The topic of British education is coming up a lot in this thread. This has spurned a few General Questions that deserve their own thread.
1: Do parents have a choice in which state-supported school their kid goes to? In the US, excluding some variations in different localities, in general your kid goes to public (state-funded) school based on where you live. If you live in a town that has only one school, your kids goes to that school. If your city is big enough to have multiple schools, your kid goes to whichever one is closest (although, again, there are variations). Do British parents have more leeway?
2: Is religion a factor in state-supported education? Are kids taught Bible study, Church of England doctrine, and similar subjects? Are they made to attend chapel? Or are British state schools completely religion-free, as are (for the most part) American public schools?
3: Do parents pay for the uniforms, or does the state provide them?
4: Do the schools assemble sports teams that compete against other schools? Ferinstance, does your teenage son/daughter’s school have a football team that will be competing against another school’s team next weekend?
It’s been mentioned on some threads here that part of the girls’ school uniforms in the U.K. can be ties. It’s similar in Australia, too, which borrows a lot of its traditions from the U.K. However, these days both boys and girls would tend not to wear ties – but still wear a blouse or shirt with a collar – except on more formal occasions.
1: Do parents have a choice in which state-supported school their kid goes to? In the US, excluding some variations in different localities, in general your kid goes to public (state-funded) school based on where you live. If you live in a town that has only one school, your kids goes to that school. If your city is big enough to have multiple schools, your kid goes to whichever one is closest (although, again, there are variations). Do British parents have more leeway?
It is based on where you live, and houses in some post codes are more valuable simply because the schools for which your children are therefore eligible are better. There’s more to it than that, but I’ll leave it it to somone better qulaified to comment.
2: Is religion a factor in state-supported education? Are kids taught Bible study, Church of England doctrine, and similar subjects? Are they made to attend chapel? Or are British state schools completely religion-free, as are (for the most part) American public schools?
Religious education is mandatory. I don’t know about the legalities of it, which I think favour Christianity, but in my experience at several state schools it tends to be of the “here are some religions, make of that what you will” type of R.E. For example, we studied pagan fertility symbols in my R.E. classes (late '70s). At primary school we routinely sang Christian hymns and carols, less so at middle school and secondary school.
3: Do parents pay for the uniforms, or does the state provide them?
Parents pay.
4: Do the schools assemble sports teams that compete against other schools? Ferinstance, does your teenage son/daughter’s school have a football team that will be competing against another school’s team next weekend?
Yes, but sport, and the identification of the school with its sports teams, is much less important in Britain.
5: What’s with the girls wearing ties?
Do they still do this? I’m not sure it was ever universal. They did wear ties at my secondary school, usually in creative ways, and yes, girls in ties are hot. There’s probably something homoerotic going on there, but I don’t care.
I suspect the answers can vary between different areas. I went to state schools in Scotland between 1977 and 1990.
Some leeway is available to parents, but I wouldn’t like to say precisely what. My own parents were able to choose a local non-denominational school for me over the nearest Catholic state school which was about 10 miles away.
In Scotland at least, there are state-run Catholic schools. There is, I believe, teacher-led prayer and education on Catholic doctrine. My non-denominational school had comparative religion class and no daily prayer. At the end of the term we were expected to attend a Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) service.
Parents pay for the uniforms.
Yes, that’s pretty common.
No idea. Schoolgirls wearing ties seems entirely normal to me.
Some choice, but how much choice is heavily based upon where you live.
Yes it’s mandated, usually under the guise of religious education. These days relgious education doesn’t tend to be slanted towards one religion and is more objective.
Parents buy them
Yes, not to anywhere near the level in the USA though. The only time you’d see anything approaching the level of enthusim that exists in the USA for high school sports is when a school team made to something like the final of the Boys school’s FA Cup final (soccer).
It’s part of the uniform for girls for a few schools, for others it’s optional for girls.
There didn’t used to be a choice, but theoretically there is now, parents being expected to choose a list of four schools, in order of preference. In reality most areas have about the same number of school places as children, so if one school is thought to be better than the others and gets more applicants than it has places it chooses according to proximity to the school, whether the child has relatives in that school and so forth. Therefore “choice” has a mercifully small effect.
I went to a Church of England school, although Islamic and Catholic schools exist (and presumably others). There were a couple of church attendances a year, Easter and that, but nothing particularly religious otherwise. There was a Religious Education class, as required by the National Curriculum, but it didn’t particularly focus on Christianity. There was a certain amount of hymn singing in primary school, but that wasn’t C of E and was interspersed with singing ragtime tunes and Beatles songs, so I don’t think there was much of an intent towards religious indoctrination behind it.
Uniforms, at least in my day, were bought by parents with poorer families receiving subsidies. Same for school meals, if you were wondering.
The schools I went to had teams which participated in sports, although I don’t know which sports. Certainly the primary school I went to had a football team and the middle-school had a Rugby team. School sports teams are really spectator events or major items of school pride as they seem to be in American films, or at least they weren’t in my day.
Both sexes are required to conform with school uniform regulations. Those vary according to school, so some may require girls to wear ties, some won’t.
Why is there only 1 private college in England? (I think that is true) Were there more private colleges in the past? If so, did the state take them over?
The law still requires a daily act of collective worship, which should be ‘broadly Christian in character’. In practice this requirement is widely ignored.
Some schools are still associated with a religious denomination. If, however, they take public funds they are no longer permitted to exclude candidates who have other religions or no religion.
It is possible to leave school at 16, having taken no public examinations (though one would be strongly pressured not to do so). It used to be 14. After the war it was raised to 15. In my lifetime it was raised to 16. The last government announced plans to raise the school leaving age to 18 - wholly undesirable in my view.
