English elementary/middle schools?

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koivuranta
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Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2018 12:06 pm

English elementary/middle schools?

Post by koivuranta » Sun Dec 26, 2021 3:55 pm

Looking for any advice about English speaking elementary/middle schools in Helsinki area. Considering moving back to Finland with 11 year old with elementary Finnish language skills. Is a regular Finnish speaking school an option or should we look for a school that teaches mainly in English?
Any advice appreciated!



English elementary/middle schools?

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FinlandGirl
Posts: 1329
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2019 10:43 am

Re: English elementary/middle schools?

Post by FinlandGirl » Mon Dec 27, 2021 11:00 am

koivuranta wrote:
Sun Dec 26, 2021 3:55 pm
Looking for any advice about English speaking elementary/middle schools in Helsinki area. Considering moving back to Finland with 11 year old with elementary Finnish language skills. Is a regular Finnish speaking school an option or should we look for a school that teaches mainly in English?
Any advice appreciated!
If you want to want to stay long-term in Finland, after finishing school your child might want to study at a university or find a job.
If speaking only English, your child will at this point likely have to choose between moving back to the US or learning Finnish.

The smart move is to put your child into a regular Finnish speaking school now.

dmpillespoo
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed May 18, 2022 1:02 pm

Re: English elementary/middle schools?

Post by dmpillespoo » Wed May 18, 2022 1:35 pm

This is a difficult question.

On the one hand, Finnish is very handy if your child intends to stay permanently. There are few English language university courses in Finland, and it is very hard to get a job in Finland if you don't speak Finnish, even if the job itself is done in English.While public services are very good about trying to work with people who don't speak Finnish, obviously it's a lot easier if you do, and not everything is available in English. As a child, if you don't speak Finnish fluently, neighborhood kids and kids at hobbies may ostracize you, so for psychosocial reasons it can be a good idea to learn Finnish.

On the other hand, you can get by in daily life with just English, a student who is a Finnish citizen can study in other European universities, many of which do offer an extensive range of English-language programs, and depending on your area of expertise, you may be able to get jobs via telecommuting or in large multinationals that do not require Finnish. You won't be as socially isolated as an adult because a lot of adults do speak English.

One thing to keep in mind is that your child may not have a choice about studying in Finnish, and if they are forced to study in Finnish, it is not at all clear that they will receive anything like adequate language support. This may push them into a long spiral of poor school results. This happens because there are few public sector English or international school places available, partly because (in my experience and experience of many expat families in the Helsinki area) the schools that do exist reject perfectly competent students (many native English speakers) and then claim there aren't enough qualified pupils to fill the existing places, so why should they create more. Why they do this is a mystery. A few places have to be kept open for mid-year arrivals, but current policy appears to be to fail as many applicants as possible, especially if they are not of the personality type the school is looking for (apparently, extroverted, stereotypical "good pupil" personalities). This is not true of private sector English schools like ISH, but they tend to be expensive and have a waiting list. If I child fails the application process in one English-language public school, the results tend to be shared with all of them in the metro area, so you are essentially out if you fail once. The tests are structured to be difficult and to test for extroversion and for structured thinking, not just language ability. Results will not be shared if your child fails, so you will not know why the school has failed them. You can reapply the next year, but typically if you are not the sort they are looking for, you will not get in, no matter how perfect your English is.

In this case, you will need to either home school, or you will need to send your child to a Finnish or Swedish language school. If they are young enough, they may be offered a preliminary year of language integration. There are no standardized methods or materials for this year, so whether your child receives adequate Finnish preparation will depend on luck - some teachers do a good job and some don't. After this, you are put in a Finnish language class and you are more or less on your own. There will not typically be extensive language support. Class will just be run in Finnish, and if you don't understand what is going on, too bad. (Some teachers do try harder than others to provide language support, but it is not possible for them with their teaching load to be very supportive, and there will not be extensive language support from special needs teachers as there is little money for that, especially since coronavirus hit.) As at home, a non-Finnish speaking child may be largely socially shunned by other kids in the class, or may end up in a friendship group with other English-speakers, further undermining their learning of Finnish. It is very hit and miss, and largely depends on the child's personality and what sort of teachers and classmates they have.

If the child does manage to get into an English speaking place or get fluent in Finnish, they have access to one of the best educational systems in the world, and a very child-friendly society in general. If they don't, they are likely to underachieve.

So it really comes down to your child's personality and how you think they might cope if they are pushed into the regular Finnish system, without much outside support.
Last edited by dmpillespoo on Sun May 22, 2022 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

dmpillespoo
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Re: English elementary/middle schools?

