Renaissance College or Kingston International

My daughter is offered a place in both Renaissance College (ESF) and Kingston International. I heard mixed reviews about both. I need to make the choice this week. Any thoughts or comments is greatly appreciated!

It depends alot on your child's Chinese ability (though if you have been ofered a place at Kingston, she must be fairly fluent.


Kingston, as you prob know, is a fully bilingual-mode IB PYP school and has been for many years (1st one in HK).


Rennaisance is just beginning the PYP curriculum, with Chinese as a subject.


Our daughter will be starting at Kingston this fall, as we believe it to be her best path (affordably) to being fully trilingual and biliterate (she speaks Eng/Canto now). It's a small class school, VERY good family atmosphere.


ESF tends to have larger class sizes, but is certainly much cheaper than Kingston. For us the language issue and the wait lists put us off.

Renaissance- if you don't want headache to have to transfer to ANOTHER school for secondary. Kingston has no through train secondary school. (Yes, there is a new school ICHK, that they are co-operating .... somewhere in Sha Tau Kok (bus from Fanling).... you don't seriously think anyone will go there after being in Kowloon Tong ..... that is a school intending for the mainlanders over the border.


Kingston also says Hon Lok Yuen will definitely take their graduates, and so will Creative School.... I cannot say EITHER one is a reason to celebrate. They are NOT top tier schools, let alone, well known for their academics. They might be NICE schools, but if you are expecting your children to excel, or become scholars or get accepted to top tier universities, you have to have other plans.


Choose Renaissance also for their excellent ECAs. They have a great campus, and their chinese is a SUBJECT as mentioned already. Often, kids get their chinese lessons cancelled because the teachers feel like it. Lots of play time, and not much homework, and it's become a very popular international school for local cantonese population of HK. Hence, the students end up speaking Cantonese most of the time in school rather than Putonghua or English.


Choose Kingston- if you like TINY campus, everything is so tiny and cute it's like for kindergarten. Choose Kingston if you want "special" attention to your child, their teachers and class size allow each student in there to be paid "more attention" than your average school. Not much homework, doesn't push the children out of their comfort zone, not much facility on campus, but their chinese is a "language" used to teach the curriculum, and NOT a subject. So children in Kingston do have a stronger chinese foundation by the time they graduate P6.

Choose Kingston also if you want to pay very expensive fees.


ESF is like a department store, and Kingston is like a "boutique".

Can't say which one is better, location is one thing you have to consider, school fees is another, curriculum is another, and whether you care about the through-train or not is another....


this is absolutely my own opinion based on my own experience and knowledge. I am sure many parents are quite happy with these two schools.