Probably the Gideons - it’s what they do.
Non-denominational state schools, rural North East Scotland, 1985 to 1998.
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Whichever school’s catchment area you live in, that’s where you go. This generally means you attend the school closest to you or that’s easiest to get to.
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We got compulsory Religious Education classes in secondary school, but as an earlier poster mentioned, these were intended to make us aware of different religions. However, there were some prayers and hymns, especially in primary school and at Christmas. There was a definite link between the schools and the Church of Scotland. I’m pretty sure our parents could opt to not have us participate - in practice very few took this option.
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There was no compulsory uniform at my secondary school, just a dress code (no jeans, trainers, football colours, sloganised tshirts, etc.). Primary school - parents had to buy the uniform, although there might have been financial assistance available to the hard-up.
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There were sports matches between schools, often friendlies with neighbouring schools, but with some competitive leagues and knock-out tournaments. Nobody, apart from those participating, really paid much attention to the results.
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Ties were generally only seen in large numbers once or twice a year when individual or year group photographs were taken. But yes, a girl wearing the full uniform would wear a tie.
Mostly echoing what other people have said:
School choice - in theory you can request to send your child to any school you like, even one at the other end of the country. It’s not true that you are restricted to catchment. However, every local authority (and to some extent the schools themselves) have a system whereby they allocate places using points, or their equivalent. So, if the child is looked after by the local authority they get x number of points, if they have a disability y points, if they have an older sibling already at the school z points, then you get points based on how close you are to the school, whether that’s in or out of catchment area and so on and so on. On your application you specify 1st - 4th choice and the ranking you give each school you apply to may also affect the points they give you.
If the school intake is undersubscribed then in theory everyone who requests that school will get in. If not (and this is more likely) then everybody’s points get totalled up and children with the most points get in. So, it is entirely possible to be well within a school’s catchment area and still not get in, or to be outside the area and actually get precedence over someone living closer to the school based on points you get awarded for other things. The effect of all this is that parents do get some choice, but in practice there are limits. It seems to work ok, or at least most people I know find the results fairly easy to live with, although the tabloids always have an annual horror story or two to print.
Every parent of nearly-school-age children will know the process intimately (the fine detail changes each year), including dates involved. For instance, the closing date for applications (I think nationally) for this year is 15th January and everyone in my peer group seems to have been talking about little else for about 3 pigging months as our children are going to be this year’s intake. All of this applies to first schools, by the way - that is infant or primary schools. The children are referred to as ‘rising 5s’ - that is, they will be 5 years old at some point in their first year. The process for junior and secondary schools is similar, but also has the principle of ‘feeder’ schools - that is if you go to St. Cake’s Infants, there’s a general principle that you’ll go to St. Cake’s Juniors if there is one, and sometimes this is automatic and requires no specific application.
We got Gideon Testaments too.
School uniform used to be a real racket; it had to be purchased from specific approved shops, and the items, when of a distinctive type and colour such as school blazers, were often very expensive. I ended up wearing a second-hand girls’ blazer at one time.
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I was technically a few miles outside the catchment area of my secondary school, though there were two closer schools. Apparently I was allowed to register due to the fact the head teacher also lived in my village, and objected to it being described as too far to travel. It was (and is) one of the very few state run grammar schools left (ie. you had to pass an exam, which complicated the points system even further), so maybe they had a bit more leeway on admissions that usual. It was vastly oversubscribed, and had a long waiting list- one girl joined the class in the 3rd year, after being in another school and waiting for a space to become available for nearly 3 years. I went to primary school near my parents’ work, in a different village to the one we lived in, as that was more convenient for them.
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Religious Education was compulsory until the third year of secondary school, but it was comparative religion rather than specifically geared towards Christianity, despite the school being officially C of E. There was a ‘broadly Christian’ daily assembly, which members of other religions were allowed to sit out (atheists didn’t get a pass, though I tried…)
In primary school we had occasional church visits, and the local vicar occasionally came and sang wobbly hymns at us. Normal daily assembly featured hymns (and, for some reason, frequently singing ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, make of that what you will.) -
Uniform was bought by parents- my primary school didn’t have one, (now they have a polo shirt as a uniform), secondary school was incredibly specific, and insisited on a certain skirt, only available from one horribly overpriced shop. In fact, my mother was complaining about the cost of their uniform only a few days ago, and I left 9 years back…
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There were inter-school tournaments, which I only generally found out about because the sporty girls would all disappear from class. If they won it would be announced in the following day’s assembly. That was about all the attention it got though.
