Review of Victoria Shanghai Academy

  1. #1

    Join Date
    Sep 2004
    Location
    HK
    Posts
    29

    Review of Victoria Shanghai Academy

    VSA is a bilingual (English/Putonghua) IB through school that encourages balanced kids (no excessive homework for the kids), but at the same time with enough academic push that the kids are not completely left in the dust when competing against local kids. They offer 50/50 English & Putonghua split, and have two homeroom teachers (a native English speaker and a Chinese teacher). The maximum class size is 29, however, we are lucky enough that in my son's grade level it's only 24-25 kids, so that's about a 12.5/1 ratio for the most part.

    The school has hired new principals for the past few years. Two years ago, they hired a new primary principal, and last year a new secondary principal. Both principals have been very active in bringing about changes to the school to strengthen the curriculum and to communicate better with the parents. The school also provides seminars for the parents to learn about the IB programs, and the PTA sponsors coffee morning each school year so that the parents can listen to what changes the principal has in mind and to get to know which direction the school is headed. We also get to meet the teachers around beginning of the term where they brief us on what is expected of the kids and what their work loads will be like so we can know what to expect.

    The parents also have opportunities to be involved with the kids through volunteer work like the reading mum/dad program when you can choose to go to the library on your appointed day and read to the kids either in English or Chinese.

    Of course, no school is perfect, VSA also experiences growing pains and can sometimes be disorganized, however, we find that overall, our son is happy in school, and he is eager to go to school, I can't ask much more than that.

    Last edited by GeoTommy; 03-10-2011 at 02:08 PM. Reason: Moved from "Review Your School and WIN!"