Foreign Perspectives

Probably the biggest plus point of the Kumon is that you need to sit down five nights a week with the kids to get the homework done. It was, of course, the biggest minus point too as it’s a 365 day a year deal which meant that, in practice, one or other of the little guys threw up the head now and again and so did we. However, homework is important as it shows you how the kids are doing much more directly than any report from the teacher will do. Missing the twice weekly classes wasn’t a problem really as the teacher could hand out sheets to cover any absences on our part or indeed for her own holidays.

It’s quite different at Kip McGrath. For one thing the teacher is a teacher with quite a lot of years of experience. Thus she’s not tied to the Kip McGrath system quite so rigidly as is the case with Kumon. So, in our case, she’s doing a combination of the maths and English programmes each week and we didn’t have to choose between them as we thought at first we would have to do. It’s a 52 week per year system rather than a 365 day per year one so there’s one 80 minute class per week rather than the two 40 minute ones (20 mins per subject) for Kumon. We’ve not hit a holiday period so I don’t know how that works out but John missed a class two weeks ago and so had a “make-up” class last week. Homework isn’t nearly so structured although in practice it’s working out at around five nights a week split between some maths and some English for James.

Which one is better though? In terms of cash, Kumon is £50 a month per subject, Kip McGrath is around £100 so it’s more expensive if you’re only doing one subject. However, we were finding that for John his maths was getting so far ahead of his reading that he was getting to the point that he couldn’t do the maths because he couldn’t read the questions which basically forced us to do two subjects.

In terms of quality of education, Kip McGrath seems streets ahead. The highly repetitive nature of Kumon suits early maths really well though didn’t seem so good on the English. That repetitive nature was leading to a certain amount of boredom for the kids so we’d have been moving on in a year or two. It’s noticeable that very, very few Kumon kids were coming in with year 3 or 4 boxes so it would appear that 2 to 3 years is about the most that the majority of people stay with them. Having said that, Kip McGrath feels more like a 2 or 3 year max programme too in that most of the promo material seems to be aimed at getting kids to where they should be in the class. Now in our case, James needs that help at the moment but John is already where he should be so the Kip classes should be moving him ahead so we’ll be able to compare over the next year.

Will there be a problem with the school if you move the kids too far ahead? That’s something that was mentioned by the Kumon teacher when we enrolled. Some schools do have issues with kids who are well ahead of the rest of the class. The school they’re in at the moment were quite keen that we were helping both the little guys along and seem to have the same basic view as me ie that it’s much better to err on the side of being too far ahead. Having said that, I imagine that if at some point we find ourselves with the guys several years ahead of their class in maths or English that it could create some problems. However, I’m sure that it’s better to have problems like that than to have them well behind their class.