Although this pre-school class is not compulsory, in practice nearly all the children go to it. Following the pre-school class, there is then nine years of compulsory schooling, which starts at Grade One for 6 to 7 years old pupils and continues through to Grade Nine. There is a final non-compulsory tenth year. For those pupils in Virklund school who want to undertake this final year, it means moving to another school. The school itself has 375 pupils taught in 20 classes - on average there are two classes for each age group.
Children attend school for a total of forty weeks each year.
Each school can set its own timetable and specify the amount of time devoted to mathematics. At Virklund school, our pupils have four 45 minutes mathematics lessons minutes per week. Some teachers will start with a Grade One class teaching all subjects, and then continue to teach the same class for the next eight years. This means that the pupils may have the same class teacher for all their years in school. There are no hard and fast rules as to when a teacher should start to take a class and when they should stop.