Dear Parents,

On 16 January the ESF hosted an information session for the Primary and Preprimary SWALS parents. The attendance was very large, which confirms that this is an important subject requiring a lot of information. Mr Fischböck and the SWALS teaching coordinator Ms Kärnä outlined the education path of SWALS students through the Primary and Secondary and answered many questions. Their presentations can be found here (presentatation by Mr Fischböck and presentatation by Ms Kärnä). We have also prepared a diagram illustrating the topic.

The Parents’ Association would like to assist both the school and the parents in finding solutions to known issues that would be most beneficial to the students. To be able to assess these problems in the right perspective, the ESF PA would like to get a broader picture of the situation. Since the SWALS group is very diversified – to name just the two extremes, there are newcomers in Germany who have to catch up on the section language and there are those born here who have had a limited exposure to their mother tongue – we would like to gather more detailed information. For this purpose a questionnaire was distributed to the parents present at the meeting. For those who couldn’t attend or prefer an electronic copy or want more sheets to describe each child separately – as answers may vary depending on the child – the questionnaire for Primary  is also available on the PA website.

Please return the completed questionnaire by the end of January (preferably, but also later as this exercise will continue) either by email to barbara.swals@gmail.com, via the ECB internal mail to Barbara Soszynska at CB17833, in the PA container or in the PA postbox in the school secretariat. All answers will be treated anonymously – neither the name nor the mother tongue will be disclosed (unless of course you want to raise a language-specific issue).

A similar survey will be prepared for SWALS parents from the Secondary, who are meeting in February. Hopefully the results and conclusions will help to make the ESF an even better place for educating our children.

We also encourage those of you who haven’t yet registered for the SWALS contact list to send the completed contact form to barbara.swals@gmail.com.