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After , secondary modern kids could take CSEs Certificate of Secondary Education ; if they did exceptionally well, they could transfer to a grammar school's sixth form. In theory there were also Secondary Technical schools, that were intended to train mechanics and technicians electricians, plumbers - highly skilled manual workers but many towns never set one up, and they never got the status they were intended to - perhaps the first example of many of the failure of high-status vocational education.
The direct-grant grammars mostly became fee-paying independent schools rather than comprehensives; they were given the final choice in My school, though, was a comprehensive that had been a direct-grant grammar, and is one of the oldest state schools in England.
The very rich sent their children to prep school from eight to thirteen originally twelve and then to public school from thirteen to eighteen. Under-eights were originally educated by tutors within the home, but usually go to pre-prep schools from four or five now.
Originally, public schools had six forms , , , , , , but the youngest form was moved to the prep schools for obscure reasons in the nineteenth century.
Many public schools still call their top form "sixth form" usually skipping third form or fourth form as a result , which is where the wider use of sixth form as the top year came from, and is why the grammars which are usually , ie seven years had a lower sixth and an upper sixth rather than a sixth and a seventh.
When comprehensivisation came in, some local authorities set up a sixth-form college; others established sixth forms in all or most of their former secondary moderns. Poorer comprehensives with few pupils staying on into sixth form were not able to offer the variety of subjects of a sixth-form college or a large e.
Many also teach Access courses university preparation for over 18s and some will even teach full degree courses which are then examined by the local university. I am an American living in England, soon to be married to an Englishman. The discussion of where to educate our [future] kids has come up. I've done my masters in England, but otherwise my education was entirely American and his was entirely English.
Have you given the matter any thought? Do you have a personal preference? Schools are different, but I don't know of any cause to say one or the other is better. Wherever you're well settled, I'd say. I will stay silent on higher education, lest I get into trouble at my day job!
I know that, if I had the ability to do it all over again, I would definitely choose Stanford over Oxford for my undergraduate studies. A few years ago such as when I studied there , the UK universities had the advantage of being considerably cheaper, but that may not be the case in future.
I can't say much yet about pre-university eductation: my daughter isn't even in kindergarten here in the US yet :.
One thing that I find rather weird is the US use of "college" as a synonym for "university". In other English usage the point is precisely that there is a distinction between college and university.
They are not the same. In Britain and the Commonwealth only universities grant degrees. Colleges do not and can not. To non-US ears "college degree" is an oxymoron. I was in a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. The next table was filled with young, Malaysian women. I happened to overhear one of them say, "She said she was going to 'college'. When Americans say 'college', they mean uni, don't they? This has just been brought on, again, by my reading a survey of how many Americans of various ages and sexes have "college degrees".
In our Commonweaslth usage a college is either a school, usually a private secondary high school, or it is a technical or trade craft school that trains people at a post secondary level but not to a degree, eg secretarial college, technical college, art college, hairdressing college, etc, or it is a part of a university that follows a collegial system, ie divides itself into colleges.
In a collegial university Oxford and Cambridge are examples teaching is done in colleges but the degrees are granted only by the university. So, when an American asks me what "college" I went to my answer is that I didn't. I went to university. There is a difference between colleges and universities in the US, it's just not the same one as in the UK.
Universities can give post graduate degrees. Colleges give Associates' 2-year or Bachelors' 4-year degrees. So, people who say they went to college in the US are saying they had an undergraduate education. But we still don't say 'go to university' for post graduate degrees--then we go to 'grad school', which was the topic that got this all started--click the link at the start of this entry to see.
Secondary school is known predominantly as high school or - colloquially - 'the high school'. Nouns in Scottish often take on a definite article that isn't required, as in, "He's been sent to the jail". We don't have grammar schools or middle schools or prep schools or sixth form colleges. State schools are either non-denominational or Roman Catholic.
Private schools are mostly non-denomination, but there are a couple of Catholic ones. School starts each year in mid-August and children begin at age 4. Age based recruitment is from something strange like March in the year of starting school to end Feb the following year i. It is compulsory to take four years of secondary school, even if you turn 16 in that year. There's no application process for schools in the way there is in England. Unless you specifically ask otherwise it will go to a panel at the local council's education department for a decision , you will be assigned your local school of your religious preference.
