I had the chance to teach at one of the European Schools in Brussels, as a seconded teacher by the Romanian Ministry of Education. European Schools were established in 1953, with the aim of ensuring education in the mother tongue of the children of staff employed in the Community institutions. The regulatory framework for the functioning of these public education institutions, established as an educational system, is ensured by international legislation, assumed by the Community states, based on the Convention defining the Statute of the European School, signed in Luxembourg on 17 August 1994, and on the Regulations of the European Schools.
Currently, there are 14 Type I European Schools, located in seven Member States, of which 4 are in Brussels, and another 12 Type II European Schools (international schools that comply with the operating principles of the European Schools), located in five other Member States.
The European Schools System is characterized by multiculturalism and plurilingualism, has its own curriculum and a form of summative assessment at the end of schooling – the European Baccalaureate.
The Romanian section was established in 2013 only at the European School of Brussels IV, where I also teach due to the large number of Romanian students and at the initiative of the parents. In the other European schools, due to the small number of students, Romanian children have the status of SWALS – students without a linguistic section, enrolled in one of the basic sections: English, French or German, but who study Romanian language and literature as their main language (L1).
The European Schools are divided into three cycles: kindergarten which lasts 2 years (M1 and M2), primary education which lasts 5 years (P1-P5) and secondary education which lasts 7 years (S1-S7).
In the lower secondary education cycle S1-S3 (corresponding to grades 6, 7 and 8 in Romania), biology is not studied as a separate subject, but a subject called Integrated Sciences is studied, which brings together biology, chemistry and physics and has a framework of 4 hours per week for all levels. The school curriculum is designed in such a way that the three subjects are studied integratedly throughout all three years, without going into too many scientific details, without going into depth, thus creating a general culture for students that will be useful later in the upper secondary education cycle S4-S7 (corresponding to grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 in Romania).
In the upper secondary education cycle, sciences are no longer taught integratedly, but are independent subjects, being compulsory only in the first two years, grades S4 and S5, where, in the framework plan, they are included with 2 hours per week. From S6, students can choose the subjects they study, if they have a minimum of 31 hours per week and a maximum of 35 hours per week. From the point of view of biology, students can choose to study biology in depth with 4 hours per week or they can choose not to study it at all. In the case of students who do not choose any of the three sciences from S6, they are required to study the Science , Technology and Society (STS) discipline, a discipline with 2 hours per week that aims to form the 8 key competences in students with the help of science, technology themes and their integration in different contexts of everyday life.
In the European Schools, the assessment is different from that in Romania. In the lower secondary cycle, grades are given in letters (as in the American system) from A which represents the highest grade (between 9 and 10) to Fx which is the lowest grade (between 0 and 3). However, in the upper cycle, the grades are exactly like in the Romanian educational system, from 0 to 10.
At the end of each semester, all students in lower secondary education will have a letter grade in their school report that represents a summary of the student’s activity in class throughout the entire semester. Students in the upper cycle will have two grades in their school report: grade A, which represents the arithmetic average of the student’s entire class activity during the semester (homework, answers given in class, tests, projects, etc.) and grade B, which represents the grade in an exam (a kind of thesis) that students take in December and June, respectively, which includes the material from the entire semester and is taken in all the subjects that the student is studying. In addition to the two reports (at the end of the first semester and at the end of the second semester), two other reports are drawn up in the middle of the two semesters (the autumn report and the spring report) in order to inform parents and students of their progress and to guide them towards a better result at the end of the semester. These two reports contain only one grade, grade A, respectively.
All these notes and reports are centralized in a digital application called SMS (School Management System), there is no physical catalog. In this application, you can find all the classes, student lists, each one’s schedule, but also the parents’ contact details. You can also send messages directly to parents, add all the homework given to students, reserve a specific classroom in case of need, take attendance and add for each lesson its subject and details (as a rule).
As previously mentioned, at the end of the schooling cycles of the European Schools, S7 students take a European Baccalaureate exam, after which they will obtain an internationally recognized diploma. As part of this exam, students must take 5 written tests and 3 oral tests. Of the written tests, the mother tongue and mathematics are mandatory, and the other 3 are their options (they choose from the subjects they have studied in the last two years at an intensive level – 4 hours per week, which may include biology), and for the oral tests they are required to take their mother tongue, and the other 2 are subjects that they can choose from all those studied in the last two years. The European Baccalaureate grade is an average of all grades obtained in the exams (both written and oral), the two A grades (semester I and semester II) obtained in the last year of study (S7) and the grades from the pre-Baccalauréat, an exam that students take in January of S7 in all the subjects they studied intensively in S6 and S7. The condition for passing the European Baccalaureate exam is that the average of all the grades is greater than or equal to 5.00.
The biggest difference of teaching in the Romanian section of the European Schools is the lack of textbooks designed according to the European Schools curriculum. As I mentioned before, the school curriculum differs from that in Romania, and students need a course support that we design by consulting English and French textbooks from other countries, translating and adapting the concepts in these textbooks to the level of the students in the classroom.
In terms of science teaching, a huge advantage would be the presence of laboratories and laboratory technicians who can prepare all the necessary materials with a prior order. Schools are very well equipped in terms of teaching material, so learning through the experimental method is much easier to apply, facilitating the teaching-learning-evaluation process.
In conclusion, the European Schools System is a completely different school system from the one in Romania, with advantages and disadvantages, based on transdisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity and plurilingualism , opening doors to students to all universities in the world.