RU
I watched a film on the plane on the way back to St Petersburg this summer.
It was a French film, the translation into English was “Holy Cow”. It wasn’t the greatest film I watched this summer, but neither was it the worst. I won’t spoil the plot in case you have an hour and a half spare, but the crux of the matter is (due to extenuating circumstances) a boy decides to create a remarkable cheese to win a prize of 30,000 euros. He has half an idea of how to make cheese, having previously worked in the farming industry.
His base knowledge is probably double of what your average viewer would know. As I’m watching, I’m thinking – you need a cow, take the milk, stir it and take it out to set. Voila! You have a quality round of cheese in the space of, I don’t know, a month perhaps?
Unsurprisingly, as we learn, the process of making global award-winning cheese is complex and requires not days or months, but many years of intensive labour, protocols and knowledge. Anyone with a few hundred euros can produce cheese, but the variety you want to present to esteemed guests, the type that will have friends, neighbours and the papers talking, well that’s an entirely different story.
As an analogy for education, or any enterprise I suspect, it’s very apt. You can have an education. Or. You can gain AN education. Which is why I’m considering creating a documentary on schools and how creating one that produces a cohort of students who gain a 100% pass rate at IGCSE can’t be done by anyone, let alone off the cuff in the space of a year or two.
Let us start by discussing the students who made up the cohort and earned the hundred percent pass rate at IGCSE last year. All of those students had been with the school for between three and a half to five years. This shows you that the results were a mutual exercise between good quality teaching and high-quality learning. Prior to joining us, all these students had experience in some aspect of either the English National Curriculum or an International Curriculum delivered in English, which meant that they came in with solid foundations on which we could build.
One of the most frustrating aspects I have encountered over the past seven years as a headteacher in Saint Petersburg is when parents or students come at the age of 12 or 14 and decide that all of a sudden their child is going to pass their IGCSE and A-levels despite having no previous experience with the English National Curriculum or an international program where they have been studying in English. It’s a little insulting to the whole of the UK who start the process of schooling at four years of age for people to think they can miss the first eight without there being any issues.
Now that isn’t to say gaining a pass (level 4 equivalent to a C-) for students with only three or four years of teaching and learning isn’t possible, but obviously it’s far more difficult than it would be if they had been studying the duration of their life in the correct curriculum. You might have some of the basic skills and knowledge, it’s like you’ve spent your whole life baking cakes and muffins and now someone’s asking you to produce pizza and pasta. You know your way around the kitchen and you’ve used some of the ingredients. Yet realistically, you’re going to have to start from scratch, especially if you want your pizza to be up there with the best in Naples.
It is perfectly understandable that in the current climate, people’s situations are changing constantly and what they may want one year could be completely different to what they need the next. However, when joining the International School of Saint Petersburg, parents need to realise that our purpose here in St Petersburg is to enable students to learn and achieve in an environment that will lead to their success at IGCSE’s and A-levels. We are not a language school. We are not a school that has random native English speakers who teach from random textbooks with no formal practise or background. Our purpose is to send students off to wherever they want to learn across the globe being at the top of their class in English National Curriculum subjects. With Alumni succeeding in Finland, Spain, Azerbaijan, Dubai and beyond, we’re a credit to the environment and expectations we’ve created.
At the same time, just because we’re here producing the highest quality of schooling (we’re the only school in the city to be accredited by both LRN and COBIS), we realised that students also want strength in their native language. Three years ago we realised the English being taught in Russian schools and that was being tested in Russian exams was far removed from what we are teaching as native English speakers with a desire to reach the level of native English speakers. It meant we added to our curriculum for those native Russian students so they have the best of both worlds. Not only is our cheese taking prizes, but we’re offering quality butter on the side.
Of course, unlike those making the cheese, to the shopper in the supermarket there’s no real requirement to understand the process, it’s simply the result the shopper is looking for as they stare at the shelves to make their selection. They look at the price. Maybe they’re lucky enough to have a taste test. In the end, if they want the best, the one with the ribbons and the prizes they have to understand it’s something worth cherishing. The results are a process with many hands working to craft it and quality often comes at a price, but the achievements speak for themselves.
Academic director Leon Clarke
