Education in England (сообщение)

The Moscow Power Engineering Institute

Report

Education in England

Student

of A-13-08 group

Zaharov A.

Moscow, 2008

Education in England is compulsory between the ages of five to sixteen. Compulsory schooling is divided into a primary and secondary stage. The transition from primary to secondary schooling is normally made around the age of eleven.

Over 90% of children attend schools which are wholly maintained by local education authorities and at which no fees are charged. Independent schools do not receive grants from public funds. But 10% of the places in independent schools are paid for by local education authorities. Primary education includes three age ranges: nursery for children under five years, infants from five to eight, and juniors from eight to eleven or twelve. Secondary schools are generally much larger than primary schools.

State schools are free in Great Britain, and attendance is compulsory. School is open five days a week.

From the public and private schools children may go to the grammar schools. The grammar schools are only for boys or only for girls, or for both. The subjects are wider and more advanced: English (Language and Literature), Mathematics, History (English and European), Geography, Chemistry, Physics, ancient languages (Latin and Greek), modern languages (French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian), art, music and physical training.

Grammar schools have six classes called forms. The firs form is the lowest class, and the sixth form is the highest one. As a rule, the school is so arranged that each form consists of three parallel classes. The first (class A) specializing in humanities, the second (class B) in science, and the third (class C) in commerce.

There are also comprehensive schools in Great Britain. Most comprehensives are much more conservative, and some of them are more like bilateral schools, divided into “Grammar” and “Modern” sides, with streams of less clever children kept very separate. But increasingly comprehensives are going over to different forms of non-streaming-combinations of “banding” (wide ability streams); some of them have “mixed ability” groups.

Literature.

1. Английский язык. Справочник абитуриента/Г. П. Шалаева, В. П. Хаскин. – М.: Филол. об-во «СЛОВО», ООО «Издательство АСТ», 2000. – 544 с.

2. Большая школьная энциклопедия. 6 – 11 кл. Т. 2. – М.: ОЛМА-ПРЕСС, 2000. – 717 с.