The Budapest School Model

This means we have reached the end of a year’s work: our main aim was to legalize the personalized educational model in Hungary and thus provide an opportunity for children to learn at their own pace, setting their own goals from first year to last.

Our curriculum offers a new solution to families who believe it is important for learning to happen through internally guided goals and evolve into measurable individual development, as well as to conform to external regulations, meaning that everyone should be able to pass the final exam.

Budapest School supports children in developing attitudes and skills which create happy and healthy adults useful for society. We help them find their own learning process and feel responsible for finding new challenges. For this, we create an environment where parents, teachers, and children work to improve themselves and each other – where children are able to reach their goals and actively affect their lives, relationships, and environments even in difficult situations.

Budapest School’s curriculum fully adheres to the National Curriculum, while it also:

• stays flexible, as its focus is individuality, own goals, experience-based and cross-subject learning,
• includes the development of 21st century skills in everyday school life,
• regulates the process of learning rather than the result. It concentrates on what the children wish to learn and how they can best develop. If they want to apply to university, the school supports them in this goal.

The micro-schools of Budapest School are led by teams of teachers who aim to adjust learning content to the children’s needs and to the learning outcomes defined in the curriculum. Each child has a mentor who helps them set and achieve their own learning goals.

Learning content and goals are jointly decided by the parent, child, and teacher. The same stands for evaluations.

Learning is evaluated on three levels: gained knowledge, critical thinking, and artistic creations. There are no grades throughout the 12 years. We have a more detailed evaluation system, which also focuses on effort and the process itself.

The modules, which define the daily activities of the children, may encompass a number of educational fields, multiple competencies and the material of several subjects; the material of one subject may also be covered by several modules.