Rolling my eyes again

After more than seven years here in Denmark, I didn't think I could be astounded anymore. I'm used to the quirks, I roll my eyes at the things I once found weird and I quietly shake my head at the things I'll never get used to. At the same time, there are even things I have come to prefer, respect and sometimes sigh with relief at all the things we have escaped back home.

Today, however, I am gobsmacked and can't begin to work out why Danes have developed this particular way of living and coping with things. Sometimes something is just such an obvious necessity that I genuinely can't understand why they can't see it.

I grew up with a Kwik Fit, McConechys, Smileys and Halfords on every other corner. Yes, I know Scotland has many more potholes than Denmark, given that we currently have none in our council area. I think I saw one in Odense about three months ago, actually, but still. When you get a puncture, you want to be able to drive less than five minutes to the nearest tyre place and get it changed before the tyre has time to lose all its air. You want to be able to do this on an evening or at the weekend, and preferably without having to book an appointment three days in advance.

Today Thomas's car started beeping because the tyre pressure was wrong on the back-left tyre. He had a look and found something like a nail sticking out of the rubber. 😕

Granted, this is the first time in seven years that we've actually needed to replace a tyre, so I started scanning my mental map of the island for the nearest drive-in tyre place and couldn't think of one. Surely I must be mistaken?

So I Googled it. There isn't one. What the actual fuck?

Apparently I need to phone a normal garage, book the car in and then get it fixed. Seriously, just why?

This is Denmark. The country where everything works like clockwork. You can receive a digital hospital appointment, send absolutely anyone money using only your phone number and receive an official message informing you that your bins are going to be emptied 47 minutes later than usual. But if you get a puncture, apparently you are expected to park the car, and wait to phone a garage during opening hours, negotiate an appointment and then somehow arrange your life around the garage's schedule, all the while crossing your fingers you still have enough air in your tyre to get you there.

If you get a puncture on Saturday afternoon, you apparently are meant to just look at your car sadly until Monday morning at the earliest.

And I realise that this is a very British way of looking at things. We have built an entire economy around the principle that if something goes wrong with your car, there will be a bloke somewhere nearby who will fix it while you stand around drinking a cup of tea. Perhaps this isn't actually a fundamental human right. Perhaps I have simply been spoiled by a lifetime of garages, tyre depots and men called Dave who can change a tyre before you've finished saying, "I've got a puncture."

But honestly, after seven years, I still occasionally encounter something in Denmark that makes me feel as though I have arrived from another planet.

And today's thing is apparently tyres.

Danish "high school"

From a Scottish point of view, calling the Danish gymnasium (STX) a “high school” is slightly misleading. The translation is convenient, but it carries assumptions about age, structure, and the role of adults that simply don’t hold up once you look more closely.

The first difference is when students actually start. In Scotland, “high school” begins around age 11 or 12 and runs straight through the teenage years. Tiny pupils in huge blazers they might one day grow into once they hit puberty trudge in with their top buttons down and their school-coloured tie knotted tightly, no matter the weather. In Denmark, students finish folkeskole and then often take a more scenic route before entering gymnasium. Many spend a year at an efterskole (a weird boarding school with a specific focus such as gymnastics, German, art or whatever), and some even take a second year to complete the optional 10th grade. Amaia is about to finish fokeskole in a month and more than 85% of her class are opting for this gap year. So, by the time they begin the three year STX programme, they might be 16 like Amaia, but just as often 17 or even 18. It already feels less like school and more like something edging towards adult life.

As a result, a single class can span several birth years. Anna’s class, for example, includes her, born in 2007, alongside a majority from 2006 and even a couple from 2005, who are actually older than her older brother. It is not unusual for siblings only two years apart to end up in the same year group. The tidy, age based system familiar in Scotland quietly falls apart. When I tell people that Anna's year in Mearns Castle graduated last summer, they are gobsmacked as they do not expect anyone under 19 to be finishing high school. And when you add in that most kids also do a gap year before uni to save up some money to move out, and to see the world, the thought of beginning uni before 20 here leaves people reeling.

And then there is the independence, which is where things really start to feel unfamiliar. There is essentially no parental involvement other than our invite to the graduation ceremony at the end. No parents’ evenings, no steady stream of report cards, no expectation that school will keep you updated. If a student skips class, the school deals with the student, not the parent. You are not copied into the email, because there is no email. If your kid drops out or switches to a different type of high school such as a business or vocational one, you only find out if your kid tells you!

Assessment follows the same logic. Students accumulate grades continuously, building a GPA from exams, written work and even class participation along uni lines and at the end of each year they have to write a dissertation, bigger each time till the one Anna just finished which was about 35 pages long. I can't imagine any Scottish kid not fainting at that! They even have to meet with a teacher and a ministry of education representative to defend their dissertation in the last month before graduating! It feels much closer to a university model than a school one, with the emphasis firmly on the student managing their own performance and knowing their stuff.

Daily life reinforces that sense of autonomy. With the driving age at 17, many students simply drive themselves to and from school, particularly outside the cities. There is no drop off, no pick up, no hovering. They arrive and leave much as adults would. They study alongside evening and Saturday jobs which still exist here and kids aren't expected to volunteer unpaid for years on end before finally being given some recompense for real work.

Some of them are, in fact, already living like adults. In most classes there will be two or three students who have moved out of home altogether, living alone or with a boyfriend or girlfriend. They receive SU, a fairly generous state education grant that is not means tested, which makes this possible. From a Scottish perspective, where most teenagers are still firmly at home, this feels like a different life stage entirely.

That independence extends even to travel. On school trips, students are often handed their tickets and expected to make their own way. When Léon and Anna went on their Spanish exchange, they were given flights from Copenhagen to Brussels and on to Málaga and trusted to navigate the journey themselves with no accompanying teacher. It is the sort of thing that would cause mild panic in a Scottish school office and would throw many Scottish parents into apoplectic states.

The relationship between students and teachers is also looser and more informal. Teachers are addressed by their first names. Students often have their teachers’ personal mobile numbers. It is not unusual for social overlap to happen, whether that is a barbecue at a teacher’s house or something more spontaneous.

Social life around school reflects broader Danish norms. Alcohol appears quite openly at school parties and Friday cafés and is treated as a normal part of socialising rather than something to be policed into secrecy. One recent example captures the tone. Anna texted me last Wednesday to say her history class had gone into town to look at historical sites, but she would be late home because the group, teacher included, had decided to go for a beer at a bar in the sunshine afterwards as it was such a lovely day. The teacher even had the students buy his drinks using their student discount cards and then sent them the money back via MobilePay. Efficient, if nothing else!

Put all of this together and gymnasium looks far less like what a Scottish parent would recognise as “high school” and much more like a hybrid of maybe Langside college or early university. The academics are serious, but the framework is built on trust and a fairly bold assumption that by this stage young people are already capable of running their own lives, or at least learning how to without too much supervision. Much as I loved Mearns Castle, where my older kids studied, for its academics, I love the way Danish high school graduates feels already much more ready for the outside world in general.