Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘School’ Category

We’re delighted to have James going to what was the favourite school of all of us – Campbell College.

Despite scraping around to find logical reasons to justify the choice to the primary school principal, quite honestly we put it at the top of our list simply because it just felt nice and was somewhere that we all felt at home. As far as logic goes, they offer all the subjects that James is interested in academically, he was fired up by a number of the after school activities and the kids all knew what they were talking about in the demonstrations at the open day.

Although it’s a boys only school, that had nothing to do with our initial reason to go there. However, it does make quite a difference. As the principal said at one of the open days, the school is totally aimed at encouraging boys in everything that they do. Thus, the library is packed with books that boys like to read and the school activities are completely aimed at boys. Less obvious is that in a boys only environment, the boys don’t get turned off by “girly” subjects and activities so the home economics department turned out quite an attractive selection of delights on the open night and rather than having a choir with the typical 115 girls and five boys, it has a choir of 120 boys.

It might seem like a thing all schools would do but everyone (kids, teachers and the former alumni) at the open day took an interest in us and behaved as though we’d be enrolling James. There was none of the “we’re probably wasting our time” attitude that came across in many schools. I can appreciate that in many of the schools, the number of applications can far exceed the number enrolled (eg Lagan gets around 300 applications for 200 places) but behaving as though we would be enrolling in due course really made a big difference to our impression of the school. Even in the trivial interactions, it felt like James was being treated as a pupil there, if only for an afternoon and I guess that feeling of belonging is why it ended up at the top of our list.

One of the things that we wanted to do in each of the schools after the open day was to just have a wander around and rather than being slung out at the end of the open day, as happened in almost all of the schools, we were welcome to have that wander and had a long chat with one of the former pupils too. But the not being slung out was, for us, just another part of the welcoming attitude – “sure, it’s just an open day, but think of yourself as a pupil here if only for today”. Former pupils being there was a nice touch too, giving a connection to the parents as well as to the potential pupils.

On the open days with them, we never felt like they were just doing an open day because that’s what schools do these days but rather that they were showcasing the school – “hey, look at how great our school is”. That’s how it should be, but even among a number of the other excellent schools that we went to, that wasn’t the case and in many cases it felt that an open day was just another chore to do.

The reports on the school are a bit negative on the old class rooms but that’s one of the aspects that makes it feel like a school rather than a modern office block that some of the new build schools feel like. To us, I think that was part of the attraction. In too many cases, the thinking seems to be that a new school building will sort out the school but a school is the teachers and pupils, not the buildings. It was our interactions with the people that encouraged us to put Campbell at the top of our list.

James did the transfer tests at Campbell which was an interesting experience. To be honest, we only chose Campbell for the tests as it was handy for parking and they did both AQE and GL. However, even there, their care towards the pupils was very apparent as they didn’t just dump the kids in a sports hall for the tests as happens elsewhere but put them in proper classrooms and gave us all kinds of advice as to how to make sure that they were relaxed on the day. They didn’t have to do that but it was yet another aspect that appealed to us.

Anyway, we’re delighted that James can treat Campbell as home now and I hope that he can put across that feeling to some other kids out there when he participates in future open days.

The selection process for secondary (or post-primary as they call it) schools in Northern Ireland can be quite a stressful one.

To begin with there are essentially seven types of school to choose from. First, there’s the state school system (largely Protestant) and the Catholic school system (largely, but not exclusively, Catholic), both of which come in high school and grammar school varieties. Then there are the integrated schools which come in high school, grammar school and mixed varieties. Finally, there are a few private or semi-private schools which are mainly a mix of grammar and non-selective with fees ranging from around £500 to £2500 depending on the school and whether you consider “voluntary” contributions to actually be mandatory (which, largely, they are).

In reality, the number of schools is somewhat thinned out due to geography unless you want to live a really complicated life. Thus, in our case, there are within sensible striking distance two non-selective state schools, two state grammar schools, two Catholic grammar schools, two integrated schools and three private/semi-private schools. That’s rather a lot to attempt to visit and in practice we ended up going to see nine of them which is still quite a lot and so we ended up spreading the visits over two years. The two we didn’t bother with were knocked out for us as, frankly, they are rubbish schools and everyone knows that.

Of those that we did visit, some were very easy to eliminate from consideration as we (ie us and the little guy) just didn’t find them appealing. Surprisingly, this included Inst (RBAI) which, on the face of it, seems an excellent school but we just didn’t particularly like it. That was also the case with Wellington though with that we were also none too impressed with the knowledge of the pupils on the open day. Ashfield bit the dust as it has an extremely narrow range of subjects – seemingly only those that are absolutely essential (eg one foreign language because they’re required to teach one).

Which left us with six and there’s only room for five on the form. In practice, you have to put one or two non-selective schools on the list in case the transfer test results don’t come out as you’d hoped but that’s not necessarily so easy a thing to do as the normal default school in our case would be Ashfield which states that you will only get accepted if you put them first or second on the form and this year it needed to be first as they appear to have had a bit of a run of applications.

