high-fliers well at all. Nor does it serve low achievers well.

In Belgium you can apply to any school you like. They apply some complicated algorithm that gives points for how close the primary school is to the secondary school and how close you live to the secondary school. The "best" schools mean you need as many points as you can get. The "worst" schools will end up with unfilled places. At this moment in time, they don't select on ability - as far as I know. But you need to pass an exam at the end of Primary. You might also need to go down several days early and camp outside your school of choice ........

There is no real private sector here - only for expats in international schools. Even the Royal Family send their children to state schools. There is an academic and a techincal stream. Some schools cover both, some do one or the other. Education is compulsory until 18. The academic track normally includes studying Latin and Greek for several years. The technical track could involve bricklaying, or business studies. After 16, it is permitted to do vocational training alongside education.

One of the complicating factors in Australia is that each state has a different system, including different starting ages. They are trying to bring in a national curriculum at the moment. State schools in Australia struggle with funding, class sizes, ageing (and worn out) teachers. There is quite a drift to the private sector across Australia.
As part of the drive to stave off the financial crisis (by employing builders), every school in Australia got a shiny new building in the last year or so.

I am from Germany and wanted to say something about sorting the students. I have to say that I now agree that it seems really early and disadvantages some students.

When I was a student myself, however, I was happy to be separated from the 'slow' kids, who held us back in primary school, who never did their homework and so on. I think a streaming system like I am experiencing in Scotland right now would have helped me, and I would have felt less resentful against 'slow student'. I know this sounds mean, but it was just my experience in primary school.

So I feel that till a proper streaming system would be established the separation system shouldn't stop.

Things I also didn't like were the (lack of) proper special needs provisions. Inclusion seems way less usual and teachers don't receive as much training it seems. In addition to that we don't usually have TAs, making it difficult to help students individually (and streaming, actually). I feel that TAs are amazing and very important.

I do think it's better that we don't have to specialise as much as British students though. I don't like the idea of GCSEs and A-Levels at all and think the requirements should be stricter and more subjects should be studied. I really value the broad education I received, even in the subjects I didn't like.

I went to school in Switzerland, where the system is very similar to the German one (at least it was at the time - haven't been there in years now); I agree with much of what WannaBe has said about her experience.

IMO it is indeed the case that there are huge advantages to teaching a broad range of subjects rather than specialisation early on. The level of education in non-familiar subjects that I encounter in people who have essentially opted out of the areas they found difficult is shocking at times. I used to work with a manager who had a good degree in a modern language but was completely unable to work out by herself how to determine the amount of VAT included in a given total. I am also completely appalled at a historian not understanding what the basic claims of evolution are etc.

That having been said: the (private) school I went to was a torture factory. Our headmaster was a high ranking officer in the army and never stopped reminding us that we were the future intellectual elite of the country and that anything less than the equivalent of a B was just not acceptable and damaged the school's reputation. The man was basically the best argument against compulsory military service anybody could possibly think of, and was completely unable to tell the difference between classroom and barracks. From what I see and hear I don't think any school in the UK would be able to get away with the amount of verbal abuse and pressure that we were subjected to.

My children had a term in a highly rated school in New York, and now almost three years in Canada (BC).

The school in New York was academically excellent (including separate teachers and rooms for science, art and maths) but seriously pushed the children, with extra classes after school for any child they thought was struggling and a fair bit of pressure to go to Saturday morning school too. Plus lots of leaflets about summer school as well. They also had two hours of homework every night (at 8 and 9). Apparently that wasn't unusual for the area, and was partly caused by a very strong 'No Child Left Behind' agenda.

The Canadian school couldn't be more different. Very relaxed, no homework, and lots of emphasis on sports, music and 'getting on with each other' type stuff (which I really appreciate as ds was bullied in NYC and it wasn't picked up at all). Both my children seem to be doing very well.

We don't know very much about high school yet (they start at 13 here) except that all the subjects are taught in blocks, so you do three or four subjects for six week periods. There also seems to be lots of options in the later years, with academic children able to take university courses and vocationally driven children able to take trade courses and apprenticeships alongside school subjects.

In Aus around 30% of children go to private schools which I think is rather unusual? Private shcools here are incredibly wealthy. A private boys school near me just spent AU$100 million on a new pool/gym complex.

In public schools a child is garaunteed a place if they live within the catchment area, so schools tend to vary depending on the socio-economic make-up of their catchment.

Overall I think Australia tends to compare favourably - it always seems to be right up there in those quality of living rankings, but there are huge variations. Lots of rural areas are so remote that it's impossible to get teachers to go there. Rural students tend to be behind thier city counterparts by about a year I think.

I think School-of-the-Air is a rather unusual Australian feature. You do school over a radio if you live too far away.

As someone mentioned earlier, if you do a history degree here you have no chance of working in a profession. To work in a bank you have to study commerce or economics etc

We are in Switzerland and it's totally different from the UK system but we are trying it and so far happy with it. Our older daughter is in the first year of primary school after 2 years of kindergarten. It is only now she is being taught to read, here they believe it is important for young children to learn through playing, acquire social competences etc. I was really skeptical about this having learnt to read at 4 but they believe children have to be ready to learn to read. It does seem that she is learning incredibly quickly now and is very engaged and enjoying it.

I live outside the UK and have the choice of sending my children to a British school but choose not to. I find the British system focusses so hard on quantifiable results, often to the detriment of a child's education; the school looks great but the child is disillusioned or bored.

