In the US we start with Grade 1 and to to Grade 12 in high school. Most kids start at five years old and graduaate at 17 or 18. Each grade lasts an entire year.
How do your Forms work? Is there a formula whereby we can convert back and forth?
Do they start with children entering at age five in the First Form? And what is the signifcance of Upper and Lower? Each one six months, or what?
Any elucidation will be appreciated.
The systems vary across the UK. My kids are now 8 and 11, and they go to school in England. They don’t seem to use “Forms” any more, they refer to students as “Year 5” or whatever. I imagine GorillaMan could explain more, as I seem to recall that he’s a teacher in England.
When I was at school (1977-1990) in Scotland it worked like this:
We started school at around age 5, and went to primary School for seven years. We started in P1 and left from P7. Then we went on to secondary school for a minimum of four and a usual maximum of six years, starting in S1 and leaving from S4, S5 or S6. That meant we’d leave aged 16-18.
Edit to add: My understanding of the English system was that forms apply to older kids. That is, you don’t start first form aged 5. The early years would be called something different, just like they are in Scotland. I got the impression that a first-form child would be about 11 or 12.
I teach at a private UK school.
Our 1st form are aged 11 when they arrive.
Our 7th form are aged 17 upwards.
When I was at school (decades ago), the Lower 6th was aged 16 upwards, and the Upper 6th were aged 17 upwards.
I think that state schools use Year n now, where Year 1 = 5 years old (but I’m not 100% sure).
“Form” is rather old-fashioned terminology for secondary school years. The first form was the first year of secondary school, for children aged 11 or 12. These days, school years from primary school onwards are more often called simply Year One, Year Two, etc.
The final two years of secondary school, which are optional and aimed at students intending to go into higher education, are still often referred to as the Sixth Form. Sometimes Lower Sixth for the first year, Upper Sixth for the second.
Hmm. “Form” had a very limited use in Ontario’s high schools when I was there. Students had a “home form”, which was the section of the student body they were considered to belong to. It was more for accounting purposes than anything else, because each student was in and out of different actual classes each day. And each grade would have been divided up into multiple home forms.
In grade nine, for example, I was in home form 102. I know this because I still have the metal cannon I made in shop class then, and it has my name and home form on the bottom. 
The system in state schools in England and Wales is:
Reception = age 4-5 (specifically ‘age 5 on August 31’), with a staged intake through the year
Year 1 = 5-6
Year 2 = 6-7
…
Year 6 = 10-11
Transition from primary to high school (for 90%+ of kids, the minority having two or three tier splits in other ways, or in a few city academies a single school throughout)
Year 7 = 11-12
…
Year 11 = 15-16
End of compulsory education (at the moment, but is set to change)
Year 12 & 13 = 16-18, still consistently referred to as ‘sixth form’. This is where they change from a largely compulsory curriculum to studying a small number of subjects in greater details. Generally they’re treated differently, typically meaning no school uniform, free study periods on their timetables, freedom to leave the premises in any free time, etc. Mostly this is still within high schools, although some areas have sixth form colleges, which specifically provide for this stage.
Scotland is a law unto itself - literally. The education system is, and always has been, completely separate north of the border, and I’ll leave others to explain it!
Sorry, forgot to add this. Most British high schools use ‘forms’ in this way, with an assigned form tutor providing a pastoral as well as administrative role. Mostly it’s just a subdivision of the year group, although some schools have switched to ‘vertical forms’, where each form consists of a small number of children from each year. Done right, this can have huge benefits, with older children taking a slightly fraternal responsibility for younger ones, ways for children uncomfortable in their own peer group to find another outlet, and so on, and also with a more equal distribution of workload and pressure for all teachers involved. (Of course, done badly, it’s just chaos.)
(Forgot to add this, too - yes, ‘form’ doesn’t make any sense alongside ‘sixth form’, and sixth formers are assigned to a form as well, but we cope nonetheless!)
Note that Brits enter Year 1 at the same time that Americans enter kindergarten. So this correspondence holds for ages:
U.S. - U.K.
Kindergarten - Year 1
1st Grade - Year 2
2nd Grade - Year 3
3rd Grade - Year 4
4th Grade - Year 5
5th Grade - Year 6
6th Grade - Year 7
7th Grade - Year 8
8th Grade - Year 9
Freshman - Year 10
Sophomore - Year 11
Junior - Year 12
Senior - Year 13
(Note that the same four words are used for the four years of university as for the four years of high school in the U.S.: Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. Note that this correspondence only matches up the ages in the two countries and makes no statement about the difficulty of the academic work in the two countries.)
Well, thanks everybody, but now I am thoroughly confused. I think I will just let it go. I may have watched too many older British movies. In fact, what brought this to my mind was wathcing the wonderful The Browning Version.
Could it be that something in the US is actually arranged more logically? Grades 1 through 12 now seem like a good system.
How is the U.S. system more logical in practice? No one uses the terms “grade 9,” “grade 10,” “grade 11,” and “grade 12.” Everyone uses the words “freshman,” “sophomore,” “junior,” and “senior,” which are totally arbitrary.
