Oslo Free School

A very cold ‘hej’ from Oslo!


After an extremely weird dinner of mashed potatoes and soup preceded by a healthy day of doughnuts, tonnes of tea and chocolate, I thought I’d sit down to tell you about my Norwegian experience. The hostel is really nice, although quite far away from the city centre, and it is literally freezing. It has not snowed (yet) but yesterday everything was frozen when I left the hostel in the morning. Although I have ‘already’ been here more than 48 hours, is seems like the time has flown by. Unfortunately I have to say that that was not just because Oslo is so amazing but also because I had to spend at least half of that time asleep in bed. I already felt quite ill when I left Cambridge on Wednesday but told myself not be a wuss- and here I am now will a full blown flue. At least I had a whole day at the democratic school yesterday and the experience was amazing!

Overall, the Oslo democratic school, or Nyskolen, caters for students age 7 to 16 and has around100 students, divided in two buildings. The lower School has 60 students, split up in three groups: yellow (year 1 and 2), orange (3 and 4) and red (5 to 7). The two younger groups have around 10 kids each while the red group has around 40, however it has three teachers who are all responsible for the group at the same time, so basically the teacher-student ratio is the same. The upper school has 40 students, split up between year 8 to 10. After year 10, Norwegian children go to the ‘Gymnasium’ were they are able to specialise a little bit.

School begins at 8.30am and finishes at 3pm. The days are divided in the morning meeting, four lessons and three breaks including a one hour lunch break. Children are encouraged to go into the nearby park and play but everybody can just do what they like. Lunch is served in the individual classrooms and again children can where, when and how much they want to eat. Food is prepared in the kitchen by a teacher with the help of three students who swap every day. Teachers come from all walks of life: All class teachers are trained either as Waldorf, Montessori or state school teachers, but teaching assistants don’t need qualifications.

A lot of the children have transferred from other schools becausethey were victims of bullying or were unable to deal with the way the schools and/or the system tried to fit them in certain boxes. The school also has special classes for new students to explain to them which opportunities are open to them and how they can influence the everyday life of the school. Many of the students commute up to an hour every day and a lot of them also stay up to two hours after school to spend time with their friends or the teachers who clean up and plan their lessons. Mona explained to me how one important part of the school is the social time the kids can spend together- school here is about community.

Weeks in the upper school are split up in projects including work experience, outdoor weeks and even two times four weeks a year which are called the ‘boring period’ and mirror the strict curriculum of a ‘normal’ school. This enables students to try a variety of ways and this system has proved very successful in the last five years. The lower school also has project works which includes music and art. At the moment, the topic is Edvard Munch, a famous Norwegian painter (You might know ‘The Scream’). In both the upper and lower school, Maths, Norwegian and English are basically taught every day. There are no ‘private’ schools in Norway, every school has to be connected to the state system. As a result, the school is 85% state funded, with parents paying around 90 pounds a month for which the children are also provided with a hot lunch, and has to follow the national curriculum. After growing up with the stereotype of how amazing Scandinavian schooling is, it was a little bit of a shock to my system to hear how tightly everything is controlled by the state and that a socialist society also means that every school should be the same and offer the same structures. Homeschooling is forbidden and every school has to be approved by the state. Initiatives like in the UK, with parents founding their own schools and private companies paying for charter schools, are not allowed- for better or for worse.

While there are around 100 Waldorf Schools, ca 40 Montessori schools and many Jenaplan schools, the democratic school is the only one of its kind in Norway and remains a spot of bother to the state system. The only way it has managed to survive in the last years is to keep to state legislation, follow the national curriculum (in one way or another) and assign tests twice a year. However, there is no homework and at the heart of the school philosophy is love and respect for each other.

