Disclaimer: yes, I have looked through the forums extensively and found a number of related threads, unfortunately many are 5-10 years old and don't help much in the moment.
tl;dr --- we're looking for school information in Kanton Zug for 2 girls entering the first and second year of kindergarten respectively.
Context : We currently live in Zurich and spent the last couple of years slowly building up our understanding of the city and school options. We ultimately came to the conclusion that "public school in Oberstrasse" or "bilingual school at d'insle montessori" were the right options for our kids (we ultimately went with bilingual at d'insle, but it was a very close decision). Our (way too early to actually matter) 'plan/hope' is that the girls will transition to a bilingual Gymi at the appropriate time.
We received a curveball in the last couple of days and it now appears highly likely that we will need to relocate to Zug in the very near future. The two big challenges that we perceive are (a) school and (b) apartment, in that priority order. And (a) will influence where we need to look for (b).
Question : What background/information/recommendations can people provide on (a) bilingual schools in Zug and (b) public schools in Zug?
Older posts seem to indicate that the Zug public schools are/were in trouble. Is that still the case?
We're also interested in any information/experience people have with the four forest school in zug.
Hi, I’m also following this with interest. We are currently in the UK and about to move to Switzerland likely Zug with husband’s job.
We have a 7 year old and a 5 year old. They speak no German but we are keen (if a bit nervous) to try them in a local school.
We looked around the 4 Forrest school and although we were very impressed with it we were concerned by its location in what appears to be an industrial estate and by the lack of outdoor space and facilities. Especially for the fees.
We have also looked at other international schools in the area and weren’t convinced.
Would be great to hear some other views on local schools in Zug.
What do you mean by the public schools are in trouble? Zug seems to be one of the few cantons that is not struggling with a teacher shortage, because they pay well. They may have some space issues, as all schools have at the moment in most cantons.
Four-forest is a private school. For public schools and kindergarten, it will be assigned to you/your kids based on your location.
There's plenty of info available how this works in this forum. However, most of it is in the education section, rather than this one.
Yes, you may want to choose a location based on the best public school, if you go down that route. Perhaps someone knows how to find a list of the best performing schools?
We are incredibly happy with our local school in Walchwil. Our daughter really loves it, but she was born here and grew up speaking german. That said, Walchwil has a very big expat community, so there are a lot of non german speaking kids and they are well catered for.
They don't do lists like that in Switzerland.
Yeah Swiss schooling doesn’t work that way.
Being in class with a bunch of bright bunnies with pushy parents is also not necessarily an advantage. In theory grading should be the same everywhere for the same standard. But in practice teachers are inevitably grading on a curve to some extent. So a school with a less intellectual cohort of kids might encourage your child to go to Gymnasium if they’re top of class, while if they’re just scraping into top 20% elsewhere they might recommend Sekondar.
But also bear in mind that Swiss schooling is more flexible than the UK and elsewhere. For example you can go initially to Sekondar and then do a “short Gymnasium”. This is better than going straight into Gymnasium and failing to keep up. Bad grades will result in being moved to Sekondar.
Local schools in Zug are well funded so plenty of private tuition for the language.
My oldest was 5 and a half when we landed here and didn’t take long for him to catch up with the others once he got some of the Swiss German under his belt.
You could always start the older one in private school and then move to the local one after a year or so when they have some level of German.
I would lean towards public schools in Zug as they are better in my opinion.I see a lot who transferred from private to my sons class take them time to switch from High German to Swiss German probably, not sure if the standard of teaching differs.