So there were actual activities based on home forms? In my experience, home form was the first thing I went to at the beginning of a new year, where I got my timetable and locker number and everything, but after that, it was little more than an ID code. I’m not sure whether we ever sat in the same room with all the other students in our home form again.
Prep schools in the US still use “forms”. It designates grades 7 through 12 (the traditional junior high and high school years). 7th grade is first form, 8th grade is 2nd form, 9th grade (freshman) is 3rd form . . . 12th grade (senior) is 6th form. Some kids do a PG (post graduate) year.
The PG year is oftentimes used by athletes wanting to do an extra year of high school to get older and bigger before starting their four years of eligibility in college. Also, when a student transfers into a prep school it is common for them to repeat a year. A student that has completed his/her junior year of high school may enter a prep school as a 5th form. Then they may do a PG year. That’s where the college coaches come up with these 20 year old freshmen.
This is true. No one (or hardly anyone) in the United States calls them “grade 9,” “grade 10,” “grade 11,” and “grade 12.” That’s what they call them in Canada.
Nearly everyone in the United States calls them “9th grade,” “10th grade,” “11th grade,” and “12th grade.” These are the official terms and no one would notice anything awry if you used them. They are 100 percent interchangeable with “freshman,” etc.
My school education from 11-18 took me through Lower Third, Upper Third, Fourth Form, Lower Fifth, Upper Fifth, Lower Sixth, and Upper Sixth.
How does this work? Is this an academic-vocational split or a normal-advanced split, or something else entirely? Is it possible to ‘jump the tracks’ once the split has initially been made?
They’re arbitrary but very old and they’re used the exact same way in college, so it’s less of a chore to memorize them. (Do the Brits use those terms? I don’t even know if British post-secondary education has the same focus on four-year programs, in fact.)
The way I’m figuring it, you either left high school in grade 11 or in grade 14. That can’t be right.
Let’s see whether I have this straight:
Age | US | Ontario, Canada | England/Wales
4-5 | kindergarten | kindergarten | reception
5-6 | 1st grade | grade 1 | year 1
6-7 | 2nd grade | grade 2 | year 2
7-8 | 3rd grade | grade 3 | year 3
8-9 | 4th grade | grade 4 | year 4
9-10 | 5th grade | grade 5 | year 5
10-11 | 6th grade | grade 6 | year 6
11-12 | 7th grade | grade 7 | year 7 / lower third form
12-13 | 8th grade | grade 8 | year 8 / upper third form
13-14 | 9th grade / freshman | grade 9 | year 9 / fourth form
14-15 | 10th grade / sophomore | grade 10 | year 10 / lower fifth form
15-16 | 11th grade / junior | grade 11 | year 11 / upper fifth form
16-17 | 12th grade / senior | grade 12 | year 12 / lower sixth form
17-18 | - | grade 13 | year 13 / upper sixth form
Of course, I’m assuming that UK school years last roughly from from September to June, with breaks, but the longest absence from school is the summer holidays between grades or years. Is this true?
To muddy the waters a bit more on US terminology
High School is usually Grades 9-12 but can be only 10-12 (my HS was, way back)
And in some systems the term “Junior High School” is replaced with “Middle School” . The two may or may not correspond exactly to the same grades.
“When I was young” (in Upstate NY) it was
Kindergarten
Elementary School = G1-G6
Junior High School = G7-G9
High School = G10-G12
I my town in Mass. HS is G9-G12 and “Middle School” may start at G5 or G6 (The levels may get shifted to line up grade population with school capacities)
At least I think I have that right. My kids have completed passing thru the system.
Additionally (missed the edit window), in Ontario at least, kindergarten and grades 1 to 6 were ‘public school’ (officially, ‘elementary school’. These schools were smaller and more of a neighbourhood scale.
Grades 7 and 8 were ‘senior public school’, ‘middle school’, or ‘junior high school’ (names varied). I don’t remember the official name; I went to a ‘senior public’ school that was separate from both the public and high schools.
Grades 9 to 13 were ‘high school’ (officially, ‘secondary school’). Grade 13 was an optional fifth year of high school intended for students going on to university. You got a diploma after grade 12 and another one after grade 13. A lot of students left school after grade 12, got jobs at places like GM, or went into the trades.
This is in the public school system, run by the public school board of each municipality or district. For historical reasons, there’s a separate system of Catholic schools in Ontario, known as ‘separate schools’. And if you can afford the tuition, you can send your kids to private schools.
Here’s a link to a Toronto Transit Commission page describing passes for high-school students. Notice that in the mocked-up sample pass on the page, one of the fields is labeled ‘home form’.
As noted above, the system is different in Scotland but yes, the longest break is the summer one. In England and Wales, the school year runs from September to July. In Scotland it’s more like August to June. I think, but can’t support this with cites, that this difference has something to do with the fact that what passes for a summer in Scotland tends to happen earlier than it does in England.