Category: News

The ECP Lecture and Talk Programme for this academic year opened recently with a thought-provoking lecture on the topic “Hostile propaganda and the Abuse of the Internet”. It was delivered by the CEO of Semantic Visions, Mr František Vrábel. Semantic Visions is a Czech company that collects and analyses 90% of the world’s online news in real time. In his talk, Mr Vrábel demonstrated how countries, as well as individuals can create hostile propaganda and spread disinformation.

There was a lively question and answer session at the end of the lecture. Our guest had to respond to some very challenging questions. Mr Vrábel underlined the need for quality education in today’s world. When asked by students how they can identify which information they are presented with is true, he replied that it is important to attend a school like ECP to be able to make one’s own informed and independent opinion. Mr Vrábel also pointed out how Facebook is misusing the data of users. He added that Facebook also generates influence by exposing the users to targeted advertising and content.

The English College in Prague has just published a new issue of The ECP Newsletter.

You can read it via this link.

Summary:

• HM’s message
• New staff
• Trips
• Events
• Helping others
• Students in action
• Future Events
• ECPN

Open Day on 14 November 2019 from 1pm to 5pm

Open Day Programme:

• 1.00 pm  Start of Open Day
• 1.00 pm to 3.00 pm Tour of the school for visitors guided by ECP students
• 3.00 pm to 3.45 pm Panel discussion for parents with Headmaster and staff
• 3.05 pm to 3.45 pm Demonstration lessons for prospective students
  Maths (Room 306) – prospective students to Year 1 and Year 2Art (Room 114) – prospective students to Year 3IB Life talk (Room 109) – prospective students to Year 4 and Year 5
• 3.45 pm to 5.00 pm Open School – Activities of individual departments presented by students – please see the Activities programme sheet

Need more information?  Please contact:

Barbora Němečková, Admissions Registrar

+ 420 283 101 206

[email protected],

www.englishcollege.cz

NOTE: Parking is available at the Galerie Fénix shopping mall car park.

Calendar Event

Both parents and students are welcome!

Refreshments will be provided at the Open Day.

Kristýnka Nguyen (the Vice President of the Student Council) and I (Fred Byrne – President of the Student Council) plan to have a big impact on the English College in Prague. We ran on a platform to make the Student Council more transparent, accessible and democratic. We are doing this by making structural changes to it. The structural changes include a new suggestion form, representatives of each tutor group and a second election half way through the year.

Negotiations with the school’s management will become routine so that changes benefiting students are made more frequently. We will push for a new student to teacher feedback programme, a split of the interhouse sports competitions to the upper and lower school and the purchase of bean bag seats for relaxing.

We will also work towards reducing the school’s carbon footprint and ask nearby businesses to offer student discounts. The traditional role of the SC is also to plan events such as the Christmas Fair or Halloween Fair. We will, of course, continue to organise them. My hope is to make all students feel that they have a voice. When we leave the Student Council, we want it to be in a state that is more transparent and democratic. 

Fred Byrne, Student Council President

This year, eight talented ECP students have been selected from schools across Prague to take part in the prestigious CERGE-EI programme. The lucky Year 5 economists will work alongside PhD students from Charles University. Therefore, they will gain a deeper understanding of economic theory and pursue a research project. Subsequently, it will culminate in a final presentation in December. We wish them luck!

CERGE-EI (Centre for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute) is a joint workplace of Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. This is a unique partnership with the aim to promote modern education and research in economics.

ECP has been taking part in this brilliant programme for three years now. The photograph and the video show participants from previous years.

The English College held a House Parents’ Meeting and Family Barbecue in the second week of its 25th anniversary year. It was a great opportunity for parents to meet with their child’s tutor, Senior Tutor and other teachers. After a short introductory assembly in the Gym for all parents, there was an opportunity to meet with individual tutors in their house groups. To make identification of the houses easier, tutors as well as parents received lanyards in house colours. They are blue for Aqua, red for Ignis, yellow for Ventus and green for Terra. Everyone was then able to find people from their house more easily. There were also balloons in house colours to emphasise the importance of community values expressed through the house system.

The event was closed with a well-attended family barbecue on the school’s playground where parents could talk informally with ECP staff as well as other parents over nice food and drink. Thank you to everyone who contributed to making it a really successful event!

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The ECP’s 25th anniversary got off to a cracking start this week. We held a birthday party in the playground, complete with tea and cake – lots of cake! How better to celebrate this significant milestone in the history of the English College in Prague than to hold our very own version of the Great British Bake Off?

Creativity and skill

The students’ brief was to bake and decorate a cake that represented either the English College in Prague, the number 25 or one of the many countries that are represented by students in school. 

