School life - Swedish style

As I dropped Kai off at Björkhagens School earlier in the week, I got to thinking about whether I would be able to explain the school system here to English-speaking friends and realised that I lacked a lot of the necesary terminology.

Interestingly enough, when one is functioning in two languages, it's very easy to compartmentalize different areas of one's life linguistically. I can talk about school-life in Swedish but never have had to do so in English,so until now, I've never thought about what things would be called.

Of course the school systems in different couuntries vary a lot so there quite simply are not exact English equivalents for some of the things that we have here in Sweden. And then all I had to go on were my own experiences of Cannon Lane Primary School, thousands of years ago, and I suspected that things had moved on a little since then.

So I took the liberty of picking Clare Craig's brains about this (Thankyou Clare!) to try to get up to speed with how things are in the UK today. It seems that perhaps less has changed than I might have thought but during the Labour government some developments have taken place that make English schools a little more like those in Sweden.

As a child born in 2003, Kai is now in reception year. He has lessons during the morning starting at 8.10 and then in the afternoon there are different activities for the children until their parents come to pick them up. Usually this is between 16.00 and 17.00 but they can stay as late as 18.00.

My first stumbling block was what to call the staff who are responsible for these.The official translation of their job title ( from the Ministry of Education no less)is leisure-time pedagogues or recreational instructors. It's a literal translation and I think it's awful.

What's your job?

I'm a leisure-time pedagogue.
No, I don't think so!

For a start, pedagogue is far too grand and high-faluting. Also the name suggests that they give courses about leisure time.
The title just doesn't explain in an adequate way what they do.

Clare suggested that the nearest English term was teaching assistant and I do like that a lot more.Johanna,Fredrik and Tony and their colleagues don't just organise games and activities. They also assist pedagogically in the class room with group work and one day a week are actually responsible for all the teaching content. (And a wonderful job they do too!)

Here comes one of the major differences between the Swedish and English systems. For the younger kids, the leisure time/activity centre (for which the teaching assistants work) has a very central role. Parents are able to drop their children off their early in the morning from 7.00 on their way to work and,as mentioned, can pick up until 18.00.

Clare tells me that there has been a move in this direction in English schools which now provide breakfast and after-school clubs,thus enabling parents to work longer days. These are run by playleaders who usually have no formal teacher training.

So maybe the gap betweenthe two systems in narrowing somewhat?