Neither parents nor schools can pick and choose. Scottish undergraduate degrees in named subjects take four years. Your first two years are generalist and then you study a specific subject in third and fourth year. You can take a three-year BA or BSc, but it's known as an Ordinary degree and is entirely generalist, made of of 1st and 2nd year classes, with no subject specialism.
Rightly or wrongly, they are viewed in the way that an American might view a junior college associate degree. Some Scottish universities also allow you to go straight from your second undergraduate year into Masters studies, but that's a separate level of complexity not required for our purposes. I'm from the west coast of Canada, and looking at that chart was a little interesting. I see how the system of education here is very much an amalgum of the two shown.
Here, Kindergarten is the first compuslory class, at age 5. Then comes 1st Grade. The grades run up to 12th and out east there is a semi-optional 13th. Within BC there are many school districts, all with their own curriculums, but building within the framework of provincial legislation that governs the broad testing of students pupils , inspiringly called "provincial exams.
I believe English is the only compulsory exam at that level, with the other exams being Math s , Science separated into biology, physics and chemistry , Language French and Spanish being most common. The jist is that we seem to graduate a year earlier than both systems, at Our post-secondary system is quite american in structure, but I'm currently in the shallow end of that pool, so I'm not an expert.
You're missing a few things in your discussion of American schools. First, many schools run K - 8. Or pre-k - 8, or preschool - 8. Certainly that's the norm for parochial schools in NYC, and many of the more popular and successful public elementary schools are transitioning now to go through the 8th grade as well. Secondly, middle school and junior high, originally, weren't just different terms for the same school.
At first, junior high was high school, but for younger students. You had your own classes, and they were taught separately by separate teachers. The middle school model gained a foothold in the middle of the last century on the grounds that kids in that age group need a transitional period from elementary school.
So instead of going to your own classes, in a middle school you would spend most of the day with the students in your homeroom, and there's some degree of interdisciplinary teaching - that is, if you're learning about the civil war in history, you read about it in English as well, that sort of thing.
Nowadays, of course, people use the terms interchangeably, but there's a very good reason that we have two different terms, and it's not just because one sounds better. And lastly, in many areas elementary school, intermediate school as my local one was called , and high school each encompass 4 numbered grades, so middle school or whatever starts in the 5th grade and runs through the 8th. This seems to be the norm as well for private schools in NYC, at least, those that run from elementary school through high school.
Having just been directed to this blog I felt compelled to add some clarifications as a British person who went to a private school. While it's good to know technical definitions, colloquial ones are probably more helpful for trying to understand what British people actually mean when they talk about public vs.
In my experience, a "private school" is a generic term for a school that you pay to attend. These can be subdivided into "public schools", which are large in terms of grounds size and number of pupils, are usually boarding schools, are well-known nationally and have a reputation for producing what we'd call "toffs" - posh, snooty, upper-class people - although of course this is a stereotype. For example, Eton, Rugby and Harrow. However a "private school" may also mean an "independent school", which is much smaller and will probably only be known locally.
However, "grammar schools" are a special class of state school at which the teaching is generally considered to be of a standard equal to or better than private schools. If the school you went to was a state-funded non-grammar, you'd probably just say you went to a state school or a local comprehensive; if you went to grammar school, you'd definitely say so.
A prep aratoy school is usually a term for a private primary school, which usually goes up to age 13, as many public schools begin at age 13 rather than age 11 independents, grammars and other state schools will usually begin at age You'll still see this numbering in a lot of traditional private schools but many such as mine are moving more towards the Year 1, Year 2 numbering system so that when we talk to people in other schools they actually understand what year we're in.
I think the traditional way is better though. Hope this is useful to someone! But in my hometown Elementary school is k-4 Middle school is 5 and 6, Junior High school 7 and 8, and then High School And there are about 5 elementary schools and then only one of each of the other 3.
Mainly because of over crowding is why they have a separate middle and junior high. I thought I'd add something people might find interesting about becoming a doctor of medicine in UK. From my understanding in US you have to do a bachelors first as a pre-med and then enter medical school afterwards?
