English-Slovak School BESST is a complex of schools from kindergarten to high school, where we are consecutively upbringing, educating and taking care of children from the early age of 3 years in kindergarten, through their years in primary and secondary school up to adolescence in high school. We do the BESST for you to be the BEST... Soft skills in every grade level Year 1: values — organizing, self-value, responsibility, cooperation, recognition and praise, curiosity, honesty, flexibility, initiative, sound judgment. Features of Ethics Education are embedded in our lessons; we teach our students to take responsibility for their own behavior and academic performance. We call our freshmen “start-ups”, we familiarize them with areas in which they could realize their potential and develop further – e.g. the student council and guest lectures delivered by experts in their fields of work. Year 2: attitudes – critical and inventive thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, adapting to new knowledge, creativity, collaboration. We have introduced curricular integration in our lessons – we teach the students to receive information critically, to evaluate it and to take a stand, to be active, curious, and initiative. We call our students “explorers” and we encourage them to look up, categorise, and creatively reuse information by themselves in their own lives. Our students can develop their personality and volitional qualities in the Duke of Edinburgh project. Year 3: actions – self-discovery, self-awareness, habits of highly successful people (proactivity, first things first, win-win thinking, …) and positively influencing the others. Year 3 students are our leaders – we support the development of their leadership skills, and we help them build their career and future. Thanks to the mini-Erasmus project our students can experience one week in the life of a university student, and they can get information on current trends in business and IT at the “Night of Chances” event. During the Maturita (School-leaving examination) week, three of our Year 3 students will have a chance to do an internship with a selected business – the students are selected on a competitive basis: the successful applicant will have to convince the potential employer that he/she is the right person for the internship. Year 4 students are “creators”. They create their own future and they have a chance to switch to the International Program Class. In this year the International Program students will be taking their first AS level exams from such subjects as Math, English, German, Biology, Business, and Information Technology. Our high school is a logical continuation of the education offered by the BESST – Private Primary and Middle School. We build on experience. We make our school better, and our students better-prepared for their future jobs that do not exist yet. The Private Bilingual High School BESST is one of only a few schools throughout the Slovak Republic approved to administer exams authorized and accepted by the University of Cambridge International Examinations. University of Cambridge International Examinations provides the copyrights for the use of syllabuses and enables its registered centers to take exams up to GCE A Levels, which are the entrance examinations for the universities abroad. Students of the Private Bilingual High School have a school leaving exam in Slovak Language and Literature in the 4th grade of study. A school leaving exam in English Language and other 2 subjects is in the 5th grade of study. Students, who attend the class within the international programme have a school leaving exam following from the international programme.
