Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘School’ Category

The prices for the Kip McGrath tutoring are incredibly confusing and quite off-putting but it turns out that they’re substantially less than I had expected.

Basically what it says is that it’s £25 per student per subject which would mean £100 a week for our two little guys or around £400 a month. In fact, it’s £25 per student per day but as we’re only running with one day and are getting a 20% discount it’s working out at £40 a week for both little guys which is actually around £1.50 a week cheaper than Kumon. Thus, although the original plan was to run with Kip for James who definitely needs it and Kumon for John who’s just sailing through it all, we ended up signing them both up for it and they start this Friday.

Although the website implies that the classes are always five in fact our little guys will be in a class by themselves to begin with at what’s currently the perfect time too. By going right after school on Friday afternoon, they’ll be finishing relatively early which, hopefully, will mean that John won’t be as exhausted as he was sometimes after the Kumon classes.

According to the tutor, James should be where he should be school-wise in around a year or so although I suspect he’ll get there sooner with the Kip McGrath plus all the extra help he’s getting in school. I’m rather dubious about her assessment for John and I’d say that he’ll be way ahead of the rest of his class before the school year is finished.

We’re already getting withdrawal symptoms from the Kumon though. It’s peculiar not to be doing the worksheets every night.

With the kids going to the same primary school as I did many years ago, I’ve been checking out how things have changed over the years.

Strangely, going into school works exactly the same as it did over 40 years ago, right down to them lining up behind the very same P2 and P4 painted on the playground as I did. Coming out is the same for the junior school as it was but the senior kids don’t have to hold hands whilst walking down the path and there’s a new front gate too though just as many people use the original gate.

The naff playground at Clara is much better than it was with the single roundabout and swings having been updated and a climbing frame added. It’s not in the top league of playgrounds but it’s definitely moved up in the world. Last week we ventured out to find the other nearby playground which has seen quite a lot of rebuilding of houses all around it. In my day it was by far the best playground around with cycle paths laid out with proper road markings around a well-equipped playground so I had high hopes for it. Sadly, it’s gone downhill somewhat since then with none of the cycle paths in its latest incarnation and not so many pieces of play equipment either.

Missing these days is Woodlee Street which used to run down the side of the school. In those days nearly everyone walked to school so the street was little used but it was demolished a decade or so ago (and still isn’t rebuilt!) with the new houses of Fashoda Street extending over where it used to be which gives rise to a major hassle for cars turning round after dropping off the kids. You’d think the developers would consider how streets approaching a school were going to be used before blocking of exits like that, wouldn’t you?

The two little guys get assessed at the Kip centre this afternoon for both maths and English though we’ve not actually decided on jumping ship from Kumon as yet.

Whereas Kumon is by and large a franchised very standardised system, Kip is supposed to be more tuned to the child and is much more of a franchised tutoring system than Kumon. That in itself brings significant differences eg the Kumon franchisees can come from any walk of life whereas the Kip people are generally from a teaching background. I suspect there’s probably more variability between Kip franchises as a result of that but that’s something that you’d not notice unless you changed from one to another at some stage.

The standardisation in Kumon should make it more scalable but, as we’ve seen, there are limits to that. Since Kip sets limits to the class size there’s an overall maximum number of students that can be taken on by a single franchise eg given that it’s an after school thing, there’s a maximum of around four classes a day (they’re 80 minutes long) ie around 25 kids per day.

As with Kumon, they only do maths and English but rather than a single fixed sequence of things to go through, there are a range of classes from pre-school through to university level and special interest ones too like English as a second language and intensive versions.

At this point, I think we’ll likely move James over to Kip completely and probably leave John doing just the English with Kumon but we’ll see how the assessment and costs pan out.

Thanks to our Kumon centre taking on rather too many new students than they seem to be able to cope with and hence arbitrarily halving the number of worksheets per session (without reducing the fees, of course), we’ve been looking around at other options.

The Kumon issue arose because there’s no set limit to the number of students that a given centre can take on. Thus, with a sudden increase in numbers following the free trial at the end of August, the numbers in the class seemed to pretty much double. Due to the way the in-class marking is handled that in turn meant that the time taken to get through the work in class went up from around 40 minutes for our guys to over an hour which might not sound like much of an increase but had the overall effect that there just wasn’t enough time to get through all the students. Rather than recruit more supervisors, the centre just halved the number of worksheets so that 60 minute time-slot now takes about 30 minutes.

So we’ve started looking for something similar that places explicit limits on the maximum number of students that they can take on. That’s thrown up Kip McGrath which operates rather differently in that rather than trying to run the kids through a standardised programme, they tailor their programmes to the children and there’s a maximum of six per class. Anyway, we’re getting the kids assessed for their programme later this week.

Ironically, we would have stuck with Kumon as it showed steady progress for the kids but it’s just too expensive for what they’re providing at the moment.

The kids new school has what they somewhat confusingly call the Community Room. It grew out of an initiative a few years back to establish links with the local community.

It’s different from the PTA in a number of aspects. For one thing, it meets every Wednesday morning for about 90 minutes rather than once in the evening every couple of months. That of itself means that the make-up of the group is largely mothers with a few fathers and grandmothers (not to mention around a dozen pre-school kids). To some extent that almost makes it a parents and toddlers group and it does take a bit of effort to steer things away from that.

The regular meetings mean that relationships are established much more quickly than in the PTA and similar groups but more importantly it means that it’s easier to organise events through this group. Thus, one of the interests at the moment is in setting up some courses to help the parents with the homework that’s starting to arrive in surprisingly large amounts. The courses run over six weeks so a regular setting is required for such things. Somewhat overlapping with the PTA there are a series of events organised by way of this group with the first one being Halloween. That’s a little confusing as there will be two events happening: one directly for the school and one only for the community group and their families.

As well as the larger courses we were treated to a basic first aid for children course this morning which covered a whole bunch of stuff that falls into the category of “stuff that you should know but hope you’ll never need to know”. So, it covered CPR, choking, bleeding, meningitis and what to do with teeth knocked out, which made for a very full 90 minutes! On the meningitis front, the deciders are if your child is getting bad fast and if they’ve cold hands and cold feet: calling 999 is the way to go if that’s happening.

Although the group was established as a means of establishing links with the local community, it seems to have become a kind of “year 8” class for the parents which is no bad thing as it will help with the kids’ education.