In UK Medicine and surgery is a degree in itself which people enter after completing A-Levels they study it at university and it takes 5 years in most universities. Some universities offer a 2part degree where students do 3 years pre-clinical and then apply again to do 3 years clinical, this tends to be offered by more 'traditional' universities such as Oxford or Cambridge.
At Liverpool university where I study we spend 4 years at unversity our final exams are in 4th year and we spend 5th year in hospital we become doctors when we pass our prescribing test and our SJT. Lynne mentioned that in Canada we say "Grade N" rather than "Nth grade". To add to the difference in naming, we don't use the terms freshman, sophomore, etc.
University students say they're in "first year", "second year", etc. He was confused, because to him, only a teacher can write a test e. He said Americans would only ever use "take a test". I don't think "take" sounds odd in that context, but I don't think I'd ever use it.
Is it just me, or is that a widespread difference between Canadian and American English? Also, where would the Brits fit in? Once a student completes his primary school, he is considered to be completely ready for the secondary school level.
But vocational schools are different in this regard. Students take a number of additional elective subjects in addition with the compulsory one to complete the required learning hours. High school system is the ultimate place where the kid grows to a young adult through continuous learning process. In addition to bookish knowledge, the high schools teach her students how to interact with people, how to deal with social responsibility, how to become a functional adult in the society.
It basically creates the base of further career field. High school learning improves ones thinking sphere. The courses you take help you to enhance problem solving skill by critical thinking. You will learn persistence which will help you to make positive change in life. Good grades in high school days will boost up the student.
It will help him to nourish his potentials more efficiently. Moreover a good grade can help you to get a good scholarship as well. High school diploma is of immense importance. Along with using numbers to denote grade level, Americans have names for each year: freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. To help you out, we researched the origin of each name and included some basic information for each of the years of high school.
Most teenagers start the 9th grade at 14 years of age, turning 15 before the end of the year. Usage of the word sophomore dates to the s where it was used to describe university students who were in their second year of study.
The typical age for this grade is 15 to 16 years of age.
New For the Glossary: Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior
But these same words are not used to describe the years of graduate school. Years of graduate school are often just referred to by number; for example, "I'm in my first year" or "I'm a first-year. The three years of law school can be referred to as 1L, 2L and 3L. And medical school is often broken up into preclinical the first two years and clinical the second two years , which are followed by an internship and residency - it takes a long time to become a doctor!
Have other confusing words for us to define? Suggest them using the form below, or leave them in the comments! Home United States U. Follow Us. Most teenagers start the 9th grade at 14 years of age, turning 15 before the end of the year. Usage of the word sophomore dates to the s where it was used to describe university students who were in their second year of study. The typical age for this grade is 15 to 16 years of age.
The designation of junior dates way back to the 13th century, where it was first used to describe someone younger than another. This is when students are considered upperclassmen and should begin thinking about post-secondary options. But we still don't say 'go to university' for post graduate degrees--then we go to 'grad school', which was the topic that got this all started--click the link at the start of this entry to see. Secondary school is known predominantly as high school or - colloquially - 'the high school'.
Nouns in Scottish often take on a definite article that isn't required, as in, "He's been sent to the jail". We don't have grammar schools or middle schools or prep schools or sixth form colleges. State schools are either non-denominational or Roman Catholic. Private schools are mostly non-denomination, but there are a couple of Catholic ones.
School starts each year in mid-August and children begin at age 4. Age based recruitment is from something strange like March in the year of starting school to end Feb the following year i. It is compulsory to take four years of secondary school, even if you turn 16 in that year. There's no application process for schools in the way there is in England. Unless you specifically ask otherwise it will go to a panel at the local council's education department for a decision , you will be assigned your local school of your religious preference.
Neither parents nor schools can pick and choose. Scottish undergraduate degrees in named subjects take four years. Your first two years are generalist and then you study a specific subject in third and fourth year. You can take a three-year BA or BSc, but it's known as an Ordinary degree and is entirely generalist, made of of 1st and 2nd year classes, with no subject specialism. Rightly or wrongly, they are viewed in the way that an American might view a junior college associate degree.
Some Scottish universities also allow you to go straight from your second undergraduate year into Masters studies, but that's a separate level of complexity not required for our purposes. I'm from the west coast of Canada, and looking at that chart was a little interesting. I see how the system of education here is very much an amalgum of the two shown.
