Visit of Dutch Students

In February we were visited by some students from Thomas A Kempis , a girls’  school in Arnhem in the Netherlands. They were completing a project on the English Education System and came to look at how we do things at Cardinal Heenan. They simply chose our school from a number of websites they had accessed. One thing they didn’t glean from our website is the fact that we are until KS 5 an all boys school. This came as something of a surprise to them!! Here is part of their report………”ah would the Lord the giftie gi us to see ourselves as others see us” (Robert Burns). By the way I am the “Leslie” mentioned in the report.

The photographs show the students in the Radio City studio, testing our fingerprint system in a lesson and talking to members of the Student Council.

Mr L.Stewart

Students Report

Our visit to Liverpool (this is what we literally told our classmates)
The idea was to find the differences between the English and Dutch school system and we thought it would be fun if we could visit a real English school. After writing a lot of emails to different schools in Liverpool, we chose Liverpool because our teacher of English and our mentor had lived in Liverpool for a year, we got a response from Leslie Stewart from the Cardinal Heenan Sport College. He was happy to welcome us in the school. When Leslie understood the idea of our project, we picked a date and booked a flight to Liverpool. We stayed at the YHA hostel in Liverpool. Once we landed in Liverpool and got to meet Leslie he told us that Cardinal Heenan is an ‘all boys school’. We were very surprised to hear that because we didn’t know that. Therefore it was very strange to walk through a school with only boys.
We’ve spend two days at Cardinal Heenan, were we experienced a lot of things; we attended a Spanish class, we had an interview with a student who showed us the sports fields from the college, we made a lot of pictures, we were able to try the food from the canteen, we got a chance to talk to the students from the schools counsel and Leslie gave us a tour through the whole building.
A PE teacher from Cardinal Heenan also teaches at a Primary School in Liverpool, so she gave us the opportunity to attend her lesson at the Primary School. We were able to speak with the younger children.
It was all in all a very interesting experience for us and we learned a lot about the English school system.
Besides our visits to the school Leslie also gave us a city tour. Leslie arranged an interview on the radio for us, were we talked about our visit to Liverpool and the Cardinal Heenan College.

The English school system
At this point we explained the English school system to our class.

Cardinal Heenan Sport College
In this part we described the interior of the school and we told about the chapel, the fingerprint system and the canteen. We also told our class that English students eat warm lunches at lunch break, in The Netherlands we eat sandwiches during the break.
We also told them about our visit at the Spanish class and that the students were very quiet during that lesson.
We told about the uniforms and what the students think about that. During our visit to the college we find out that the opinions about that matter are very different. Some students find it a good idea, because of the equality and other students find it not a good idea because they would rather wear their own clothes.
We told them about the different colors of the levels in the building and about our meeting with the youngest age of the school.
An other big difference between Dutch schools and English schools is the means of transportation. In The Netherlands most of the students go to school by bike and in England we never saw English students going by bike to school.
Then we told our classmates about our interview with the sixth form student and about the sports fields from the school.
At last we told them about the sixth form class that we were allowed to attend and that we noticed that their teacher explained everything in detail. We compared that to our lessons and told them that we think our lessons are more based on working independently.