Anyway, because of the need to put at least one non-selective school on the list, we had to drop Methody which was really nice and would have been third or fourth on our list otherwise. It’s a bit further down largely down to the logistics of getting the little guy there in the mornings and it would have been higher otherwise.

First place went to my old school simply because of that. My parents didn’t have the chance to do the open day experience that we did and I’m not sure that I’d have picked it out of the range of schools that we’ve seen. So it worked out quite well that he didn’t get that but rather the second on the list which in reality was our first choice. We’d have been equally pleased with our third choice which was a thoroughly impressive school full of very knowledgeable pupils on the open day. Fourth choice was the integrated Lagan College which looks like it will one day become one of the great schools but it’s not quite there yet (it’s pretty good at the moment). We could have lived with our fifth choice, Priory College, but wouldn’t have been over the moon with it.

One thing that always amazes me is that parents put down schools that they don’t like at all. This year is no exception if the Facebook comments of some pupils are anything to go by and I think a lot of tears have been shed on Saturday when the school selection letters turned up because of that. Why on earth would anyone put down a school that they know their child will hate? The applications to failing schools also confuse me – why do people apply to schools that are failing so badly that their closure is even announced in the information booklet that all parents get? The zero ambition of some parents is also sad with some really bright kids not getting to even try for a grammar school and instead ending up in also-ran schools when they could have done so much better.

What’s also sad, is how little thought some parents put into choosing which schools they put on their list. Many will only know of the school that they went to but these days there’s heaps of information about schools and they all have open nights. We spent ages pouring over the booklets that are sent out to P7 parents (and you can either download them or ask the primary school for them in P6 as we did). Our “short” list of nine took us two years to get through and we went to our favoured schools at least twice each. Yes, it did take a lot of time and effort but it’s going to be the school that James will be in for the next seven years and one that’ll make a big difference in his future.

By chance we saw a promo for an event during June for the local branch of the Young Archaeologists Club which I took the little guys along to.

That was one based around mosaics which kicked off with a short talk to put them into context before we all got going on constructing our very own mosaic. All the meetings are two hours long which was a little bit short to get the mosaics done so we were rushing a little towards the end but even so have two very nice ones sitting in the house now.

With that behind them they were all fired up to join and go along to the monthly meetings. Between one thing and another we didn’t quite manage to get signed up yet but the next meeting was yesterday at Belvoir Park. Slightly iffy weather meant that the decision to go wasn’t taken ’til under an hour before for us but I’m glad we went. That two hours disappears surprisingly quickly when you’re walking round even a small number of sites so with the remains of a country house, a motte, an ice house and a graveyard in terms of built archaeology and the oldest oak tree in Ireland plus a redwood to consider the event was over very quickly indeed. Interestingly though the little guys have remembered a number of the facts presented along the way so it was a surprisingly good means of education.

We’ve finally managed to get the forms to join so will be getting those off during the week as they’re still dead keen on it. Whether they would think that they’ve an interest in archaeology per se is debatable but they’re enjoying the outings and learning a bit along the way too.

I find that we don’t really think of when the kids go back to school after Christmas until it’s time for them to get the school bags packed. So it was a nice surprise to find that after we’d them all packed for today that they don’t actually go back to school until tomorrow.

That gives me a little more time to play with too. And I need it too as I’ve only just started the archaeology assignment which is due by noon on Friday. I’ll get an extension of it as the delay is basically down to the combination of food poisoning and some kind of flu-thing that felled me for getting on for three weeks. Somehow I don’t think that I’ll hit Friday but, all being well, I shouldn’t be more than a few days late.

Which leaves the medicine (SK185) ECA to complete. That shouldn’t take more than a day or two at most though. After that there’s the microbes course (S171) but it’s a background course for me so no great rush as the assignment isn’t due ’til the end of April.

That doesn’t count the main course which, for this year, is biology (S204) that has a page count easily twice that of any other course I’ve done. Having said that, the course team writing the thing got completely carried away and these days quite a lot of those pages aren’t included in the course for various reasons. For example, there are three separate strands starting from around the second month and you only need to do two of those (plants/microbes/animals) although I suspect that the choice of which two will need some thought. My theory is that I’ll do animals and microbes at the moment which’ll ease the microbe course and should help in my planned schedule over the next couple of years. That said, I’ll need some of the plants bit for my plants residential in July.

Oh, and not to forget TT281 although I’m hoping that it will fly just as quickly as TT280 did.

We were tootling along quite nicely with our various regular activities until a week or two back but now it’s getting to the point that we can barely fit everything in.

It’s mainly down to the Christmas activities that the school seem to be throwing at us almost daily which are difficult to fit into what was already a reasonably full though doable schedule. Thus we have school photos to deal with, school calendars to come in the next day or two, the school Christmas fair this week, the school play next week, the school Christmas pantomime the following week and, no doubt, many more Christmasy things that we’ve forgotten or not been told about yet.

Naturally, there are also things like Christmas cards to write, Christmas presents to be bought, the Christmas markets to be seen and lots more besides.

And, of course, there are the non-Christmas things to be done which, for me, seems to be largely taken up with assorted course assignments though there’s lots of non-course things to be done too.