Podcast
Topics covered
- Types of tertiary education in Switzerland
- The pathways to university
- How parents can best communicate with Swiss teachers
- Support for special educational needs children
- Support for gifted children
Who We're Speaking With
In this episode we welcome back Margaret Oertig, to continue the conversation about schools in Switzerland.
Margaret is the author of the brilliant book Going Local, Your Guide to Swiss Schooling.
Originally from Scotland, today Margaret lives with her Swiss husband near Basel. She has lived and worked in Switzerland since 1987. Her two daughters, who are now adults, went through the Swiss school system.
Margaret has worked for many years delivering intercultural training programmes to international companies. She worked for 20 years for the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, lecturing, writing and working on projects related to intercultural collaboration.
About the Episode
Fully understanding the Swiss school system can help you make the best choices for your family. If you know what potential cultural differences are, how to best communicate with your child’s teacher, and what support is available, you can better advocate for your child. In this second episode, Margaret speaks about important education-related matters in more detail.
Some things to remember when communicating with your child’s Swiss teachers:
- Make an appointment: Since your child is expected to come to school independently, you won’t run into their teachers naturally. If you’d like to check on your child’s progress, the best thing to do is to book a short appointment. Email or call the teacher directly, and take advantage of any parent-teacher meetings the school sets up.
- Focus on independence: It’s often better if you encourage your child to speak up for themselves since most Swiss schools value independence. This is especially true once your child is in upper elementary or secondary school.
- The teachers are the experts: When communicating with teachers, treat them as the experts. Don’t be shy to voice your opinion, but also listen to what they have to say. Try not to become too emotional when speaking about your child because this could make it seem as if you can’t think straight.
- Talk about the present situation: When decisions are made about ability streaming and other parts of your child’s education, their current performance is analysed. It’s not so much about their potential as it is about the evidence of their performance, based on their school work. So, always talk about the concrete situation, and ask what your child can do to improve.
- You can appeal decisions: If you disagree with a decision made about your child, ask the head teacher about the appeals process. Just remember that decisions are based on various factors such as your child’s grades, maturity level, and performance in class. You’ll need a lot of evidence to successfully change or reverse a decision.
Resources
Federal Professional Examinations (Eidgenössische Berufsprüfungen) (German)
Federal Diploma of Higher Education
Tertiary level professional education
Integrative Förderung (German)
Talenta (Zurich school for gifted children) (German)
Next steps
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Transcript
Daniel: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Expert Guide to Your Life in Switzerland.
This is a series of conversations in which we speak with people who could be considered experts on different aspects of life in Switzerland and share what we learn with you.
The series is brought to you by Rigby. We're a staffing and IT services company based in Zurich.
If you or anyone you know of is looking for a new role in Switzerland or if you're looking to hire, let us know, we'd be happy to help.
The best way to do that is by sending an email to contact@rigby.ch.
In today's episode, we would like to continue the conversation with Margaret Oertig about schools in Switzerland.
Margaret is the author of the brilliant book Going Local: Your Guide to Swiss Schooling.
She also worked for 20 years for the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, lecturing, writing, and working on projects related to intercultural collaboration and delivering intercultural training programs to international companies.
In our first call together, we covered all kinds of things—from what's different about the Swiss school system, what's taught at kindergarten, getting ready for secondary school, some common issues that incomers face, the different paths available in the Swiss school system, the apprenticeship system, the selection criteria for the schools, and a little bit about the Gymi.
Among other things, today we'll be covering tertiary education in Switzerland, university entrance requirements, the provisions for children with special needs or for gifted children, and how to work together with the school.
So, Margaret, welcome back!
Margaret: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Daniel: Okay, great. So, can we begin with talking about tertiary education? What are the three types of tertiary education in Switzerland?
Margaret: You’ve got the traditional universities. About 20% of the population start those and perhaps about 15% complete them.
You've got universities of applied sciences, which I think is similar to what we used to call technical colleges, but they've got, you know, various specialties. They've got more of a practice focus and they lead to a bachelor's degree as well, and there are also master's programs. Internationally they are universities, but in Switzerland, when you say “Fachhochschule,” they say it's not university. But internationally, they are. I have to say, ‘I was a university lecturer’ if I'm talking in English when I'm abroad.
