By popular request, I will provide an overview of the education system in the UK as compared to that of the US. Students begin their education in Primary School at around the age of 5. Primary education is much like elementary schools in the US. They go through 7 years here before going to a secondary school (i.e. high school).
Secondary Education
For those of you who have read the Harry Potter series, you’re already familiar with secondary school in the UK. Students are required to attend this for 4 years. At the end of this time, students take their Standard Grade exams (once called O-levels) in 7-9 subject areas. Once the student completes these, he is able to enter the workforce similar to a US citizen who have receive a high school diploma. In the rest of the UK, the equivalent of Standard Grade is the GCSE. Secondary schools have an optional 2 years which begin at this point. Most students stay at least another year as it is required for university-level education (1 for Scotland or 2 for the rest of the UK). Starting in the fourth year of secondary school (but not generally until the fifth), students are allowed to take “Higher” courses. In the UK, these are known as AS-levels. These courses are roughly equivalent to most intro-level college courses in the US. Students focus their efforts here If a student stays for the sixth year, he takes “Advanced Higher” and/or additional Highers. Advanced Highers are generally equivalent in the UK to A-levels. Students staying this far do so for university admissions, however the quality of education at this level is closer to that of a (good) junior college in the US as it provides a solid base for specialization in the university. Students who do not go on to university in these optional years work towards their Higher National Certificate and/or Higher National Diploma. These are scaled slightly under the bachelor’s degree and are roughly equivalent to an associate’s degree in the US.
Qualifications
With all of that said, there is still more regarding education. In the UK, education’s main goal is marketable skills. Because of this, there is a unified structure of qualification levels (SCQF in Scotland, NQF in the rest of the UK). I will be following the Scottish structure, but the national one follows it closely. Once students reach their fourth year of secondary school, they begin to gain points on the SCQF. This is a general scale for depth of education, so that basic secondary education is low and graduate degrees are high. There is also a second scale (Scottish Vocational Qualifications or SVQ) which more broadly indicates the level of competence one ought to have. SVQ is a vocational scale utilized more often in apprenticeships than in education. Because of the way secondary school is structured in that it provides means for apprenticeships to begin while still in school, the two scales do correlate weakly. By the time a student reaches SCQF level 3, he is expected to be competent in basic, routine work (SVQ 1). By the time a student has completed the mandatory part of secondary school (Standard Grades), he will be on SCQF level4 (or sometimes level 5) and this should also correlate to SVQ 2 (is able to perform a broad range of skills). A student who stays in secondary school through the 2 optional years should be on the SCQF level 7 (sometimes 6) and is expected to have competency as a supervisor (SVQ 3). A student who graduates from a university with a regular degree is considered SCQF level 9 (Honours degree is level 10). The upper SCQF levels (11 and 12) are for Master’s and doctoral degrees (respectively). Additionally, there are two levels of the SVQ which can be awarded: management (SVQ 4) and senior management (SVQ 5).
You may also be interested in:
Could you explain more how the U.K. system is more geared to producing marketable skills?
Hi Chris, nice overview. Just wanted to mention, that most students actually start school at three years old here, it’s called nursery, and then go on to Reception at age 4, then year one at age 5. Also, I thought they were called “A levels”?
3 years old??? It’s interesting that as kids get sent earlier and earlier to school, they get dumber and dumber.
@ Sadie. There are no A levels in Scotland. A levels in England and Wales used to be a two year course and most students did three. Nowadays they do AS levels (usually four) in one year and then A2 levels (typically three) the following year.
Sadie, you’re right that they start at 3 y/o, but I wanted to focus on secondary school since primary school is relatively similar. Also A levels are roughly equivalent to the Highers in Scotland.
Jasen, the system produces more marketable skills in that there is no concept that “everyone goes to university.” As a result, students who plan on entering the workforce are put into apprenticeships. Additionally, the Standard Grades are subject-specific; I would relate them to SAT 2′s but in varying fields that are more job-related.
cchrisr – apprenticeships in UK are a shadow of what they once were (3 year or more on the job training) and very few school leavers go into what would be termed a traditional apprenticeship. There are schemes like “Modern Apprenticeships” which combine training and some further education (usually culminating in NVQs or SVQs, depending on whereabouts you are in UK. To suggest that school leavers who do not go to university “are put into apprenticeships” is simply not the case. Those who do leave school after Standard grades (usually at 16) will generally go straight into the workforce, without any apprenticeship scheme.
A levels no longer exist as such. England and Wales have a two tier system – AS levels after one year and A2s after a second year.
HNC and HND qualifications are not generally studied at schools but at Higher Education and Further Education colleges – they are post-school qualifications – and are not the norm.
Standard grades are subject-specific and may well be equivalent to SAT2s but I doubt they are more “job-related”. They are academic qualifications.
Sorry if I appear pedantic but your overview is a mish-mash attempting to cover the Scottish and English/Welsh systems, schools, FE/HE and university and academic/vocational qualifications and it does none of the above clearly. Not that it would be possible to do so in that number of words!
Redski, thank you for your input here. I am not very familiar with the details of the education system beyond what I can glean from the undergraduates I occasionally see in my department. I did know about the two-tier system for the A-levels (in Scotland it’s Highers and Advanced Highers), but I wasn’t aware that the AS level was an applicable as a norm (like Credit Grade versus SG as the norm). However, I do think the content areas of Standard Grades can be more job related (such as the one for Childcare). Also, I will be going into more detail of the university level in a week or so and would like your comments on that as well.
New Zealand has an interesting twist (other than the fact that kids all go to school barefoot) at the primary school level. Kids start primary school on their 5th birthday. Seemed weird to me but upon closer examination (my kid starting primary school) there are a lot of advantages to feeding the kids into the system one at a time. Preschools make a big deal of graduating to the “big” school so most kids are excited by it, the kids have a class full of mentors when they start, and the teachers only have to deal with one new entrant at a time. Seems to work pretty well.
The only downside I see is that kids that start in the middle third of the year need to be evaluated to see if they will move on or continue where they are. The schools are very up front and matter of fact about where students stand to this doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
Under the heading of things are really different in the schools here, my town hosted the New Zealand national primary (yes grade school) school surfing championships last year with several hundred kids competing. My grade school in the states didn’t have a surfing team!! Amazing to watch these kids. No one was even concerned when the contest was delayed a couple of hours when a pod of orca’s dropped in for a little surfing too. The kids got out of the water pretty promptly. Here’s a video of orca’s mixing it up with surfer’s on a different day. I was surfing nearby earlier but I missed it. I’m not sure how I feel about being demoted on the food chain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7FOw8eFy4c