Hah! you can choose your classes!
Here in lovely Northern Ireland I had to take
English Lit and Lang
Maths and Additional Maths
Science (Bio, Chem, Physics)
Geography and/or History (took both)
French
with one other of the rest of the subjects I had taken up to that point
Spanish
Italian
Latin
Religious Education
Home Ec
or German
(i took latin, which is very useful in anatomy and modern languages)
for my GCSE’s (formal exams aged 16). yes, that’s right, 11 bloody subjects with 2 or three 2 hour papers in each!! arghh!
And only 3 subjects from those for my A-levels at 18 ( I took Chem, Bio, History) in order to get into university. I had 4 hours of eaching a day and 2 hours of free study for the last two years at school.
I had Gym once a week (gymnastics, dancing, athletics) and Games once a week ( swimming, field hockey, netball, rugby, soccer) as well, until I was 16, then we had “personal development” once a week…which was an hour for discussion, debate and enjoyment… we had sex ed, comparative religion, self defence classes and guest speakers from various organisations came to speak.
For my entire time at school I had music and drama for an hour on alternate Wednesdays.
I WISH I could have picked something usless and time wasting to do. With my timetable, it wasn’t exactly possible!
(Although the talk on European Economic Policy was probably something iI could have happily skipped)