Instead my children go to an IB school where the focus is on learning. It's quite a progressive system and I am a huge fan. It works brilliantly for my daughter, whereas the British system didn't really. I feel very lucky I have been able to make this choice.

bugster - my dd went from zero to chapter books in Primary One - it was positively scary the speed they learnt. Brains more ready for it maybe?

I did read somewhere that countries where primary education starts earlier have higher rates of dyslexia. I have no idea if this is true or not...

putrifyno was your daughter also in Switzerland? Yes i think it could be that their brains just are more ready for it. I have certainly got to know a lot of 4 year olds who are nowhere near ready for it here, but maybe pre-school in England helps them learn some pre-readinfg skills. I was prettu shocked a couple of months ago when my English godson, only just 4, could write his name really neatly with capital and lower case letters.

In France children also go from zero reading to chapter books in the first year of primary; what I don't like about the lateness and speed of acquiring decoding (reading) skills in France is that they aren't accompanied by the consolidation of encoding (spelling) that lots of reading at the same level does, the English way.

My DD was taught to read very slowly in English, over a long time, whereas she was taught to read fast and furiously in French. The end result is that her reading skills are today slightly better than in English (in that she can read long words faster) but she enjoys reading in English a lot more because she can "sight read" many more words, and her writing skills are way ahead in English.

I confess that one of the reasons we left Australia when we did was concern over the education system in Queensland. Our DSs would have almost certainly have gone private (as someone said, the private schools educate 30%+ of the population, which translates as 'fewer in the country, many more in middle class suburban/city areas') BUT of the six 'local' private schools on offer on the Sunshine Coast, all were of a religious persuasion: Two Christian Fundamentalist (Creationism, the myth of evolution/fossils are the work of the devil), the inevitable Catholic, an Anglican (usually the most expensive), a Lutheran and a Methodist. Oh, and not far away, an obscure Indian Sect/hippy school.

The local state highs were overcrowded and suffering from the social problems that happen when you 'cream off' the middle class kids. A friend is sending her DD to one of the better state highs, on the Music Programme (as opposed to the -I kid you not- 'Surfing Programme'). The entry requirement for Music? Having played a musical instrument in primary. No grade or level required.

A principle issue for us was also the emphasis on sport. All the glittering prizes appear to go to kids who are good at sport rather than good at science. Another friend told me it reminded her of 1950s white South Africa!

Here, in the UK, whilst I concede we are fortunate to have been able to buy into the catchment of excellent state schools, I am pleased with the education my DSs are getting. I think that here we are good at 'doing ourselves down' whereas some countries cannot endure any criticism of their way of doing things, hence you will always hear, in those 'Relocate to the Sun' TV shows featuring Oz that 'the education system is excellent'.

Not necessarily.

"The local state highs were overcrowded and suffering from the social problems that happen when you 'cream off' the middle class kids."

The "creaming effect" is also very high in France now.

bonsoir not sure I'm completely up to scratch on decoding and encoding, but my daughter is learning writing and reading at exactly the same time. She learns letters and the connected sounds and facial expressions, and then she has to read letters using those sounds, and write dictated words using them.

I agree that that is the method, but it is not nearly as efficient as the English method of learning to read very slowly, whereby you see a lot more printed words because you have read a much greater volume between the start point and the end point, IYSWIM.

erebus
out of interest - which was your primary?
I know your secondary and you know mine. :-)

Do you mean here in the UK or in Oz, Talkinpeace2

Here, it's KW.

Erebus
Here
KW makes sense
the catchment boundaries for MB are surreal and those for Th are political
but at least we KNOW where they are from the HCC web site
far better than the poor souls stuck with the London rigmarole

Loads of differentiation in Ireland Indigo. Where did you get that notion from?

Talkin

I didn't know MB's catchment 'meant' anything, tbh. I know of DCs from all over who go there! Thing is, Romsey is a relatively small, rural town with a lot of rural villages in potential catchments (And Kings, Winch, is similar- Romsey kids frequently get in there, too as most of Kings' catchment is fields!). Th has a solid suburban catchment, like, say, Westgate in Winch. So it stands to reason that the boundaries would be more likely to come in to play. So I'm not entirely sure what you mean by Th catchment being 'political' (a genuine question, not an invitation to a scrap!). It follows well circumscribed boundaries but they are set (and moved) according to the number of possible intake DCs, thus the south end of my otherwise homogeneous estate, is no longer 'in' whereas it was a few years ago.

Fwiw, I know looking at the 'catchment map' for Kings and Westgate, one village is 'in', the next is out, but not necessarily in a straight geographical line! Is that what you mean by 'surreal'?

Sorry for the OP hijack!

Erebus
Mountbatten Catchment : www3.hants.gov.uk/schooldetails?dfes=4015#catchment
Westgate : www3.hants.gov.uk/schooldetails?dfes=4012#catchment
Kings : www3.hants.gov.uk/schooldetails?dfes=4310#catchment
we may have fab schools round here but boy oh boy are the catchments a dogs dinner!

Which, to tie back to the thread
makes a bit of a mockery of the idea of "local schools".
Once the new Oasis building opens, the kids who live outside its gate will get a free bus to Mountbatten 4 miles away because the catchment / LEA boundary runs down the middle of the road : surreal huh!