There were some very impressive cakes, which were expertly judged by two of the English College’s Board of Governors. Dr Barbara Day is one of the ECP’s Founder Governors who has been involved with the school since 1995. Zdeněk Tůma has been a Governor of the ECP since 2001 and his son graduated from the College in 2015.

The judges awarded points for the design concept of the cakes and the execution. Mr Tůma said: “It was good to see students taking part in the 25th anniversary celebrations. The cakes all showed their creativity and skill and it was difficult to decide on only one winner.”

The winners

The results were very close, but when the scores were added up, the winners of the ECP 25th Anniversary Great British Bake Off were 4C – Mr Straughan’s Tutor Group. They had made a magnificent cake that impressed the judges with the attention to detail. The winning House, that scored the most number of points overall, was Aqua.

ECP’s iconic blue door

Year 3 Ignis students described their cake like this. “This cake is meant to represent the aspects of ECP that we believe make the school special. At the front of the cake is the iconic blue door that greets members of ECP every morning and bids them farewell at the end of the day. A beer glass and a teacup clink at the back of the cake, showing the way that two different cultures join together seamlessly. The cake as a whole is shaped similarly to the building – a place many of us have learned to call home in the last 25 years. This is more than just a cake, it is a commemoration of hard work, learning and unforgettable memories.”

After the judging, everyone tucked in and enjoyed eating the cakes, which tasted as good as they looked!

Over 1350 graduates with the IB Diploma

The ECP first opened its blue door to students on 4 September 1994. Since the first 103 students started studying at the English College twenty five years ago, over 1350 have graduated with the IB Diploma, an internationally-recognised qualification that opens doors to the most prestigious universities around the world.

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On the second day of the new term we held a whole school activity called ‘Problem Solving’.  This involved students working in mixed year teams, but still in Houses, solving a range of problems. Those included, for instance, Design and Communication where teams had to come up with their own advertisement and design for a new breakfast cereal. In Engineering, students were challenged to build a 1-metre span bridge from 50 sheets of paper that could carry a load of up to 1 kg. In addition, there were two practical leadership challenges. The first one was to build the highest tower out of spaghetti with a marshmallow at the top, while the second one was to put up two tents. Most of the team were blind-folded for this, while the two ‘sighted’ members were not allowed to touch the tents.

All proved challenging and a huge success. The event was a great start to the year and also helped new students to get to know existing students. Congratulations to Ignis as the winning house.

And here you can watch how ECP staff were preparing for the event.

ECP graduates of 2019 are heading off to prestigious universities

While being in school and having many experiences is fantastic, we are of course always focused on life beyond school. This year, we had our second largest cohort ever of graduating students. All of them – not just a selected few – do the full IB Diploma. All students, who took the Czech Maturita exam from Czech Language and Literature, have passed. At least 88% of students (excluding the handful who chose to take a gap year) got into either their first or second choice universities. This is especially impressive given how aspirational our students are to get into the very best institutions in the world. The others either got their insurance choice of university or are still considering their options.

Oxbridge

This year we managed to maintain our 7-year run of having at least one student securing a place at either Oxford or Cambridge. Interestingly, the student who had been offered a place at Oxford got 44 IB points, but has chosen a different option. Instead, he will study Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, a truly world-class Ivy League university.

For the first time in many years, more students chose, of their own volition, to study in Prague. The increasing quality of Czech university courses (many offered in English) led just under a third of our students to study in places like Charles University and VŠE. The UK remains the second most popular destination. As usual, we have multiple students going to world-class universities. These include University College London, King’s College London, Exeter and Warwick. Our record of getting students into outstanding institutions worldwide remains one of our strengths at the ECP. The quality and variety of courses in English at Dutch universities draws our best students too. Notably Groningen University and the University of Amsterdam between them attracted 8 of this year’s graduates.

Over 1350 students have now graduated from the ECP with the IB Diploma since we opened 25 years ago. We wish them all well, but today in particular we wish all 77 of our 2019 graduates the very best at university and beyond. Please keep in touch!

The launch of the English College Knowledge News Network, a thought-provoking news programme produced entirely by students.

Knowledge News Network or (KNN) is a student-driven media initiative. The students, alongside their teachers and a professional videographer, created a news programme with a twist. In the style of Panorama (UK) or Události (CZ), KNN doesn’t only report the news as it is but reports on how we know what we know or how we gather and assess the facts. In part a response to the rise of “clickbait” media and fake news and in part to enrich our IB Theory of Knowledge Programme, KNN asks students to demand more rigour of themselves in exactly how they know the things they know rather than simply accepting knowledge at face value.  With the use of a green screen to create our news studio and weather report, and various locations in and around the College, KNN tackles the hot topics of the year – technology, equality and the environment – and immerses students in the experience of being a journalist and news producer. First videos within this project are available below.

Watch first ever KNN News here