Hi all,

I know Tracy, you won't be very happy about what I am going to write but I never really understand at 100% why private schools are so popular in Geneva.

The public school is good quality in Switzerland and free for the children !!! The idea for a swiss person like me is that if you pay for a private school, you pay for your kids to have good records at school. Later on, your kids can have serious issues to enter university for example.

As a swiss, I can only tell you, trust the public school in Switzerland ! Trust even more the public school if you know that you are staying long term in Switzerland !!!  "Private school" are not respected over here and especially on a CV.

For people, speaking other languages at home, there are lots of russian, italian, portuguese, spanish, english school that the kids can follow after the public school in order to learn better their culture.

Sorry Tracy, it is not personnal, but I think it is important to highlight the quality of the public school in Switzerland compare to private schools.

Thank you a lot for reading me  

Thanks for the reply and no hard feelings at all. You are certainly welcome to your opinion and it is true that the Swiss public schools are generally very good and better than many found in other countrries. My two children are currently in the local system and my Swiss husband is a graduate of the Swiss public system. As with any public system, however, the classes tend to be fairly large and individualised attention hard to obtain. Also, I find I am struggling a bit with the structuration of the Swiss system which I believe tends to pigeonhole kids unfairly according to early-level performances. Admittedly other places like the US, can be considered too lax, allowing students to jump all over the place in their studies, following whims so they never gain true mastery in anything but I just can't see trying to streamline a child's career path from the age of 6 - which is what I feel happens here! Grades obtained at 1 P effect the choices that will be available at the Cycle level etc. A last complaint about the current public school is the teaching method used. This may be specific to our school but I find it a problem when the adults have to puzzle over the homework of a 7 year old for more than 10 minutes to figure out what the task/point actually is! And we are talking about native French spearkers!

I must admit that I am confused by your conclusion that people use private schools to ensure that their children get good marks. I have never heard of any private school that awards good grades in exchange for payment. In fact, while it may be the case here that the teaching quality of some private schools here is less than the public level, in general private schools offer a more challenging curricula and more intensive course loads than their public counterparts.

Lastly, regarding your remarks about the university entrances & job applications, you are right about Switzerland's current assessment of private schools here. I can only hope that this will change and believe it will with increasing quality of private institutions. Bear in mind, though that most children attending private schools here are not Swiss and do not intend to stay here for the long term.

Tracy,

I really appreciated your answer with good faith.

Elitism is the master word in the public school system, I do agree. At school, I have to admit that my schoolfriends were good if the parents were taking care of them. If the parents didn't care about the children, they had a tendancy to loose track.

I won't say however that the class are large because they don't want to go more than 24 kids per class which is nothing compare to France where you can end up with 40 kids per class.

I grew up in Lausanne. I can give you example of the reputations of those private school.

One was called Champittet. I will say the only private school with a good reputation in Lausanne. However, the high school students have to take externally the federal high school diploma because this private school could not grant diploma. In public school, your school is eligible to give you a diploma recognized by any swiss universities.

If I speak about good reputation, it is because the kids from Champittet was successful to get their high school diploma and don't fail more than others at university. However, it took year for Champittet to build its reputation.

Other private schools like Lemania were known to be a disaster. When I was about 13 year old, I had a schoolfriend. He was terrible. Only get the worst grades "1/10". The parents took the decision to send him to Lemania. It was a miracle: average of 8.5/10. However, the results is that later on, he couldn't access high school and it was very hard for him to success his apprenticeship. It is the main reason why locally we believe that private school are made to give you good marks : )

I know the public school is not perfect. However, regarding the value added that could offer a private school, I won't think my money will be well invested.

Otherwise, I totally respect your opinion and I thank you to have been very fair on that subject. And I am very happy we could have given the right picture of the system over here !

Cheers!

To all those who have sent personal emails to me from this site, I am afraid that when I try to reply my mail bounces. We are currently developing the school project website which can be found for the time being following this link: 

https://sites.google.com/site/harknessschool/

If you would like additional information, given the fact that I don't seem to be able to respond to emails generated from this site, kindly contact me through the website. Thanks and hope to hear from you.

Tracy

I need to know if the school is operating already and if so please send me the webpGe