Not sure what you define as ‘private college’ - clarification needed.
I think he means the University of Buckingham, which is the one example of a (AIUI) respected university that operates outside the British funding system.
In the United States, we make a distinction between public/state (government) universities – which are owned, operated, and funded by the state, and private universities, which might take some money from the government, but are privately owned and operated, either by religious organizations or by private non-religious foundations. Both kinds are not-for-profit.
Prominent public/state universities – University of California (Berkeley), Ohio State University, University of Michigan, University of Illinois, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of Texas, Pennsylvania State University, etc.
Prominent private universities – Harvard University, Leland Stanford Jr. University, Yale University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, etc.
There are also “proprietary” colleges that operate for profit – e.g., University of Phoenix, DeVry University, ITT Tech, and various proprietary business or technical colleges – but they’re problematic, expensive, and often fraudulent, and degrees from such institutions are often not considered advantageous by potential employers.
The carrot of access to public funding was dangled in front of such institutions to persuade them to opt in. In recent years there has been some talk of Oxbridge opting out, to enable them to charge the (higher) fees which they feel to be economic.
The University College at Buckingham was founded specifically to be outside this system, and it remains outside it. IIRC they had some difficulty getting their degrees validated in the early years. Until the present, there has not been sufficient demand for institutions outside the UCAS system to warrant any more being created. (Although there are plenty of other educational colleges outside the access-to-public-funding system, but they cannot issue degrees).
There normally a number of local schools that will fall into your catchment area, and you can apply for your child to attend a number of them (I ‘think’ you can do a kind of ‘first choice’, ‘second choice’ etc thing). Clearly, some schools are better than others, so the good ones tend to get heavily oversubscribed and there’s always a scramble for places. As others have noted, parents will sometimes shelf out to buy expensive houses in the catchment area of a good school to guarantee a place.
So parents DO have a choice, but it doesn’t mean they’ll get a place at the school they want most.
Religion Education is a subject that is mandatory up til about aged 14 – but this isn’t a case of ramming one religion down the throat, it tends to be more a general overview/history of a number of religions.
In my day (80s), my school was non-denominational although we vaguely adhered to the Church of England – singing a daily hymn in assembly. Non Christian pupils sat out of assembly. I suspect this Christian aspect doesn’t happen anymore, except in denominational schools – some state funded schools are Catholic, Jewish, Islamic etc, and have a greater leaning towards that religion in their daily prayers and RE lessons.
Parents pay, but school uniform is generally much cheaper than normal clothes, especially for the basics such as trousers, shirts, jumpers and shoes. Many state schools include grey or black in their uniform, which means the big national retailers like supermarkets can sell generic uniforms at very low cost. The individual school ‘branding’ is then added by a badged blazer, tie or jumper/sweatshirt.
Yes, although they are not normally part of a league, it’s more just a succession of friendlies. There will be occasional competitive tournaments for which there is a trophy.
Hawt. No, seriously, it’s probably because girls’ uniforms have developed from boys’. It does mean any Brit woman can tie her partner’s tie for him, which isn’t a bad skill to have. Ties are becoming less common though. Damn shame.
Additionally on the uniforms, some schools (esp. primary schools) run or accommodate a sort of second-hand market/shop for uniforms - because although some pupils tear holes in the knees of their trousers on the first wear, other kids grow out of them before they’ve been washed twice. There’s also quite a lot of handing down, within families and between friends with differently-aged kids.
Even in the C of E controlled primary where I’m a governor, the collective worship is most often an assembly with a theme like road safety or stranger danger. Interpretation of ‘Broadly Christian’ can be stretched easily to anything that positively impacts the wellbeing of the pupils, community, world, etc.
The Church influence at this school chiefly consists of monitoring and supporting the moral growth of the children and the community cohesion stuff.
Interestingly, because of the flavour of input from the Church (which includes a log of golden rule stuff, tolerance and understanding of your peers, etc), the school gets a higher than average level of requests for placement of children of other religions, and as a result, is more concentratedly multicultural than the community in which it resides.
This is true, although at least in the case of C of E schools, church membership or religious observance is permitted to be a deciding factor in the specific case where two children from outside catchment are applying for a single place at the same time.
I left school in 1998, so this might have changed, but my parents moved house when I was ten, and I was due to start secondary school the next year at eleven. I stayed for my final year at the primary school I was already at, not the one in the new village we’d moved to. As everyone from the primary school I was at went to one secondary school, and everyone from the school in my new village went to another, I was allowed to go with my friends to the same school as them rather than having to go to the one in the catchment area. I am fairly certain my parents would have checked that I would be able to do this before they moved us to the new village, but who knows? Same for my brother.
Our uniform was polo shirts and jumpers, no ties. I gave up wearing the uniform by the last year anyway
Our school never competed in any meaningful way against other schools in sports, definitely not with the fervour of American schools I see on TV(and also experience of living in the States when I was younger). You could join a sports team, such as hockey, netball, football, rugby, etc but it was optional and involved giving up your free time and therefore virtually no one bothered. I don’t remember anyone getting any kind of status from being on a sports team, either, but then I was a tragic little weirdo at school and a lot of that stuff passed me by - I was far too busy dying my hair and writing things on my DM boots to notice anybody using their time fruitfully.
Missed edit window: We had a daily assembly, I do not remember any of the content of it apart from one when someone had smashed up the boys’ toilets in the language block, and our year all got a bollocking. They caught the guy that did it anyway and he was expelled. I think we were given bibles at some point but I don’t remember why; I do not think any religious ceremonies were enforced. I went to a CofE primary school and our assemblies did involve praying, but not at secondary school.
Strange to have an assembly every day for five years (term-time only, obvs) and to only remember one thing! I learnt virtually nothing!