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I went to a Girls’ school, the uniform, which was always worn, included a tie
I think I still have it somewhere, if you want to get kinky…
So what if your little tyke is really really passionate about football and wants to play as much as he can, with a view toward playing professionally some day? Are there leagues [del]organized[/del] organised by local athletic organizations? Do the football clubs themselves have youth development leagues?
British pro soccer teams have a system for signing up kids who are high school age (14-18) , I am sure somebody here can explain it better. The Chelsea team even has a relationship with our local soccer league in NC.
If you are good enough to play you won’t be doing it at school, you will join a proper youth league club. The Football Association clubs have scouts who attend the matches to seek out talent.
:dubious: The British boy’s high school I attended in the 1960s had a predominance of C of E pupils, but quite a few Jewish and Catholic boys too. The Jews and Catholics did not attend the religious parts of the assemblies, and during RE lessons they sat at the back of the class and did homework (or goofed off, I guess) when the rest of us were supposed to be paying attention to the teacher. However, I can recall absolutely no instances of any sort of religiously motivated tensions, or even resentment that they got out of participating in the RE class. I do remember a couple of boys who would occasionally make generic, mildly anti-semitic remarks, but that never seemed to be translated into personal hostility to the actual Jewish boys, and I can’t ever recall any boy saying anything anti-Catholic. People knew who was a Catholic or a Jew (and many probably knew that I, for instance, was to all intents and purposes an atheist, although that did not get me out of the hymn singing in assemblies or the RE classes), but in the social life of the school, one’s religious affiliation was a total non-issue.
Obviously you’d expect a kid who’s got the abilty to become a pro to play for the school team, but they will usually be developed by their local professional team’s academy (or another professional team, as kids can be scouted at quite young ages by professional clubs) and they would play at the youth level for this team. There’s also loads of youth teams and again these will usually have more influence on a players development than their school.
Professional teams will start recruitng players at about age 7. The rules for professional teams are that up to the age of 12 they can recruit anyone within an hour’s travelling distance, from 12-16 anyone within an hour and half’s travelling distance and from 16 up I believe the only limitation are FIFA’s rules about recruiting youngsters from abroad.
My parents exempted me from RE classes so I could do an extra GCSE-Latin.
No big deal, no one cared much, and I think they just wrote a note saying they thought my time would be more productively spent elsewhere.
In my girls’ school there were various esoteric rules about the uniform.
Skirts had to be a maximum of so many inches above the knee (rolling them up on the way to and from school on the buses and trains* was usual).
Shoes had to be black and laced with less than 1" heel (often flouted).
Blazers were only to be worn outdoors.
Bras were to be white (no, really).
Activities in the gym like gymnastics and dance were to be done in polo shirt and large elasticated knickers (think Bridget Jones’ big pants) and bare feet. Hockey, netball, tennis etc meant you could wear a pleated skirt and running shoes, and running meant shorts or sweat pants were an option.
Summer blouses (short sleeves, no tie) in summer only.
Grey gabardine or duffel coats in winter, only outdoors and only if fully buttoned.
Tights were meant to be grey and woollen- in reality we all bought charcoal 40 denier from M&S instead.
Here there is a schoolboy rugby cup final on St Patrick’s day. My father took me one year when his old school was playing. I was 6, and it was the one time I felt my dad might have quite liked a son. Apart from that, school sport isn’t a big thing.
*There aren’t “School buses” here the way there are in the US. While there are some buses put on especially for school kids, many just get ordinary buses and trains with commuters (who just adore sittng beside teenagers), using a state subsidised free pass. For kids going to single sex schools the journey in the morning might be the only real chance to meet the opposite sex during the week. Of course, there are those whose parents drive them, those who walk, and in sixth form, those who drive themselves.
There was RE at the schools I went to. But to me it never came across as a case of them trying to instil a religion into us. More that they were just teaching us about various religions of the world. To be honest I found RE pretty boring and never paid much attention. I remember more about Hinduism than Christianity, since Hinduism seemed more interesting and fun than other religions. Not that I remember too much of Hinduism either, but I found Diwali pretty interesting.
There was also a school prayer in morning assembly. But I found that completely uninteresting too. I usually just kept my head down and thought about cartoons.
Now that you pointed it out, I can see it might seem unusual. But since girls had always worn ties, I never thought anything about it at the time. It’s just school uniform.
In my day it was all Christianity (I guess things have changed since then), but it certainly did not feel like we were being evangelized, just taught about the religion, what is in the Bible, etc.
