La Escuela de Lancaster, located in the Southern suburbs of Mexico City, is an interesting place to work. To start with, the school and most of the people in it, are bilingual Spanish/English. Students take Mexican History, Mathematics and, of course, Spanish, in Spanish. The sciences, Geography European History and English, in English. They also learn French and the brighter students have a good conversational level of French when they finish up in year 12.
The parents literally own and operate the school. They have a meeting once a year to decide fees, wages, money for resources and the general direction of the school. Complicating some things and making others easier is the fact that the school operates all the way from pre kinder to upper 6, which is to say that we have students from ages 4 to 19. The early years (4 to 12 years old) are at one site and the older kids at another. Parents are heavily involved at the primary school but seem to lose interest when their children go on to high school. On parent teacher night at the high school we run a book to see how many visitors each teacher will get and the average is below 3. Crazy when we each teach some 250 children. This is lucky for me because I teach at the high school and don’t really want people looking over my shoulder, but it makes no sense whatsoever. In the grand scheme of life, who cares what marks a child gets in fourth grade, but how they go in their International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and A levels – that really matters and can influence the course of their whole life.
The ethos of the school has always been on development of healthy happy people, but the IGCSE grades have traditionally been quite low. Recent changes have brought with them a big change though and last year’s batch of kids scored much much higher than any in the history of the school. The changes that brought this about would make an interesting study and I might/should have a crack at doing this.
This year is the first year that the school is offering the International Baccalaureate (IB). It will be interesting to see how it goes. The ethos of the IB certainly gels well with that of the school and the students seem quite keen to take it on.
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