Thanks all!
These are very valuable feedbacks!
Anyone here that sends kids to private school and can offer a counter advise? Or any advise?
Thanks!
Thank you all for this. Just trying to make sense of it as an incomer. Is it a fair summary that if you don’t make the grade at 14 to get in the University track at school, you take a vocational / apprenticeship route but there are provisions for days off outside those programs and courses available for you to study to pass university entrance exams(?) I wonder how much later one would typically enter university via this route, I guess 2-3 years?
But you can also get into university from an apprenticeship, you might need to pass some exams or do some additional stuff but it’s never blocked, the links above should outline that better. Another thing to note that in CH sn apprenticeship is generally a lot more than compared to other countries where you pretty much need a university diploma. E.g. in my job (software development), most of my coworkers went through the apprenticeship route and ended up in the same place compared to the ones that went through the university route.
Concerning what is possible/normal in Switzerland: All the common ways are listed and explained here: Schweizer Bildungssystem - berufsberatung.ch. Sadly, there’s no English version, only DE/FR/IT/RM. For English resources, take a look at this page: Englisch - berufsberatung.ch I’d bet you can find answers to all your questions there.
I have friends that they do. I could ask them if its OK if I put you in contact with them. Send me a PM
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My GF wants to send our potential future kid to a Rudolf Steiner school (and Kita before that). Not sure what to think about that. I went to public school and turned out fine. Had some great teachers on the way.
Any thoughts?
I saw an ads recently mentioning Rudolf Steiner school has been teaching since 1874 and promote English and German lessons.
I haven’t checked their pricing but it must be expensive to compensate marketing fees.
It is located in a posh area avec Geneva and far from where we live so I won’t mention it to her.
How did she know about it?
In my point of view public school are great and I will rather spend the cost différence to extra activities so kids can learn and make friends outside of school.
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More than public vs private i would worry about Steiner vs others.
I guess you already read about the whole anthroposophy on wikipédia? For me would be no way (it’s starting to be officially considered a cult in some countries).
Montessori wouldn’t raise the same red flags for me.
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For a child that has no major psychological/mental problems, Swiss public schools are great. If you want them to build useful social connections with children from rich families, subscribe them rather to a golf course. This is not a joke, unfortunately.
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Thanks for pointing that out. Sounds something like Scientology to me.
So what do you do if your kid has problems in public schools? What would be an alternative?
Recently there was a show about these schools: Wenn freie Entfaltung auf gefährliche Weltanschauung trifft: Waldorfschulen | ZDF Magazin Royale - YouTube
I wouldn’t send my kid there. Public schools are fine in Switzerland. I went to public school, so did my girlfriend and all of my family, lawyers, doctors, engineers, …
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Maybe wait until it’s a thing rather than hypothetical. I’d assume you can work with the school direction on what would be best. And there’s lots of private schools (international, Montessori, etc) if that’s what works best.
I think I’ve already mentioned somewhere else, but if you go to a private school and your kid get bullied, you can probably forget to get a fair help from the bosses there (I wouidn’t call them principals), since the bully is probably a kid of a rich andn affluent person and everyone will bent to them.
Private schools are more like a (bad?) nanny imho.
“Public + right afer school courses + good parenting” is the best solution.
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That’s not my experience. Time and again trouble children were kicked out of the (private) school where our kids go.
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The way I see it: public schools are good generally in Switzerland. But you can get more (social circle, foreign language, music & sports) in private schools. It’s a small difference in most cases, but those small things adds up over the years that shapes up a kid.
I look at it as an investment, is it worth to spend X for the ‘extra benefits’ in private schools. Generally investing in education pays off, but I am not sure if we can get an empirical evidence towards it, as it depends on many factors.
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I decided to cough up the money because there’s no public school using the Montessori method and we are super happy with how that is working for our kids, especially making them grow independent. In addition, the school provides extra services like music/sport/art/language lessons in-house so that we don’t have to bring them to these extra activities.
Also I am told that, if both parents work and have a high income, then the price for “Hort” is not that much smaller than the school fees. Could someone comment on this point?
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In ZH it costs about 70 chf per day without subvention to spend the day at the Hort, that’s about 15k a year from what we computed. The difference however is that you cannot deduct tuition fees from taxes while Hort costs can be.
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So significantly lower than the private school fee (2500-3000chf/month) but not like an order of magnitude lower.
What do you mean with “tuition fees” not being tax deductible? I have been successfully deducting school fees for years now (up to the current ~10K limit).
Hmmm I thought this only works till the end of Kindergarten. After that no more ?
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That’d be something really interesting for me to find out (my kids are still in KG). But what would be the reasoning? After all also KG is available publicly…