Ce report (Primary School Council)
14Dear FLT Members,
Your representatives were at the Primary School Council (Ce) held on March 20.
1- The draft school calendar for 2018-2019:
Students will be re-entered at LFIT on September 3, 2018. The end of the school year is scheduled for July 5, 2019.
A meeting has already been held with the principal and teachers, in the presence of your FLT representatives and students. We made the remark that Monday, September 24, which is a public holiday in Japan but a normal working day at LFIT, will be suitable to hold our General Assembly.
FLT action:
– We will ensure that our proposal will be maintained.
– For Meisho, it’s not possible to advance the end of year to the end of June; because this would imply reducing the holidays during the year to maintain the 180 school days.
2- Draft structure for the 2018-2019 school year:
There is a cohort climb in CE2. We will continue to have 5 classes from CP to CE2 to meet the high demand in elementary.
At the end of the first application campaign, the school received a total of 159 completed registration applications. This represents 16 additional requests compared to last year. 28 cases are still pending, and the school is not sure whether to accept all the applications.
FLT action:
– Important to follow up the class structure before the school starts in September.
– We will also ensure that classes are not overloaded and that the target of 25-26 students per primary class is maintained.
3- Bilingual class admission campaign for fall 2018:
The new admission application for bilingual class will be opened until May 18, 2018. Applicants are required to send a letter of motivation to the primary school secretary.
For greater transparency and simplicity, the school has provided an explanation on the bilingual class admission criteria, and has been posted on the LFIT website since 20 March.
Each application will be studied and discussed by the pedagogical team during the meeting, and only students have met the criterias will be selected without ranking from each other. If there are more suitable children than available spots, the teachers at each level will choose the most qualified students to enroll in this program during the commission meeting.
Every year, the school can ask students to leave the bilingual program if the students are struggling.
FLT action:
– We will ensure follow-up this bilingual program for children who are already attending LFIT, as well as for newcomers who will also benefit from bilingual classes.
– We propose to the school to put the admission criteria in Japanese and English on the website.
– We will follow closely on how the results of the commission will be communicated to parents. The new criteria is less precise than the previous ones. It looks like the new criteria is more subjective, putting more emphasises on the requirement of coherence (in the communication) of the decisions.
4- School Project 6:
We will not be able to enter new premises in September 2018, given the legal impossibility of the Kita-Ku town hall to offer us a long-term lease, in accordance with the rules for obtaining an authorization to open an annex, by the TMG Private School Office.
The school will continue to work under the same conditions in the coming September by putting the CE2E in room A207. We will work on a new distribution so that students can stay in their classes.
FLT action:
Importance of following this point with management for years to come.
5- Your questions have been answered:
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Concerning on the primary language reform, a reflection is going on. Your FLT representatives are aware of the importance of language teaching for our children in an international environment. We asked to be involved in every step of the development of this reform so that we could regularly inform parents and be able to share their expectations with LFIT management.
Exchanges will continue in the school community after the publication of an AEFE circular.
The next step will be to finalize the reform at the end of the 2018 calendar year. The new formula will have to be adopted at the school council in the first or second quarter of the 2018 – 2019 school year, in order to apply the change on the new school year, from September 2019.
We suggest that the work can be continued through exchanges involving primary school teachers and representatives of parents together (as the meeting organized in the first quarter), and not separately like it was done in March.
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Regarding the work around the School Project, we are formatting the draft. This draft will be sent to the AEFE, presented to the various bodies and voted on the Establishment Council in June 2018 for application on 1 September 2018.
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For the topic on teaching Japanese as Foreign Language, JLE students progress is on target with the program to be attained at the end of primary school. The Japanese JLE is currently 1h30 a week, so it is only natural that JLE students do not become bilingual in two or three years. However, the school works on several tracks for a different organization of language groups in the next few years. We are trying to avoid separating the most advanced students in Japanese from those who are less advance until CE2.
Learning in Japanese is regularly evaluated by teachers of Japanese as in other languages. -
The broadcast of an English video during a Japanese language course to a group of the bilingual section took place only once. This did not prevent the teacher from reacting his students in Japanese on the past excerpt.
Your FLT representatives will strive to improve communication between teachers and parents in order to correct the negative perception at the beginning of this questioning. Your FLT representatives will also take care to exchange views on the teaching of Japanese, especially JLM, at this moment of revamping language teaching at LFI Tokyo -
Concerning the multi-age classes, the teachers are always satisfied with the organization from an educational point of view. The whole team started working on the criteria that will decide how to proceed with this program. This program remains to be continued.
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As announced by the last Board of Directors, the creation of an additional bus line is currently being considered.
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In kindergarten, starting in September 2016, there had two new tools helps to monitor the learning and progress of students: the learning track record, filled in throughout the cycle, and the summary of the student’s achievements, established at the end of the Cycle 1. There are no expectations per level, but rather expectations at the end of the cycle. This is the same case for cycles 2 and 3.
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Some parents were not able to receive first quarter reports directly from their email, but all of them have received passcodes to allow them to view the report online through Pronote. This was a slight technical incident which now has been fixed. Reports for the second quarter will available on March 30th.
Sincerely yours,
FLT-Fapée Team
https://www.familles-lycee-tokyo.com
association@familles-lycee-tokyo.com