And then there's universities of teacher education that also can be considered “Fachhochschulen,” but some people consider it as a separate one again. And then there are colleges of higher education, “Höhere Fachhochschulen,” and they're definitely not universities. It's not a bachelor's degree, although they are working towards being given the right to award professional bachelor's degrees, but they're not there yet. And that takes three years part-time or two years full-time.
So these are the four main types. In the College of Higher Education, one of the things you can do there is an “Eidgenössische Berufsprüfung,” a federal diploma of higher education, but you can also do that in the workplace and attending more similar to night classes or maybe Friday/Saturday classes. And higher than that is an advanced federal diploma.
This is where you start to see that maybe bachelor's and master's aren't everything because if you have this advanced federal diploma, for example, you could have the diploma in tax that you're a tax expert, and you could be one of the top people in the country on the tax system, or you could be a photographer, or an energy and efficiency advisor. You're usually a specialist with very specialized training. But it isn’t this kind of more traditional bachelor's, master's type program.
Kathrin: So maybe I can just explain my experiences a little bit. I actually attended two types of these universities. I started out by attending the University of Bern and studying biology. I did that for a year, and after that, I switched to a university of teacher education.
So maybe one thing to emphasize with Swiss universities that sets them apart from other countries is that you choose a course of study from the very first year. In some countries, like the US, you can sort of try different things in your first year of university. But in Switzerland, you choose a very definite course of study, and you can't really change that unless you start again.
A lot of people actually do what I did, which is start with one thing and after a year, they transfer and almost add a year to do something else.
Margaret: Yes, it's a bit anonymous, isn't it?
Kathrin: Oh, yes. So it's not, there's no real personalised attention and the lecturers might not know you. What you also have, of course, is practicals from your first year. So you get to go out into your field and get your first experience. Maybe for us it was in the local gardens in Bern. So we did get to go out in the field.
In the Pädagogische Hochschule, so the teacher training University, it is quite different. You start by choosing a level if you want to do primary, secondary or upper secondary. I did secondary and so I had to choose three subjects to teach. If you do primary, you kind of teach all subjects because it's not as specific. And we did have some large lectures with all the levels together, but a lot of our training was in very small classrooms with maybe 15 to 20 students. So it was a lot more personalised, especially you really get to know your teachers in your subject. For example, all the English teachers, I studied English as a second language as one of my three specialised subjects. And I did know the names of all the teachers and they knew my name and it was quite personal.
Like in the University of Bern, the General University, there's a big focus on practical training from an early stage. I went out at the time I was only 19. And I went out to do my practical training. And the ninth graders were about 15. So, you know, it's very interesting that you get to start at such an early age to teach.
Maybe a final thing to say about the PH, so the teacher training schools, is that they have a lot more mature students as well. So people who laterally transferred because there's a bridge here program, so people can come from apprenticeships or those who have already worked in a first career. So you do get many mature students there.
Margaret: Yeah, I think this is quite interesting. I was having a look at the, you know, the more recent statistics on how old are people when they start. And I think for the traditional universities, the average age to start is 20. Whereas say in the UK, that might have been 18 even. Yeah, and people often only get their bachelor’s at the age of 24 to 25. So they're actually taking four to five years to get their bachelor's. It could be because they change their subject, they go to a different subject. And it could also be that they just take longer because they're working at the same time, so they're actually building their work experience. They're not just sitting, studying all the time.
Average age for the masters in a traditional university is about 27. And I remember my daughter went for an interview in a law firm at 25 after getting her masters, and they said, "Why are you so young?"
(laughs)
Whereas in the UK, you could have done that by the time you were 23, you know? So 27 was a very typical age for a masters. And then the university of applied sciences, that’s interesting because the age is even older. The average starting age is 23 and the age to get your bachelors’ is [KS1] about 27.
So I think this is also something for parents to keep in mind in terms of this thing. It's not a race. The whole system is designed to actually go quite slowly. And because people don't always get what is going to happen in their course, they quite often change or they discover they don't like it so much and then they go to something else in a different course.
Kathrin: Okay, so let's now talk about the university entrance requirements in Switzerland. What are the requirements?
Margaret: If you take traditional universities to start with, you need to get the Gymnasiale Matura, the maturity from the Kantonsschule, the Lycee, whatever, and that's the basic, the most typical way to go. And to get that, it doesn't matter what marks you get, you just have to pass, if you say there's roughly 12 subjects, it varies a bit, you have to pass 10 of your 12 subjects. And the two that you fail, you have to double compensate. So the pass mark is four. So let's say for maths, you only get 3.5, you need to have another subject where you get 4.5. So you've got to do a bit of extra work somewhere else.
