Escape from the hothouse

South Korea’s education system puts us to shame. Last year the BBC tested a group of 15- and 16-year-olds with some questions from a GCSE maths paper; they all finished in half the time allowed, four scored 100 per cent and the other two dropped one mark. It’s the kind of performance most British teachers and parents can only dream of, so at first it’s surprising that a London girls’ school has opened up a branch in South Korea. The North London Collegiate (NLCS) is one of Britain’s top schools, but it still looked like they were going to have a lot of competition on their hands when they chose South Korea for their first international franchise. Three years ago they opened up a co-educational school on Jeju island off the south coast of Korea, and they’ve just had their first sixth-formers’ exam results.

It was the Korean government who invited NLCS to set up in Jeju, because they were worried about a brain drain. More and more children were being sent away; in 2007 more than 20,000 Korean children were at school abroad. The nation’s extraordinary proficiency in maths and science comes at a price: teenagers regularly spend 13 or 14 hours a day studying, dutifully going off every day to after-school classes, known as hagwons. They’re all competing to get into three universities and it leaves a lot of teenagers stressed and sleep-deprived. The national exam fever has been linked to Korea’s high suicide rate among young people.

The drudgery and the pressure of Korean students’ life is a far cry from the sunny, end-of-term atmosphere I find when I visit the North London Collegiate in Stanmore in Middlesex. Lawns dotted with rose bushes and shaded by cedar trees stretch into tennis courts with a folly beyond.