Best schools in Gaborone
Education in Gaborone
Expat families tend to favour living in Broadhurst as almost all the international schools are an easy drive, or even a short walk, away. The main alternatives chosen are Gaborone West, The Village, Naledi and the current posh choice - the shiny, golf estate of Phakalane, conveniently on the way to the airport.
In Botswana, the different year groups are called standards or grades, with standard/grade 7 the highest at primary level and equivalent to the US sixth grade. So don’t assume, if you are moving from the northern hemisphere, that your child is going ‘back’ a year – it’s just a different numerical system.
Children in this part of the world start school at different ages, so you might find quite an age range in the classroom – one child we know of who arrived from US sixth grade found themselves in a class of 11-15 year-olds. Quite a spread, then, when it comes to maturity levels. Good news is the schools give advice on which year your child will be best suited to, given their development level. Still, ask questions, visit the classes, quiz them about enrichment and think it through.
Secondary schools use different lingo again. Maru-a-Pula, for example, starts with form 1 (which overlaps a bit with standard 7 and sometimes students from local private schools skip straight to form 2 - the admissions person will advise you). Westwood International, on the other hand, starts with year 8, which is a direct continuation from standard 7. All deeply confusing, so get the school to provide a clear explanation of their system.
One more thing to bear in mind - most schools start the day between 7-7:30 am, so it’s early bedtimes all round. But in the end, nothing is too far from anything in Gaborone, so provided the family are early birds, you can be more flexible about your school choice.
Choosing a school in Gaborone
All the international schools use — to varying degrees — some form of international curricula or a partially adapted version peculiar to that school. However, at this stage no schools in Botswana are really ‘international schools’ in the sense of having a critical mass of international families come through.
The schools that expats tend to consider are the stand-alone primary or secondary schools or a combined primary-secondary option, the advantage being that children of different ages in the same family can attend school on one campus. Other schools also exist to meet various needs including religious affiliation, commuting time/location and fees.
All the schools in this area tend to have interesting and extensive after-school activities, including sports programmes. The sports facilities are usually decent, and all the students engage in sports competitions with other local independent schools.
Extra academic and enrichment lessons, delivered via private tutors, are very common in Gaborone. These could be in piano, horse riding, judo and tae kwon do, among others. The opportunities for extras are always expanding with the fluctuating expatriate population, increasing number of Batswana schooled outside Botswana and the constantly modernising city.