I might sound a little bit like the prospectus here, but I immediately felt the difference when I arrived in the morning. I had been given a lovely guide, Mona, who took me to the school meeting and had lots of time to chat. Everybody was very friendly and a lot of the kids were really happy to talk to me- in English! All of them said how much they enjoyed their time at the school and that they would never go back to the state system. What some of them especially liked was the fact that the students often helped each other in the lessons and that the age difference did not really matter. I was also free to have a look at the different classes and year groups, hang out in the kitchen, talk to lots of teachers and just spend time with the children. The student-staff relationship could not have been more different from a normal school: The teachers knew all of the kids’ names and treated them very much like they were all a big family. Coming from a British school, I was astonished to see teachers touching students- scandalous! :-) Imagine, I also took pictures without being threatened to be taken to court.

Although I would not say that the school is democratic in the strict sense of the Summerhill model as children have to attend fixed lessons, it is still very much child centred and children have the opportunity to change the way the school is run. Every morning the two parts of the school meet up to discuss the plan for the day. Any child and adult are free to report any personal news and everybody has to wait for their turn to speak. Once a week, the whole school meets up to discuss any issues that have come up over the last days and children have the chance to request projects and feedback on lessons. It was really interesting to see how the school adapts to the state system in order to stay open and yet finds ways to give power to students.

I had planned to go back to the school today and have a look at two English lessons at the Upper School, but unfortunately my flue made is pretty much impossible. I felt so bad today that I was barely able to leave the bed, not even talking about enjoying Oslo, but I am still glad I came. It comes to show that there is nothing that can replace the real life experience of such an amazing place. Thanks to Ryanair’s super cheap flights I really hope to come back for a few days some time in the next months and experience some more everyday life in this lovely community! Hopefully this is just the first of many free and democratic schools which I will visit in the next months and years.

More thoughts on the school and its structure and pictures tomorrow when I am back home!

PS: Digressing from the topic a little bit: last Saturday before the film festival meeting, I went to the concert of the University of Cambridge Chamber Orchestra. They were playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concertos in E minor and I have been listening to the concertos these past four days. I have to say that they go very well with Oslo and the cold. Just like the Kings of Leon clearly recorded their last album to be listening to on the Parisian Metro at night :-)

Finally some adventures abroad again! :-)

I have really missed the Paris/travelling bits that I was posting over the summer, so here is one blog entry about all of the amazing things that are happening away from Cambridge and the UK.

So, lets start off fairly close to 'home', in Southampton! It is half term and I am down for the weekend since my film friends invited me to come and stay with them. It is so nice to have meals with friends, talk about films and drink some wine together- how I had missed that! Hampshire is beautiful in autumn and I walked down to the old Southampton walls with my friend Sam yesterday. In a way, it is also quite nice to get a break from education. I still have an essay to write until the end of the week and of course will get back to my studies in the next days, but it is so refreshing to talk about films and other stuff. It's a little bit like I opened the window to my brain and let lots of fresh air in :-)

Around midday, I will be travelling back up and tomorrow I am off to Oslo! I had booked the flights back in September when Ryanair had an offer and got them for £15 return which is amazing! Of course I will need to pay for the hostel, food and the transport from and to the airports, but that is just about doable. The trip will give me the opportunity to visit the Democratic school there. This is the first time that I am actually able to see one after doing the tonnes of reading in the last months and I am pretty excited as you can imagine. What awaits me? Chaos? Community? Structure in any way? I am a little bit worried about not being able to speak Norwegian but lets hope that somebody will be able to explain stuff to me in German, English or French. Will keep you updated :-) The google weather forecast promises snow!!

There are at least two more exciting journey for me in the next months which are education related: The International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) in April in Tel-Aviv, for which I should really book tickets now, and then of course the AERO conference in Albany in June. Now that I am officially a presenter (click here to see that I am right :-P) I have a proper reason to interview people about their education experience and hopefully will also be able to visit a few more alternative schools in the next months. I just wish I had more money!