Actually, though, none of the RE teachers I had in high school seemed to care much about what they were doing. One of them didn’t even turn up a lot of the time. About the only actual learning in RE that I can remember in 7 years of high school was reading the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, some bits of which I still remember, such as when Peter has God strike a woman dead because she did not give all of her money to the Church when she joined. Another teacher, when some of us started to question in class why we should actually believe that there is a God, mentioned the five proofs of His existence (I guess he meant the five given by Aquinas), but refused to tell us what they were because, he said, we would not be interested. If he had told us, I think it would have been, by some distance, the most interesting RE lesson we had ever had.
Like everyone else has said, there is some choice, but in practice it’s fairly limited.
I doubt there are many towns with only one school - it might be the case in the depths of the countryside. Note that British schools tend to be somewhat smaller than ones in the US, so it’d be normal to have three school with 700 or so pupils each rather than one school with 2100.
What everyone else has said is right on this, but to answer those specific questions, no: kids wouldn’t be taught Bible study (not in the way that I understand Bible study, anyway) and CofE doctrine would only be mentioned in the vanishingly rare occurence that a child asked about it.
RE is often grouped with citizenship and sex education to become a horribly acronymed hour of dullness a week. My daughter’s school calls it PSHRE and she has no idea what those initials stand for. It’s basically cultural studies.
They do, and some secondary school have been accused of using really expensive uniforms to deter poorer parents. My 12-year-old daughter’s trousers, shirts, jumpers, ties and PE kit came to only about 50 originally, but she keeps losing the bloody PE kit, grr!
Primary school uniform is simple, practical clothing that costs pennies.
If you’re unemployed or on a very low income, you can apply for a school uniform grant for your child once they reach secondary school age. It’s usually automatic.
Uniforms are actually a lot more common now than they were twenty years ago, but, apart from ties, they’re really sensible. Girls are pretty much always allowed to choose trousers rather than skirts, PE kits don’t have those disgusting revealing ‘PE knickers’ and tiny skirts any more, and there are requirements for those of other religions - like, pupils can wear a shalwar kameez or whatever, but only a plain one in a specific colour.
Oh we were deeply jealous of the only muslim girl who was religious enough to wear hijab. She got to wear the hockey skirt over a pair of sweat pants and a sweatshirt for PE, and grey salwar kameez with a maroon head scarf (school colours were grey, maroon and navy).
The main difference between school uniforms in Northern Ireland and the Republic is that in the north the skirts tend to end mid thigh or higher, while in the South they tend to end at the knee or lower.
The fashion while my little sister was at school was for the girls to wear oversized blazers and roll up the skirts so they couldn’t be seen below the blazer. Oh yes, the schools LOVED that- teenage girls appearing to be wearing nothing but tights and blazers.
The kids have always managed to make the uniforms their own- whether you wore the socks pulled up or pushed down, big fat knots, skinny knots, collar open or buttoned, shirt tucked in or out, jumpers tied around the waist or the shoulders- those who wore things strictly according to the school rules were deeply uncool, but you had to wear things in a particular “wrong way” to be cool.
As has been mentioned, it does mean girls here can tie a tie, although most kids wear the simple “up and over” knot, often there will be experimentation with half windsors and full windsors.
The main difference with school colours here is that American colours are designed to look good on the sporting field and to be eye catching. Our school colours are designed not to show the dirt for daily wear.
US school colours might be red and yellow, green and blue, orange and purple.
UK school colours are more likely to be grey, brown, black, bottle green, navy, maroon or blue with accent colours of red, gold, blue, green, purple- often as a stripe in the tie and the crest on the blazer.
Just reminded me, this is one of the actual practical restrictions on what school you go to- travel costs are only paid to a certain selection of schools for each kid, depending mainly on the distance (though if you do qualify, in very rural areas you can even get picked up daily by a taxi, if there’s no buses). I think there was a caveat that if you wished to study more than 2 subjects not available at any of the normal option schools, you could qualify for free travel to the nearest school that taught them.
This might vary by region, but I’m fairly sure that was the case in Cumbria while I lived there.
I did not get free travel, as I went to a school too far away (there was only one local secondary school, and it didn’t have a great reputation) my parents dropped me off daily at the train station, and gave me the fare.
I should add this is pretty much the way it is for Men’s soccer in the USA too, until only a fdew years ago the typical US college sport system was used, but it was generally agreed that those players produced by the college system were at a disadvantage to those produced by professional clubs as they entered the professional leagues much later.
These days the vast majority of the top young US soccer players are not in the US college system.
We did. Coming from the countryside, we had a bus which took about an hour to get to town. Driving yourself it would be twenty minutes, but we had to go around all the hamlets and villages.
It never occurred to me to think there was anything odd about us girls wearing ties.