Swiss School- German School

[salu]

Is there anybody who has experience with the Swiss School? We are moving to Singapore in April and are currently deciding if we send our kids to the Swiss or German Europeaen School (eurosec). As we are both German and Austlalian citizen we would like our children to go to a school where they learn both languages at the same time. Is there another school that would offer that? Thanks

[happigal]

I don't have experience with either school, but I did have a look at their websites and visited the German school.

The European section of the German school's main medium of instruction is English and teaches German as a second language. The Swiss school, I believe, teaches only in Swiss German with English as a second language.

Most International Schools teach in English and offer German as a second language (OFS springs to mind, but I don't know about the others).

Hope this helps.

[salu]

Thanks for the tip with OFS. Last time i looked it up i didn't see the site where tey talked about another language.
Is there anybody with experience of the OFS?

[Two Ton Tony]

Realising this is an old thread but recognising others with similar questions may come along here's my comparison based on :
GESS - 1 in KK and 1 in Not-De stream. 2009-2011
SSiS - 2 in Not-Very-DE stream 2011-present day

GESS is a big beast school with 1,500 pupils in two locations (one is changing). The school has two streams (basically DE-IB and Learning-DE-IB). It's got a good reputation but poor results in Singapore and doesn't have a lot of staff that stick around for long. The two location strategy is painful and we never really felt satisfied with the education standards to be honest. Ultimately we pulled our kids out of GESS for a variety of reasons but it was probably lots of little reasons, price hikes with no justification, lousy lousy admin, unsatisfactory interaction, promises made and denied (which I thought was just a Swiss thing!).

SSiS was a snap decision of ours at the end of one term of being screwed about. It is a smaller campus of around 400, cheaper by some 25% and better than GESS by some way, though like GESS, makes lousy admin decisions based entirely around your being a single working parent family. Ideally with 1 child and non working wife of course. This is of course Swiss norm and so I forgive them their country ways. The curriculum is Swiss and the school only takes the kids up to about age 11 at which point they are auto enrolled into UWC (look it up under "The school that God made" or "the school that God wished he'd made" - it has something of a reputation... Ask me in 2016).

In closing, I know several families that have moved their kids to SSiS from GESS and only one that moved the other way. But everyone has their own reasons and you should do your own research and not listen to idle gossip.