My youngest sister is 15 and she just took part in an exchange program with a school near Chicago which I also did at her age. A group of German students visits for almost four weeks in autumn and the Americans come to Germany the following summer. Although I did not get on brilliantly with my host-sister at the time, I really enjoyed the experience and I think in one way or another it definitely influenced me to come to the UK just half a year later. Just being able to speak English in a real, valid context was pretty amazing. In a way, learning a language is one of the few things you can truly apply once you leave school- and yet very few people actually value it. Anyway, to add a little bit sensation to the blog: My sister got swine flue and I was really worried that she might not be able to take the flight home with everybody else. However, everything is ok now! :-) Also on the topic of exchanges, Alex Blagona, a very actively blogging MFL teacher up in Suffolk, gives his opinion about heallth and safety issues in UK school exchanges here. His blog is really well worth reading so have a look if you have a spare second.

So, I better get up now and meet a few more friends before I have to go back up to 'the North'.

Happy 'half term' everybody! :-)

PS: After the foundation of the National Student Film Association (NSFA) in June, I am now involved in the starting up of a big Student Film Festival in Cambridge. I have fantastic ideas for it and with all of the resources and the reputation the uni has to offer, this could be the first international festival of the UK. Super exciting stuff! Hopefully, I am going to start a new blog as soon as things get going properly to update you and use it as a documentatio for other students who want to start their own festivals. I wrote a 5 page abstract yesterday on what you have to think about and what we did with SoFi, the University of Southampton Film Festival, and I am eager to get as many students inspired to take the initiative as possible. It is a little bit like schools starting, just on the side of film :-)

Responses to the Primary Review and a defining moment in my teacher training

Oh man, so much is happening at the moment, I don't know where to begin. The only problem of my course being so rich is that, unless I post something every day, you will end up with super long blog posts- I promise I will try to be concise today :-)

So, first a quick update about my PGCE and what is going on in my life. Today, we were handed back our first assignment (a report on the use of Target Language in the MFL classroom) and I received super positive feedback which makes me really happy. It's funny that something which was considered a weakness in my first degree, having and expressing your own personal opinion and relating data to your work, is now suddenly a strength a lot of other people from the course have trouble with. Further, today was also a good day, because I heard that my workshop proposal for the AERO conference 2010 in Albany, New York got accepted!! My article on the last conference was just published a few days ago in the AERO magazine and I am extremely excited to be chosen to hold a workshop- only have of the proposals that were submitted got accepted! I am going to talk about the alternative education network in Europe and there is hopefully going to be a discussion on how we can bring the different branches and the states closer together.

I had a pretty interesting weekend with lots of time with my friends, a bit of Pilates, going out and enjoying the gorgeous autumn weather here in Cambridge. Somehow, I ended up at the market place Sunday evening and hear people singing in a beautiful church nearby. I am not a Christian but sang in a church choir in Germany many many years and could not resist having a peak inside. As it is the habit in churches I was ushered inside and sat down before I could say no and although I was not too excited about being stuck in the middle of a church service I must say that it was a pretty powerful experience to sing again with hundreds of people and be part of a community, even if I knew nobody there and in a way was only pretending to be part of the group. I should really get involved in one of the uni choirs- it was such a peaceful end of the week! :-)

Oh dear, but I digress! Let's get down to the dirty business. A couple of newspapers have posted comments on the Primary Review and they range from agreement to outrage. Minette Marrin from the Sunday times blames the 'low attainment' of British students on bad teachers and argues that it does not make a difference at which age children go to school. As a teacher, I am of course quite angry about a comment like that- the situation is much to complex to blame one party involved!- but on the other hand have to agree partially: yes, education can be made or break with the teacher. Ironically, Ed Balls, the UK schools' secretary, announced plans today to encourage parents to send their children to school with four years of age!! This is, and I quote, so that children can 'hit the ground running' and to 'close the gap on their peers'. What the hell!? How can you send children to school with the attitude that they are already behind? The two brain sides of human beings are not even properly connected until the age of six!