So a lot of the pupils are calculating, where will I not bother to work very much because I need to really focus on this subject that I'm likely to fail, 'cause if they fail too many, they would not get the qualification.
So I think in the last podcast, I said, you know, it's very tough. I wouldn't have managed it. What I do tend to forget is that in my school, we were focused on getting good grades in all of our four subjects or whatever. Whereas here they're just focused on a minimal pass of everything. Some people are focusing on more, but they don't need to.
And you can go to university and study economics if you failed maths. You know, the universities are not looking at your marks. They're just looking at you've got the bit of paper. It's like a driving license, you know, it's you have the bit of paper or you haven't.
There's other ways in through what they call “Passerelle,” through entrance exams. They usually, if you go to the university website, you'll get lots of information about other possibilities.
So the important thing to know for the Universities of Applied Sciences, they often need work practice before you can get in. If, for example, you're studying business, then you will need to have done a year's work experience, forty-eight weeks. And that's quite hard to fit in within one year. So that's one of the reasons people start later, that they may be over two years, they're doing this one year's work experience.
I think for engineering, IT, business, you need just one year's work experience. For some of the other topics like social work, you would have had to have worked for one year doing general work and also doing some six months of social work-based or some kind of social activities.
Again, you look at the website of the place you're interested in and see what the requirements are, but you cannot assume, apart from traditional universities, you can't assume that you walk into a University of Applied Sciences and just start immediately after finishing school. It doesn't work that way.
So the interesting thing about Swiss university is if you come from abroad or you come from a private school, you only need six subjects to get in. And this is something that's quite unfair for the locals, Swiss pupils that have been in the, you know, the public schools. You only have to have six rather than the full 12. For example, they don't think that you should need to have three languages, two languages would be enough. Things like that. And that's good to keep in mind.
And Swiss Universities website gives you a lot of information on this. You can come from abroad or you can come from a private school in Switzerland and still get into Swiss university with six subjects.
Daniel: And moving on, one question that I wanted to get your opinion on. If during primary or secondary school, a family would like to speak with the school about a topic, what would be the best way to approach that? What would be the best way for parents to work together with the school?
Margaret: Yes, I think making an appointment is the best way. There is very little informal contact, you know, just through dropping the kid off, because they don't really want to see you even in the school playground, playground, never mind the school classroom. So you don't have informal contact naturally, so it's better to make an appointment to see the teacher if there's something coming up.
Or if it's something small, you can also write email or phone. I think it's good to ask what the teacher prefers. Some teachers might want to just talk on the phone, others might want to do email. So ask how they would like to communicate. Sometimes you've got these kind of notebooks for messages back and forwards and you can check the notebook every day and see if the teacher has written anything to you. That can be quite efficient for low-key things. You could just write a question.
But I find it quite good, we used to, in primary school because I didn't understand the system, we used to just make an appointment somewhere into the autumn term around about October. I would just say ‘could we have a meeting with you just to chat,’ or maybe September, I don't remember anymore, but you know just to chat about how our daughter's getting on.
And things came up through that, like the teacher said in the second class, she's reading very quietly. She's afraid of making mistakes. She won't speak up when she's reading. And the teacher was worried about this that she would develop some kind of complex through it.
And then the next thing was the teacher gave them all a double page to read, to practice reading at home. And I think that was deliberate partly so my daughter wouldn't worry about making mistakes. And then I practiced it with her in the living room, first of all. She read it out to me and then I sent her to the hall or I went to the hall and then she read it again and then we were between the bedroom and the living room and then between the balcony and the bedroom, and she was shouting across the house with this, you know, the bit of reading.
And then when she went into school, the teacher took them all separately into a different room, recorded everybody reading and nearly jumped out of her skin when our daughter yelled her texts. So kind of cured her and it was like teamwork in that sense that you know, the teacher, but it was only because we asked for an appointment that we learned this information. And then the teacher said: "Let's do this little game at home."
Kathrin: Okay. Thank you, Margaret. And I think that's a wrap for this episode of the Swiss School System podcast. In the next episode, we're going to talk about children with different abilities, for example, those who need support and the support system and how parents can help them thrive and get the most out of the school system.
Margaret and Daniel, thank you for this insightful discussion. And we’ll see you in the next episode!
Margaret: Thank you!
Daniel: Thanks very much!