My friend's kids are 10 and 6 years old, bilingual (French and English). The family's thinking about relocating for good, but would also prefer, if possible, to have some insurance (if they dislike life here so much that they decide to go back in a few years) in terms of kids keeping their English and learning more. The current discussion is focused on choice between Champittet and a public school in a good neighborhood. My friend does not consider international schools, she thinks that many students there are transitory.
Ok, here is my understanding of the pros and cons for private vs public school:
Location:
Public schools win. They are everywhere, including nice places, kids can just walk to school with their friends vs. being driven every day by an adult.
Time management:
Public schools have very unusual and very inconvenient (from the point of view of working parents) lunch break from 11:30am to 2 pm. The school ends before 4pm. Very few public schools have any facilities for the students to stay at school during the break. Full time jobs for both parents are out of question without additional help.
Private schools almost always have their students full time from 8am to 3 pm, and often full day until 5-6pm.
Private schools seem to be winning, yet there are a couple of things that we have to keep in mind. First, for 1/4 of a calendar year kids do not go to school at all, so that time is a problem for parents of either private or public schools' students. Second, tuition fee per student in a private school is 15K-25K+. Parents can send their kids to public school but find an au pair to take care of the lunch break and early home coming for kids. It seems especially better financially for the families with many kids. So there is no clear winner in this category.
Money: public schools win almost always :-)) They are free (almost) !!!
Diplomas:
Swiss schools usually provide only Swiss maturite (?), private schools have all the spectrum from IB to British degrees, etc. This is might be the main advantage of private schools. I do not know how difficult is to apply (and be admitted to Oxford, say, or Yale, when one has Swiss maturite vs IB.
Classmates:
I would assume that a public school in a nice area w/out many low-income housing would have majority of Swiss kids + some reasonable fraction of foreigners. Not that I have something against low income housing, although I certainly do not like bad areas. Anyway, only nice areas are under consideration. Most of the Swiss kids could be expected to stay in the school in the future, this is really good for someone who wants to settle down, so their kids get friends possibly for life.
Private schools aka Champittet: I do not know much about them. Champittet has been purely French school until recently, so it could not have many English-speaking expat children. The tuition is quite high, so it could be posh and snobbery. My take would be that Champittet has kids of prosperous Swiss who could afford 25K tuition and like the school for the status, networking opps and, perhaps, quality of the education there. My friend does not care much about status, would really prefer something not posh, but certainly wants all the educational things possible.
So here we finally come to the most important point. It is also where I am confused the most.
Quality of teaching:
I assume for the ease of presentation (:-)) that the initial IQs of kids that go to public and private schools are the same.
Public schools, as I understand, provide fairly solid education. My kids thrive in public school, even without French. They loved it from the first day and would go there even on weekends, if they could. But they are still small and this is my biased idiosyncratic experience.
At some point (5th or 6th grade, not relevant for me now, but very important for my friend, her son is 10) public school splits into gymnasium track and non-gymnasium. Let's call these two groups of students pubA and pubB, pubA going to gymnasium to get Swiss maturite and later go an university. If your kids made it to pubA, then she/he is OK. For kids who did not make it into pubA the road is less clear. If their parents are ambitious and can afford it, they will direct the kids, yes!, to private school to get maturite anyway.
Private school: until some pubB come, the contingent of the private school should not be very different from the public school (we agreed they have the same original mixture of IQs). Perhaps, because kids spend more time at school, have smaller classes and more attention from the teachers, their education by year 5 could be better than in public school. Suppose that their level on average is higher than pubA, and if they had the same separation procedure as in public schools, only the bottom third would not make it to the gymnasium. Let's call them privB. The thing is that in the following years, privB do not study separately from privA, the classes in private schools will still have privB together with privA, and also some pub. So although privA could be better than pubA, overall class level in private schools might be well lower than pubA.
Unless, of course, the difference in teaching level in public and private schools is such tremendous that all of the students in private schools are becoming completely brilliant by year 5th and would make it to the gymnasium (and university) even in public school. Then why don’t they all go to public schools and save money?
Miss Kitty
PS Those who made it to the end of my note, thank you very much for your patience! If you have any comments, or can point to any important factors that I’ve missed or just explain to me what I did not understand about schools in Switzerland, you will be very much appreciated.
Thanks!