In one way, today's university seminar on assessment had quite a drastic impact on how I see the UK's education system and this day will go into the books as the moment when I decided not to work in the English state system. This is because firstly, teachers are only encouraged to teach students how to pass exams. Everything depends on how 'students' perform and if they don't do well, eg don't meet the exam criteria, they are seen as a failure and so is the teacher. Secondly, students are only graded on how much of the subject knowledge they are able to cram in their heads. Whereas 50% of the overall grade in any subject at German schools is 'oral', ie the teacher continuously the students' effort during the lessons, nothing like this exists in the UK. Nobody cares if you work hard: It is only the mark at the exam that counts. This is extremely sad and although I am still enjoying my course and the teaching, this is not a system I want to support in the future! The PGCE will give a great range of fantastic skills and will be fantastic for opening up opportunities in the future but I can't wait to get involved with alternative education! :-)

Another thing that was discussed widely in this weekend's newspapers is the idea off the British government supporting small schools which are being founded by parents who can not afford to send their children to private schools and are outraged about the standard of the state schools near them. These new schools might be able to get funding from the state and will be tied to the following of the National Curriculum. Somehow this whole movement has been connected to the Montessori schools but I have honestly no clue how the two groups are linked- there are already many Montessori schools in the UK and surely no untrained parents can just open a school like that? More investigation to follow! In general I think it is a great scheme that should give parents a great deal of autonomy in the education of their children within the local community.

In the Sunday Times I also read an article about Fleur Britten, a 21 year old student at Oxford who was home educated. It's amazing to hear how she just learned about what she wanted and now has a skill a lot of other students of our generation are missing: Knowing what you like! The organisation that connects many homeschooling families in the UK is Education Otherwise and I am excited to get in touch with them in the next months in preparation for my AERO workshop.

I am sorry if the blog reads a little bit like a newspaper reviews- it is rare that I find the time to read stuff properly and I thought you might be interested in a few quick updates about what is going on in the world of education in Britain! :-) On a last thought, yesterday a few friends and I were talking about schools reflecting the local society and culture we live in. It is a micro-cosmos in itself but surely every school should prepare children for the world that is waiting for them once they leave the school. This is quite an exciting thought for me because it is yet another reason for the idea that exams in schools is wrong: When do you ever take an exam outside of an educational context?

I hope you had a good start into the week! :-)

Another exciting review and my first lessons

After talking about the Nuffield Review at the beginning of the week, there was another paper published yesterday which makes me think that the UK education system is changing in major ways. After six years of research, Cambridge published a big Primary School Review which is really rather exciting and, as the BBC news say, 'could change British Primary Schools forever'. The report focuses on life, work and learning in primary school and makes 75 recommendations to the state, some of them more radical than others.

Interestingly, its main avocation is the abolishment of simplified rules and prejudices that govern primar school life everywhere in the UK, eg testing vs non-testing, schools starting age four vs age six, curriculum imposition vs total freedom. The review argues that a balance has to be found for each individual child. If a child wants to learn how to read at 4 it should be encouraged but not forced to. It supports a school starting age of 6 but also encourages the observation of the maturity of the individual child. Learning should be assessed but not in exams but ongoing teacher observation of progress. According to the recommendations of the report, league table should be scrapped, SATs abolished and the status of primary schools and its teachers raised as they provide the ground work for the society we live in. You can find the findings here .

All in all, it looks amazing. I only went to school with 7 (!) and really think that my parents made the right decision at the time and I truly enjoyed being able to play with my friends at the Kindergarten a year longer! Getting rid of exams is always a good idea, especially for students the age of 10, and as a teacher of course I support the idea that schools and education should be more valued- almost every teacher is going to tell you that he/she is overworked and underpaid, even the good ones. Now the question is, as with the Nuffield review, which of these ideas are actually going to be implemented and how Primary Schools, parents, teachers and especially students are going to react to it. The intentions might be great but many people are strongly opposed to change and find the idea of not being able to assess children's knowledge on paper very frightening!

