Watching a show on Netflix that takes place in England. A teenager is expelled from her sixth-form school, and then goes to great lengths to scheme and sweet-talk her way back in.
Putting aside plot convenience, in real life couldn’t she just … go to another school? Surely being expelled from one sixth-form school doesn’t mean she’s expelled from every sixth-form in England, right?
In a larger sense, if a British teenager drops out of, gets expelled from, or declines altogether to go to sixth-form, and then later changes their mind, are there 6F options for adults? Like online or something?
Being expelled from a school - sixth form or not - does not exclude you from education. Imagine what that would do to society if that was the case!
Also, plenty of adults opt to do A Levels in later life (A Levels are the qualifications you traditionally do in sixth form in order to enter university). You don’t have to do these at school, there are Further Education Colleges and remote/online learning options.
(PS, are you, by any chance, watching Sex Education?)
So if someone is expelled form, say, St. Bonaventure 6F, can they just fill out the paperwork at St. Aloysius 6F and start the following Monday? Will they have to explain why they were expelled and pinky-swear to be good?
That would be up to St Aloysius, and might vary with the particular status they have in the structure, as different schools even within the public system are given different rules and powers over selection of new entrants.
Depending on the family, getting expelled and missing out on A-levels at the usual time might be more or less of a social status disaster, even though there are alternative routes back into them and on to university (or completely different forms of education too) - the latter might be seen as a bit below the salt.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I assume the above only applies for children up to the age of 16? So is not necessarily the case for sixth-formers? I know there have been some changes recently, but 16 is still the age at which you can legally leave the formal education system, so I would have thought that the school’s/local authority’s obligation to provide you with formal education also ceases at that point.
Admittedly, I left sixth form nearly 17 years ago and my kids aren’t anywhere near that point themselves, so my knowledge is rusty - which is why I’m putting this in the form of a challenge rather than stating it as fact. But I got the distinct impression when I was in sixth form that the school had much less leverage over your attendance than prior to that, and if someone simply dropped out - well, it was their loss. The school wasn’t going to go out of their way to chase you, as it were, it was time to start learning some adult responsibility.
From your description of the plot, I had assumed that you were talking about the movie An Education. In that movie (set in 1961), a young British woman is dating an older man. She has been doing very well at school and expects to get into Oxford. The man asks her to marry him. She agrees to do so and drops out of school. Not long afterwards, she discovers that he is married. He was lying to her to get her into bed with him. She decides to go back to school now that the affair is over. It takes her some time to persuade a teacher and the principal there to let her back into the school. In the last scene in the movie, you see her walking around the campus of Oxford. It appears to me that the young woman knew that the school she had been going to was considered a very good school from which many students had been able to get into Oxford, so it was important to her to get back into that particular school. Incidentally, the movie is based on an essay by a woman to whom something like this actually happened.
However, it would be like dropping out of Harvard and starting the next day at Yale. Or worse, dropping out of MIT and starting next day at Yale. Even if you can get the exact same subjects (very likely if you are doing a very common set of subjects), some of the teachers are going to be doing stuff in different orders, using different textbooks, with different options. You might do something twice, and completely miss something else. Plus the extra half-hour each way in transport…
Pinky swearing would depend on the context. If you dropped out because you were having an affair with one of the teachers, any other school would bend over backwards to fix any kind of problem. If it’s because you were hitting other students… St Aloysious might start you on a supported home study program.
Yes, that’s another important factor. At this level (16-18 age-group) you’d be doing a much more specialised group of subjects than in the years up to 16, and different schools will be preparing for the examinations run by different examination authorities, and teaching for it in their own way with their own focus (so for example in humanities subjects, A-level History or English Literature in different schools might have a specialist element focussing on completely different periods).
So someone trying to change partway through is going to cause a lot of extra work re-adjusting, both for the school and themselves. Plus, so much is now driven, for schools, by their examination results that they’ll need persuading to risk having their overall position in the results league tables affected by taking on a student needing those re-adjustments.
Depending on exactly when this happens, the student might be advised to start again. Or ambitious parents might have to think about private tutoring of some kind. There are private tutoring colleges that cram students who’ve had some sort of setback in their A-level studies or exams - for those who are able and willing to pay.
O.K., I just read the description of the plot of the series Sex Education that you linked to. I presume you’re talking about the character Maeve. She was expelled from the school for (supposedly) selling drugs in the first series of episodes. She gets a job. In the second series of episodes, she gets back into the same school. As I pointed out in my description of the plot of An Education, the point was not that she couldn’t get into another school. It’s pretty clear that she could. She just wanted to get into this particular school, perhaps because it was a very good school or perhaps because she liked the students or teachers there.
Things about ‘An Education’ is that she dropped out willingly, at an age (and time) when she could. As it was her choice and she was not required to be in education, the school didn’t see why they should take her back.
Yes, that’s sort of what I was getting at - thanks to Mk VII for the correction. Though I’m curious as to how this works for those opting for an apprenticeship at 16 - presumably some sort of classroom/supervision time at an approved institution is required.
It’s not that over 16s must stay in full-time education, it’s full-time education or training (or a combo of those and volunteering). So an approved apprenticeship scheme counts, whether it has class based training or not.
Yes - apprenticeships count as further education. In fact, less academic young people are being encouraged to see them as an alternative to university. Plumbers and electricians don’t grow on trees.