KCIS VS ESF

prettymama888

Can anyone give me some comments on both schools, KCIS VS ESF?

I have applied both for my son for his primary 1, however, I just want to have more understanding about these two schools on below criteria:

1) Teaching method, whether they teach Chinese?  As I heard KCIS is teaching traditional Chinese while ESF is teaching simple Chinese.  

2) Roughly how many % of foreigner in each school?

3) Quantity of Homework? Both schools have no daily homework?

4) Any tutoring is needed?  I don't want to let my kid gets in local school because I feel bad on HK education scheme about quantity of homework, 7 to 8 pieces of homework daily + tutoring is normal for local school, how about KCIS and ESF? do you need to enroll any class like maths, Chinese, painting, etc for your kids?

thank you so much for all your reply~~~

koala_xin

My gal in KCIS year 3:
1. Same Chines textbook as local. But I guess they progress slowly and skip some contents. 1 simple dictation per two weeks.
2. Not much westerners, don't know the exact percentage
3. 1 homework book per week, only 5 pages
4. I don't have tutoring, but I guess it depends on the expectation of parents

marcuseunis

kcis每日有中文工課的

Mom2One

My son is in Year 2 at an ESF school (Glenealy) and they have Mandarin lessons 3 times a week, learning simplified characters. His school (being rather small with only 60 students for year group) streams into 2 levels - Near Native and Chinese as Second Language streams, depending on the abilities of the student.  My son is in the Near Native Stream and we definitely supplement with extra Chinese tutoring outside of school.

There is not much homework assigned to the lower Years (higher years have more).  My son gets a daily English reader as well as a weekly homework assignment (which can be finished in anywhere from 10-30 mins).

I believe ESF schools - depending on the catchment - vary greatly in terms of the nationality of their students.  My son's school which is in the Midlevels have a high percentage of westerners (in fact, there are equal number of caucasian and Chinese students in the school according to Glenealy's 2013 annual report - out of 360 students in the whole school, there are 92 Chinese, 98 Caucasian, 66 Eurasian, 62 Indian  - being the 4 predominant ethnicities).  But I believe you will find greater proportions of Chinese students in other ESF catchments (eg. Quarry Bay school or Kennedy school on HK island).

In terms of extra tutoring, I think it's up to you.  I know families that supplement with extra maths and Chinese (we do with our son - mainly private Chinese tutoring and e.nopi) but many other families don't.

One thing you should be aware of is that ESF schools can vary greatly between catchments.  What is true of one ESF school may not apply to a different ESF school. If you are interested in ESF, you should definitely talk to parents whose child goes to the ESF school in your catchment.

Hope this helps!