St. Cronan's Boys' National School, Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland

19th April 2010

Dear Parents and Guardians,

This time last year we were delighted to welcome Ms Wang, Ms Tian, Angela and Lisa to our school for two weeks. They came from the best school in Beijing on the recommendation of His Excellency Mr. Biwei Liu, the Chinese Ambassador to Ireland. During the past two weeks some staff members from our school visited their school. This was possible because they do not have holidays at Easter time.

The welcome they gave us was really wonderful, with parents, teachers and principal Wang greeting us at the airport. As we all know, Chinese people are famous throughout the world for their hospitality and friendliness, so we were made feel at home very quickly. Nothing was too much trouble as we were brought everywhere to see the famous sights. Luckily we had the assistance of our parents, Robert Wang and Shu Rong and Ivan Walsh who acted as interpreters.

We learned that there are many similarities between our two systems, but in many other ways they are quite different. Seeing pupils on their way to school at 7.00am for start time of 7.45am was one thing, but then hearing that they don't finish school until 4.30pm and sometimes later is not what we are used to ! There are many more pupils in their classes than in our school and unlike us they have different subject teachers just as in our Secondary schools. Summer holidays do not start until the middle of July following important school and district exams. When pupils reach the end of 6th class they have to do a very difficult exam to get into the best Middle school.

You might think that this makes the pupils stressed out, but to us, they were all very happy in school. Guangming School is famous not only for the excellent results it gets in exams but for the way in which the principals provide their pupils with many other activities to balance the pressure of school work. Their school motto 'I Can Do' really does mean that to the pupils, as visitors can view the beautiful art and craft work, science projects and many awards received by the pupils. They even have a weekly celebration display in their school hallway of the different sports and activities done by the pupils outside school. Our group really was impressed with the care the pupils took of their school environment and how respectful they were to their teachers and fellow pupils. We appreciated the very great effort they made to show us how excellent they were at performing music, dance and traditional Chinese crafts and how younger pupils were led by senior pupils in recycling plastic bottles from the neighbourhood. They deserved a Green Flag !

It was an honour for us to be the first Irish primary school to visit Beijing as part of a twinning project. We were fortunate to have had discussions with officials of Beijing Department of Education, Beijing University and with the teachers of Guangming School.

We hope that together both our schools will benefit from strengthening our links during the coming years. We hope that you will be able to see how these projects progress during the coming months by logging on to this website.

Vaughan Dodd
Principal