I'd very much appreciate any advice/comments from anyone with experience moving their child from a Swiss public primary school back to a UK primary school.
We have one daughter (3.5 years old) and are considering a move to Switzerland due to a recent job offer. International private schooling is an option we are considering but it would be difficult to afford.
If our daughter attended a Swiss public primary school and after a few years, if we wished to return to the UK, how difficult might this transition might be? Is it even feasible?
What if we stayed much longer and our daughter was secondary school age, would transfer to a UK secondary school be feasible?
My daughter is 10. She has been in local German speaking education since for ever. If we were to move back now she would:
Have a solid understanding of maths. The process of learning maths here is very organised and step by step. They may do some subjects in maths later than others in the uk eg fractions they have only just touched on but no part is skimmed over and they repeat a lot of the work to ensure it is ingrained.
She went for paid for english reading and writing classes until she was 9 (one hour a week). She would probably need to brush up on some of the grammar but her reading and writing is fine. Spelling is ok but would be better if she were using the language in school. She does lots of home reading. her vocabulary would be broader if she were educated in English.
In German they do not do as much creative writing as I've seen in English schools.
She would be way ahead in the crochet/woodwork/needlework subjects. She uses a sewing machine, woodwork tools and an iron in school.
She would be used to doing gym(PE) 3 times a week but not team sports
She would be way ahead with French and German.
She would be behind in subjects such as science and history, especially the vocabulary.
She would be able to organise her own work and be able to get to school by herself.
She would not know what an assembly is or houses or team games.
What a chance to learn about different cultures and to have the ability to learn language the easy way.
If you go back earlier can't imagine it will have too much impact in the long run.
A friend was in the same senerio as you but child was 5 and started international and turned out an expensive lesson to learn as he paid up front for the year quit half way in and lost the remaining amount.
The reason he quit was his child was not learning the local language so was immensely frustrated as she could not easily play with the children in the street and the international school was a fair distance away.
They returned to the U.K. 2.5 years later, by then his daughter had the local language and German mastered.
He has had no problem what so ever in the UK and is paying for additional language lessons just to keep it up.
Flip it around and my daughter came here at 13 went local is now in her last year at 15 is tri-lingual - ride the first 6 months out and was fine.
She is now going on to great things in high education for 7 more years (hopefully)and it is relatively free in cost.
As they said above- kids cope so well- and it is much easier that way round than t'other, as there is more choice for GCSEs and especially a very narrow A'Level system in the UK (post 16- for those not 'au fait' with UK system (not Scotland) students only study 4 subjects for Year 12, and 3 for year 13- so extremely narrow syllabus- and can be totally non academic (eg Sport studies, art, It and business.... and 1000s and more combinations on the theme).
I see you are from Belfast- so is that the same in NI?
Our children were 8 and 10 when we moved to England. They could understand English but didn't speak it, could read it but not write it.
The younger one had just finished her first school year (at that time in Aargau, children started school at seven!) the elder one had had three years schooling. The younger child jumped from a first class to 'the middle of a third year' class! The elder from a third to the fifth.
It was not easy, especially for the younger child. It makes a difference if the children had been exposed to British culture while living here. Ours weren't. They knew no British history, little British Geography, didn't know maths terms in English. However, they were not shy and were good at sports and music, which helped them to integrate. The first six months were tough. Second year was great. Then we came back! We had, albeit on a lesser scale, similar experiences. The geography that they could still remember from the Aargau, pre-England, didn't include the names of the Churfirsten!
Going to the UK to school was a great experience for the children. They are glad they had the chance. The Debating Society at their school was brilliant and the skills they learned there stood them in good stead when they were later expected to stand up in front of 200 people and give a talk in Zürich!
Accentuate the positive but don't forget, there will be negative bits. There always are.
Hihi. perhaps been out of the UK a bit too long then. Lower 6th has been called Year 12 for quite a long time, and Upper 6th Year 13. And the system changed quite a long time ago- AS Levels were introduced- and yes, 4 subject taken in Year 12 for AS, then 1 is indeed dropped- so 3 subjects are taken in Year 13 for A'Levels (and as said, I was a 6th Form specialist, teacher and tutor, for many years before our fairly recent move).
At the same time as the last Year of compulsory schooling became Year 11 (I taught in the old O Level system too, before the English system moved to GCSE and the above).
Now will have to check with nieces and nephews who attend posh Public Schools- they might have opted not the change the terminology there.
I see, the education system has been dumbed down, S levels used to be better than A levels, now confusingly called an AS level but less than a A level.
The brightest kids got 4 A's at A level & 2 S '1s', of course almost everybody goes to 'University' now, most of those were mere polytechnics then.
Overall has education levels improved or declined in the last 40 years?
Perhaps open another thread for that- as it is becoming irrelevant to OP.
As a Mod Langs teacher, I'd say the current A'Levels are an awful lot better than the old ones, which were based on more and more obscure points of irrelevant grammar and classical literature. But for another thread.
