School and education

[Jerry_Atrick]

Well, my daughter elected to stay in England to complete her final year of secondary school. However, she elected to leave her private school and go to a state school to complete her A Levels (equivalent to HSC/VCE). Over here, it is only 3 subjects (optionally up to 5) and over 2 years, so it is 13 years in total. She had a chat with the headmaster of the grammar school in Melbourne and was impressed with the facilities, but the compulsion to do English didn't really appeal to her, and, she was ultimately going to be at a high school.

 

Over here, there are A-Level, oy Year 12 colleges. There is Lower and Upper Years, so it is really Year 13. They also house alternate final year qualifications. However, they operate as a half-way between high school (or secondary colleges) and university. The students select their subjects, they are given "class timetables", which are two or three per week per week and arranged in lecture/tutorial style. Outside that, they are free to come and go as they wish -soc much the same as a university. However, they do have more set homework such as essays and exercises, and they are closely monitored. Parents are only involved with the school if a student is performing poorly and not using their new-found freedom reasonably productively.  So, I am stuck here a little longer 😞.

 

BTW, she selected English Lit (so much for being forced to do English as a downer in Aus) as one of her subjects. Women! I will never understand them.

 

My son also went to this school as he found the private school did not meet his requirements, and I doubt a state school would have as well. However, one of the things one pays for a private school is to be far more flexible and accommodating and we found out the hard way, this was not really the case, and a local state school probably would have been better for him. What would have been best for him probably would have been some other form of schooling. He is incredibly intelligent, but incredibly unstructured. His private school house and biology teacher remarked my son was both the most intelligent and difficult kid to teach he has seen in his 20-odd year career.

 

So, for my son, an unstructured school, along the lines of the Finnish system would have worked well. Home schooling in our case probably wouldn't as I think the parents have to have the disposition, and, as OME mentioned, time. I can't say my partner has the disposition, and it is questionable whether I do... And without major life changes (which probably would have been for the better) I didn't have the time, and it is questionable if I even have the right disposition - esp. as older parents.

 

However, I think my daughter really gained from going to a private school. At the state school, she was a middle of the class student - not bright, and not dumb. She was well behaved. So, in those large classes of 30+ students, with a teacher and teaching assistant, she was given the minimum attention required and she plodded along. As the private school she went to had only 14 - 18 kids per class, with a teacher and teaching assistant, she was suddenly getting more attention, and as someone who reacts to praise in a meritocracy, she really blossomed. We had her down as an arty girl who would be a good administrator or something. After her first year, her maths teacher was very enthusiastic about my daughter's maths ability and I think it shocked her as much as us. Also, they noted she had a bit of an insecurity complex, which I think was helped by the state school not really recognising her. Going to the private school helped her overcome that, and she is in the main a confident young woman. Of course, well-funded state schools could offer much the same.

 

Kier Starmer, the Labour opposition leader, has recently put forward a policy that would see private schools lose their charitable status and therefore the fees be subject to VAT (GST, but 20%). That will tip a lot of students out of the private education system. When both of ours were in the private system, if we had to pay VAT on top, it may well have meant choosing only one to go in, of have both go out. Ideologically, it is the right thing to do (no government subsidies for private schools here), however, the government would have to invest much more than the 20% tax to adequately cover the increase in state school numbers that would result... And, given land is at a premium in urban and suburban areas in the UK, there is not much space to house the additional nippers.

 

 

Edited December 22, 2022 by Jerry_Atrick

[red750]

My three kids were brought up in Catholic schools. My wife was Catholic, and the kids had to go to a Catholic school. My sons went to a Catholic  boys secondary college, and my daughter to a Catholic co-ed secondary college. She is a much better carpenter than I am. Made some good stuff we still use more than 20 years later. She wanted to be a teacher, so went to Uni and got a Batchelor of Arts degree (qualifies you to flip burgers.) She did work experience as a teachers assistant, but was deemed unsatifactory because she couldn't control the kids. She says she couldn't work in an office, so has been a school crossing supervisor (lollypop lady) for twenty years. She was also carer for my mother-in-law, my wife, and to a lesser degree, for me.