Does anyone know how I can get the school stats for the area we live for things like exam results, Swiss Maturité results etc for public schools? Also are there any school inspections here, like the ones in the UK, where schools are rated according to a variety of KPI's?
I responded:
Does any other country do it like the UK?
I’m not aware of any myself.
The uk publishes school stats for exam results and schools are regularly inspected and ‘league tables’ of the best schools published.
They also have GCSE exams at age 16 where they study six, seven or eight subjects and A’ levels at age 18 where they specialise even further and study three or four subjects.
Does any other country has this system for education?
bowlie, in answer to your question, Australia does publish statistics and KPIs for school performance. I remember my folks relentlessly analysing stats before deciding where to send me.
I believe New Zealand publish their rankings too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/e...-indicate.html
I worked with Jon King directly, before he became the statewide education commissioner, and eventually replace Arne Duncan as Obama's Secretary of Education. He was a sh!t. He sent his kids to private schools, and worked with for profit charters, and was terrible for the state and the nation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...oing-to-court/
I'm not aware of this happening in Canada for high schools, but to be fair it might vary by province, and I've also not lived there for a long time so things might have changed...
On the other hand, there is a lot of performance data available for universities through the famous MacLean's magazine ranking , which I heavily relied upon when choosing where to study.
Sometimes kids are allocated at a school, despite living a long way away, and the kid next door to the school gets allocated place a long way away. To my mind, the Swiss way is much better and fairer, and makes much more sense.
There are also many private schools, and religious schools- making things even more difficult. In the last small town where I taught- there were 3 secondaries, with 6th Forms (for A'Levels- age 16-18). An expensive, selective, Grammar school, a Catholic school, and a Comprehensive School which took in the rest (my school). As it was a University town, we had most of the academic staff children, many Bengali students from very under-privileged homes where parents didn't speak English, or could read or write, and the children from the local Council Estate, with many families in all sorts of difficulties, and many 'special needs' children. The 'creaming off' by the Grammar school and the Catholic school, concentrated problems in our school.
In Ireland applications for third level education is don centrally so students only make a single application indicating their preference in topics and institutions.
The question of testing and ranking is less relevant.
Belgium is more like the UK in that respect or at least Wallonia is, I have no idea if it’s the same in Flanders.
Kids can start ‘school’ on the day that they turn two and a half if the choose although school is not actually obligatory until the year in which they turn six.
Parents can choose which school they send their kids to and it doesn’t even have to be in their commune of residence. Communal schools have an obligation to accept all kids who apply and if necessary open up extra classes to accommodate them but the Catholic schools and private schools don’t have that obligation and can refuse admission if they are full.
I went to visit four schools near where we lived when my son was ready to start school and chose one that I liked the feel of and which I knew other parents were happy with. It wasn’t in our commune and it wasn’t the nearest to where we lived but it was probably actually nearer that’s the nearest school in our commune.
The schools are very flexible and I chose to only send him to school in the mornings initially as he was only three and the kids had a nap in the afte4noins anyway which he no longer did.
Parents can also change schools at any time during the primary years. One of my friends moved her kids three times.
For secondary school which they move onto at age 11 there is also free choice but it is also much more difficult as there is fierce competition to get a place in the ‘better’ schools. There is no centralised system so parents have to apply to the schools directly once registration opens and it’s every man for himself. Priority is given to kids who live locally or at least in the same commune. The kids also have to have the primary leaving certificate to be admitted but they don’t know whether they have achieved that during the application process although most of them would have a fairly good idea. Of my son’s class only one pupil failed to receive it.
We left to move to Switzerland before secondary so we didn’t have to go through that procedure.
No, in Australia, if you attend a state-provided school, you must attend the one which is located in your catchment area, i.e. where you live.
The only way around it is if you choose to put your child in private school instead (which is usually a religious one).
I believe the case can be made to change schools from your catchment area only in extenuating circumstances, for example a documented history of bullying
My nephews in the north of England went to the primary school for their catchment area which was near to where they live. Same for my cousins and their kids.
For secondary they could choose one if the two secondary schools which served their area.
It was slightly different for our granddaughter in Essex. She went to the primary school for their catchment area which was just around the corner from their house but for secondary she had give a list of three secondary schools in order of preference and she was allocated a place at one of those. She got a place at her second choice.
For the grandkids in East Sussex only three of them are at school so far and all three of them go to their local school where they were assigned places, there was no application procedure or fight for places.
It obviously varies widely depending on where you are even in the UK.
I believe for secondary schools (sometimes referred to as middle schools) this can also be the case in Switzerland. In areas served by more than one secondary school the kids can choose an order of preference but aren’t guaranteed to be placed in their preferred option. A friend’s daughter in Basel was allocated a place in her second choice school.
Since education is a cantonal domain this will obviously differ depending on where you are.
This is actually less an issue than what it may seem, because the choice of high school or uni is mostly based on what one wants to do (or is forced to do!) and much less on the alleged "quality" of the institutes. So the typical choice is between the closest technical school or the closest gymi, not between two technical schools based on their rankings.
There are of course private schools, mostly associated with church, and private unis, but they don't necessarily provide better quality (to be generous...).
There are also schools with very bad reputation but they are mostly associated with their education level - you won't find a disaster gymi, while you could easily find two bad professional schools in the same area, because that's where problematic youngs go (sorry to say, it's probably a whole separate discussion).
Overall I always went to public schools, from kindergarten to PhD, and the close-by offer was always of good/high quality.
Maybe sometimes, but it's also a source of income for kindergartens where offer is X and local demand is Y < X...
However starting from regular school (age 6) this is rarely an issue, class composition is more flexible and there is rarely the need to exclude anyone. Non-existing in high school... in my gymi the number of classes could vary from 6 to 13 each year depending on the number of subscriptions, each class with 20 to 30 students.
Of course the extra classes will get temporary teachers, most of them move yearly or monthly and don't have a permanent contract, this has an obvious impact on quality but somehow they often manage to stay "above threshold".
So in some towns you might have two or three options, where as in other places you might have only one.
When it comes to second level, people regardless of religion tend to favour schools previously run by the various religious orders. The orders are mostly gone but the facilities remain and they are often better than the newer state schools. Back in the day, the religious orders plowed most of their salaries back into the schools, so you often find the have more play fields, bigger gyms, more labs and so on.