As an example, on Thursday, we had a school briefing on the introduction of diplomas, which offer Year 10 students the chance to learn about a special subject are in an applied way, and offered teachers the chance to completely rewrite their assessment standards. Theoretically, they would have been able to assess students enthusiasm, commitment, skills and progress and not the knowledge that they had gathered over the time of a few weeks. However, none of the teachers were able to see this new policy as a possibility, for them it is just more paperwork which nobody was happy about. Of course I understand that after teacher for years and years, having to deal with new policies every year or so and not being able to have true freedom because of government regulations can tire you out but that does not mean that you should lose the will or broad sight to want to change things- in my book at least! These teachers and administrators are so stuck in their way of seeing eduction that they are not even willing to consider more holistic alternatives- which ironically the national curriculum is implementing more and more of!

On Wednesday and Thursday I also taught my first proper lessons, very exciting. Almost as expected, the second one went better than the first and I even got a round of applause from my students- after teaching the time in German of all things :-) I would say that both of the lessons were way too teacher focused and that I am also praising too much, but at least I know what to concentrate on in the next lessons. Now that I am actually in the classroom almost every day, I am looking forward to trying out all of my exciting ideas. However, I have also learned that you have take one step after the other and that just the fact of taking the register in the middle of the lesson rather than at the end can already confuse my students immensely!!

My first lesson, the Nuffield Review and lots of love :-)

I have been quite lazy with my blogging in the last weeks and really need to make myself sit down and write an update on what is going on! When I started this, I promised myself I would not become like the other bloggers who write posts every few weeks or months- there is too much interesting stuff going on in my life to not share it :-P Unfortunately, talking about the excitement, that of course also means that a lot of my time is spend actually doing stuff rather than reporting on it and when I get home (late on most days) I am happy just to have a hot chocolate in bed rather than get my evaluation hat on and make an effort :-)

So, by now I am into PGCE week 5- unbelievable! There is just another week and a half until half term and soon it's going to be Christmas (or so the shops want us to believe :-). Tomorrow, I am finally teaching my first proper session at my school and it is quite exciting, if also tedious, to plan 60 minutes in detail. I am not really used to this kind of lesson planning and really need to discipline myself to go beyond a few notes on a piece of paper! Tomorrow will also be extra strange, because I have not taught at all at the school yet and will be thrown into the deep end; my mentor is at a conference and basically left me with her Year 10 German class. I am really looking forward to the challenge, and explicitly asked for it, and hope I can live up to the expectations!

Otherwise, the PGCE is going well. We had to hand in our first assignment on Friday which consisted of a 1000 word essay on the use of target language in the classroom. Our second one, 2000 words on inductive grammar teaching , is due in the week after half term and today we already had a preparation lecture for the third one which is the same all across the different PGCE disciplines. I find the work load very doable, but then should probably make more of an effort to file things correctly and plan a little bit better.

The most interesting thing this week was the reading of the Nuffield Review which recommends a more holistic education for the 14 to 19 year olds all across the British comprehensive schools. You can find the paper here. It is always great to see how alternative education ideas are implemented into the National Curriculum or Scheme of Work, however, I am very aware that it is not just the paper work that needs to change but the way learning is accessed. As long as schools work towards exams, the best ideas will not be implemented and democratic education is impossible!

In two weeks time I am off to Oslo and will hopefully also have the chance to drop in at the democratic school. I have never seen one and it would be great to have a look around and experience democratic education in action. The only problem is really going to be the language barrier as I don't know any Norwegian. Let's hope that Oslo lives up to its great language reputation! :-)

On a finishing note, my friend Steve and I were visited this weekend by our Student Robotics friends from Southampton and we went punting on the Cam, to the cinema and a nice Italian restaurant in Cambridge, called 'Clowns'. Overall, I also cooked for 12 different people over the course of the weekend and had a fantastic time. The two and a half days really showed me again how happy it make me to have friends around and I am now tempted more than ever to chose my place of work for next year in a place where my friends are living. All you need is love :-D