Here, Kindergarten is the first compuslory class, at age 5. Then comes 1st Grade. The grades run up to 12th and out east there is a semi-optional 13th.
Within BC there are many school districts, all with their own curriculums, but building within the framework of provincial legislation that governs the broad testing of students pupils , inspiringly called "provincial exams. I believe English is the only compulsory exam at that level, with the other exams being Math s , Science separated into biology, physics and chemistry , Language French and Spanish being most common. The jist is that we seem to graduate a year earlier than both systems, at Our post-secondary system is quite american in structure, but I'm currently in the shallow end of that pool, so I'm not an expert.
You're missing a few things in your discussion of American schools. First, many schools run K - 8. Or pre-k - 8, or preschool - 8. Certainly that's the norm for parochial schools in NYC, and many of the more popular and successful public elementary schools are transitioning now to go through the 8th grade as well. Secondly, middle school and junior high, originally, weren't just different terms for the same school.
At first, junior high was high school, but for younger students. You had your own classes, and they were taught separately by separate teachers. The middle school model gained a foothold in the middle of the last century on the grounds that kids in that age group need a transitional period from elementary school.
So instead of going to your own classes, in a middle school you would spend most of the day with the students in your homeroom, and there's some degree of interdisciplinary teaching - that is, if you're learning about the civil war in history, you read about it in English as well, that sort of thing. Nowadays, of course, people use the terms interchangeably, but there's a very good reason that we have two different terms, and it's not just because one sounds better.
And lastly, in many areas elementary school, intermediate school as my local one was called , and high school each encompass 4 numbered grades, so middle school or whatever starts in the 5th grade and runs through the 8th. This seems to be the norm as well for private schools in NYC, at least, those that run from elementary school through high school.
Having just been directed to this blog I felt compelled to add some clarifications as a British person who went to a private school. While it's good to know technical definitions, colloquial ones are probably more helpful for trying to understand what British people actually mean when they talk about public vs. In my experience, a "private school" is a generic term for a school that you pay to attend.
These can be subdivided into "public schools", which are large in terms of grounds size and number of pupils, are usually boarding schools, are well-known nationally and have a reputation for producing what we'd call "toffs" - posh, snooty, upper-class people - although of course this is a stereotype. For example, Eton, Rugby and Harrow. However a "private school" may also mean an "independent school", which is much smaller and will probably only be known locally.
However, "grammar schools" are a special class of state school at which the teaching is generally considered to be of a standard equal to or better than private schools. If the school you went to was a state-funded non-grammar, you'd probably just say you went to a state school or a local comprehensive; if you went to grammar school, you'd definitely say so.
A prep aratoy school is usually a term for a private primary school, which usually goes up to age 13, as many public schools begin at age 13 rather than age 11 independents, grammars and other state schools will usually begin at age You'll still see this numbering in a lot of traditional private schools but many such as mine are moving more towards the Year 1, Year 2 numbering system so that when we talk to people in other schools they actually understand what year we're in. I think the traditional way is better though.
Hope this is useful to someone! But in my hometown Elementary school is k-4 Middle school is 5 and 6, Junior High school 7 and 8, and then High School And there are about 5 elementary schools and then only one of each of the other 3. Mainly because of over crowding is why they have a separate middle and junior high. I thought I'd add something people might find interesting about becoming a doctor of medicine in UK. From my understanding in US you have to do a bachelors first as a pre-med and then enter medical school afterwards?
In UK Medicine and surgery is a degree in itself which people enter after completing A-Levels they study it at university and it takes 5 years in most universities. Some universities offer a 2part degree where students do 3 years pre-clinical and then apply again to do 3 years clinical, this tends to be offered by more 'traditional' universities such as Oxford or Cambridge.
At Liverpool university where I study we spend 4 years at unversity our final exams are in 4th year and we spend 5th year in hospital we become doctors when we pass our prescribing test and our SJT.
Lynne mentioned that in Canada we say "Grade N" rather than "Nth grade". To add to the difference in naming, we don't use the terms freshman, sophomore, etc. University students say they're in "first year", "second year", etc. He was confused, because to him, only a teacher can write a test e. He said Americans would only ever use "take a test".