Post by dmpillespoo » Wed May 18, 2022 1:41 pm

Sorry, meant to say "There will typically NOT be extensive language support."

dmpillespoo
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Re: English elementary/middle schools?

Post by dmpillespoo » Wed May 18, 2022 2:22 pm

Here is what my child said her entrance exam consisted of for first grade in the Olari English-language Espoo International School (so this was the test for six and seven year old applicants):

The kids did a lot of the material as a group. To start, a story was read about kids going to a zoo and the animals they saw, what the animals did, and how the kids ate a snack and went on a bus ride. After listening to this story once, the teacher gave the kids an answer sheet which had several rows. Each row started with a symbol (like a picture of a butterfly), followed by a picture of a thumb pointing up and then a picture of a thumb pointing down. The teacher then told the kids that they would be told statements about the story which they had to mark as true or false on the correct line. True was to be indicated by crossing out the thumb down symbol, leaving the thumb up symbol clear of marks. False was to be indicated by crossing out the thumbs up symbol. The correct line was to be found by listening to the teacher saying, for example, "Find the line with the butterfly". So for example, the story says that the first animal the children met was a lion. After the story, the teacher says, "Find the line with the butterfly. Here is the statement: The first animal the children met was a seal." Now the children are supposed to respond by finding the line with the butterfly, and crossing out the thumbs up (i.e. true), leaving the thumbs down symbol clear of marks, in order to show that the statement about the seal is false. If the kids get any part of this wrong - marking the false symbol because the statement is false instead of scratching out the true symbol to indicate false, or forgetting that part of the story, or not recognizing the relevant words in the statement or the story, or not knowing the word "butterfly" so that they can't find the correct line to mark, then they lose credit for that answer.

After this section, she said that they had to answer questions like: Describe your family (including nationalities)? Describe your mom and dad and other family members? Describe your house (inside)? If you had $100, what would you do with it? If you could fly, what would you do? What's your favorite game? How do you play it? Where do you go to school? What have you done today? Can you write words yet? Can you read yet? Can you write numbers? Her impression was that they wanted kids to talk a lot, so shyness would be penalized, and they wanted to hear things a certain way (they wanted a lot of detailed descriptions, and they were not amused when she said she'd use $100 to buy more pet cats, and then joked that if she could fly, she would grab $100 to buy more pet cats).

After this section, there was a group exercise in which there was a picture of a horse, and they had to put various figures in various places, e.g., drawing another horse between the river and the tree. She said they did not seem pleased that she also drew other stuff they had not asked her to draw.

There was then a series of stories with a set of four pictures, only one of which accurately showed some element of the story line, and they had to mark the correct illustration (so here, in contrast to the thumb symbol marking, they had to mark the correct answer instead of the incorrect answer).

My daughter passed the test, as did all her classmates from her international daycare, even though many kids from her daycare with equal skills and similar personalities had failed the year before. I am guessing it is because I had kicked up a fuss that year about the policy of failing as many kids as possible, even calling the city council about it. However, I heard that the next year, things were back to their normal policy.

I note that the city also decided not to allow my daughter's daycare to expand into a private English-language international school, even though we had a petition going as part of the fussing process that showed there is actually a significant amount of unmet demand for more English-language school places. As far as I could determine, the city committee responsible thought a new private school would be too expensive (in spite of it being privately funded) and would compete with their own plans to start a second English-language school, which in the event apparently did not materialize.

My takeaway from the whole process was that in spite of the talk at the national and higher city level about wanting to attract foreign highly educated workers by offering English-language education, in practice there seems to be little appetite for doing this. I don't claim to understand why, but that seems to be the situation at the moment. My own daughter went to a Finnish language Montessori class for her first two and half years, but did not get a preliminary year of Finnish integration for whatever reason. She was not able to learn enough Finnish to keep up, in spite of private tutoring, so halfway through third grade we switched her to ISH, which has been fantastic. ISH is expensive, but it has great teachers, great support staff, excellent student-teacher ratios, and a really nice school culture. Not that the Finnish class was bad, either. The teacher was good for sure, the classwork was well designed and good. But my daughter just couldn't get language support there. ISH is a better fit for us. For others, it could be the other way around. And for kids who are structured, bright, extraverted students with excellent English, the English language public schools could be a great fit.

ozil-madrid
Posts: 66
Joined: Mon Dec 03, 2018 1:28 pm

Re: English elementary/middle schools?

Post by ozil-madrid » Fri Nov 04, 2022 7:48 pm

Hi everyone, where are the english and bilingual schools in espoo ? Can i live in Kirkkonumi and still make child attend schooling in espoo? Should i school multi-lingual or finnish day care if both parents are foreigners?


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