S levels were single special 3 hours papers (at least in Physics, Chemistry and Maths) that were taken in conjunction with A levels for the really clever students- I have three . Four A-levels where one was General Studies was not uncommon. The system has changed since then. To ascertain whether education has improved or declined would require some sort of baseline. No government will ever agree to that!
For the OP. I know kids who've left Swiss school and gone on to study A-levels (AS levels?) and done fine. The only wrinkle would be moving to the UK age 6/7 - when other kids would have had 2 years of actual school, your daughter may have had only one. But kids adapt quite easily. Moving when she's 15 would be problematic as well.
I'm afraid my sister wouldn't agree with you. She teaches English in a lycee in France and says the teaching assistants she gets from the UK (university students in their third year of a French degree) have got progressively worse over the last 25 or so odd years. They can't speak the language properly and/or have no grasp of the grammar, so are not able to write it, and little comprehension of French culture. She puts it down to multi-choice questions in exams, no essay writing, no oral testing and your points above.
It's quite normal for lower 6th to be called year 12 and upper 6th to be called year 13.
When I did my A-levels, we just did 3 A-levels right through. But 5 years later when my sister was in Year 12, they did 4 AS levels, which they could continue at A-level in year 13 or drop one and continue 3 to A-level in year 13.
Anyone remember what this thread is supposed to be about? Three of the fourteen 'replies' so far have been on this theme. It looks like I am the only one who had experienced this move with their own childen - and mine weren't actually moving back to the UK. They had not lived there previously. To add to that, this was thirty years ago which means that quite a bit has probably changed. However, it seems the best we can come up with at the moment.
To add to what I said before - in spite of the transition difficulties (we parents had our problems in adapting too, although I was brought up in the UK and Mr L had once worked there for a couple of months) we don't regret having taken this step, and nor do our 'youngsters'. Being 'outsiders' who didn't know the ropes taught them to be tolerant of others in similar situations. Going to school in both countries taught them that there is more than one way of doing things. Not necessarily 'right' or 'wrong', just different.
To those who say that they know people who have done the move and the children had no problems at all - I wonder what the children themselves thought about it at the time. Just changing schools means losing your friends and your 'place in the class'. Changing country may mean that you are good at the 'wrong' sports, i.e. you are good with a ball but you don't know the rules of netball, you play a wooden recorder (as opposed to a much superior plastic one!!!) you don't know the songs sung at school (which everyone knows at your age!), you write 'all funny' and you don't want a dollop of mashed potato with your pizza like everyone else does (I kid you not). These are minor things but happen every day - and it helps a lot if Mum has time to listen to the odd tail of woe.
As I say, we don't regret it. It taught us all a lot. But it wasn't all roses.
I agree. It is not all roses, but gives the kids so many good things at the same time. And it won't be the same experience for all kids. Kids who are outgoing, flexible and have a good command of their mother tongue, will likely have an easier time than kids who are shy, like having a routine, or struggle with language. But kids do adjust, even the shy ones. Mine switched school systems and language at age 10 & 12, from Canada to here, they are doing fine (after the first 6 months). I don't really think it would be any more of an issue the other way around.
One of my daughters was 8 when we were back in the UK after being in a Swiss primary school. What I found was that the one subject that she was very behind in was maths. I remember that she had to have extra lessons to catch up.
The other subjects were not a problem and of course she was a fluent french speaker.
Experiencing another culture and language is worth 1000x more than a few months having to catch up. Our youngest (40 next week- yiiiikes) decided when she was 12 that she wanted to spend one term at school here- and stayed with friends. The Head at her secondary school was totally in favour, and so were all the other teachers- she did have to catch up in several subjects on her return- but she gained so much due to the experience and has never lost the French she learnt then (yep, with Neuchâtel accent lol).
Talking about being 'ahead' and 'behind' can be confusing. Most of the time it means behind ahead in a way, and behind in another = just different. Although it is true kids learn times tables and reading earlier than in CH.
I think it depends when you move them: when you move kids around age 7&8 they will be "behind" in maths and reading returning to England, because they work on these things much earlier than here. If you wait until age 11/12, they will be at around the same level again, as Swiss kids start later, but progress faster. At that point there will be other things that they might not have encountered in either system, as the emphasis is different. I have found that most kids adjust to those differences easily. The language is the biggest issue. If it is completely foreign to them, then that is quite a big hurdle, especially as kids get older.
In some ways it is probably easier on children to do the move now rather than thirty years ago. The English school our childen went to had, if I remember correctly, only one other child who was not English. When we came back, the children attended a village school where 'abroad' or 'foreign' was the next village down the valley. This meant, in both cases, that the teaching staff were not really accustomed to children who, though intelligent and quick to pick things up, had 'holes' in their knowledge. On the plus side, it had the advantage that our youngsters heard English (and German) as spoken by native speakers and didn't pick up grammatical mistakes from others whose language was not perfect.
If we were to put the clock back, with our present knowledge of the ups and downs, we would definitely do the same thing again.