I don't think "take" sounds odd in that context, but I don't think I'd ever use it. Is it just me, or is that a widespread difference between Canadian and American English? Also, where would the Brits fit in?
Do they always "sit" their exams, or do they also "write" or "take" them? Just to add to what dev said about the Scottish Education system, the high school years are now officially S1, S2, S3 etc. My children are currently in S4, but if I accidentally say "fourth year" to them, as it was in my day, they remind me that this is the 21st century and not the Stone Age. Also, not sure about the first two years at Scottish Uni being "general".
I've only ever known of specific degree programmes where you are studying your chosen subject from the start. As a side issue, "school" in Scotland always used to require the definite article, e.
Sadly, this is really only heard from older folks now as our culture is increasingly swamped by others. With a son who graduated from Brighton Uni quite recently, I would like to add a couple of points about English university education as I understand it so lots of hedge words; do check for yourself if any of this is relevant to you before you rely on it. It is sometimes often?
True or not, the first year at university will include consolidating in practice re-teaching parts of the relevant A-level subject but in a uni way, and will often also teach general skills such as statistics, relevant Microsoft Office programs, possibly remedial writing and possibly English, together with fairly soft introductory-level degree topics. Typically the results from the first year's course work and exams will govern whether a student is allowed to progress to the second year, required to repeat some or all of the first year, or asked to leave.
Those results will not count towards the class of degree. The second and third years move onto the meat of the degree subject proper, and results do determine the eventual class of degree. Probably half of the third year of an honours degree is taken up with writing the dissertation, or completing a project for more practical subjects.
For practical subjects some unis may offer optional 'sandwich degrees', which mean that students follow a four-year degree course but spend the third year working, sometimes paid, sometimes not, gaining practical experience at a relevant company or non-commercial organisation. They then return to uni for a fourth year, studying alongside third-year non-sandwich students who started uni a year later.
Sandwich course students will generally submit a dissertation-equivalent placement report for an honours degree, relating their sandwich year experience to some elements of subject theory. Although such students graduate a year later than non-sandwich students, their practical experience and more impressive CVs can more than compensate for the delay in entering the workforce proper.
Finally, most but not all English degree courses are three years or four year sandwich. Several New England boarding schools of 19th-century foundation still use forms, meaning grades, as well as other terms extracted from the British lexicon--housemaster, tuck shop, etc. I was a second former through sixth former some sixty years ago at my Connecticut school Choate , and would still be so designated today except that the second form was phased out in the s.
The most ferociously anglophile New England school is St. Paul's, which is Episcopal Anglican and calls its headmaster a rector. Mencken, a mock anglophobe, treats New England boarding school lexical anglophilia in his American Language, with particular attention paid to St.
Paul's, Choate, and Groton. Other such schools are designedly idiosyncratic, with, for example, Hotchkiss inserting lower-middler and upper-middler between junior and senior. Responding to Monty's prickly post of 8 March In American usage, a college is a bachelor's degree-granting component of a university.
The usage is a thousand years old in Europe and four hundred years old in North America. If Monty finds objectionable this lexical discrimination, he'd better take it up with the College de France, Balliol College, or Magdelen College. All of those places were founded in the Colonial Period as we call it.
Mencken wrote a three-volume masterpiece about American English, which everyone should read so said Alistair Cooke and so says Stephen Fry. In the present-day universities of Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Dartmouth frequently misnamed Dartmouth University in careless journalism one makes application, if one is seventeen years old, to The College, not the The University.
Many public American universities have lately been founding Honors Colleges with special residential arrangements, to lure top applicants away from the Ivies and the Ivy peers.
And then there is the important world of the American bachelor's-degree-only liberal arts college, exemplified by the Ivy-peer Amherst College and Williams College. So the college-university distinction is utile and well understood in the USA. At my Ivy League university, the many British undergraduate were in absolutely no distress about the distinction, colloquial or technical but then they had to be really smart to get in.
Since you linked to this from a blog post When asking for educational achievements, many had their French "baccalaureat", which was translated as "A levels" for English families, but as "Junior College" for American ones! And I believe British students going to an American university after A levels are excused the first year of their course. In the comments for my last entry, Paul Danon wondered about the names of school years in AmE and how they compare to those in BrE.
The Brackley Baptist Church in Northamptonshire has on its website for some reason!
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