GCSEs and A Levels/Dan, Emma, and Rupert's future

[Susan Atherton]

I apologise for the rapidly heading OT nature of this post, but I just wanted to answer any queries for the Americans among us bemused by the English school system.

Lynda wondered:
snippity
 That said, how flexible IS the British 
school system?  What are these tests Dan, Rupert and Emma will be taking in 
the next year or so that determines their futures? 

These tests are the General Certificate of Secondary Education exams, or GCSEs. To be honest, I don't think there is such a thing as a test that determines your future, because you can always go back to night school, but the GCSEs are reasonably important. 

Basically, the English school system runs something like this. First, you have Nursery. Some kids don't go to nursery, some do - it's more a mildly educational childminders than anything else. Then, when you turn four, you toddle off to Reception. This is mandatory, and if you stay in the school system, you won't emerge til you're twenty one. Scary, huh? (Even scarier is that at my sixth form, they actually had an infant and junior school attached, as well as a nursery, so you could enter at age two and not leave til you turned eighteen. Now THAT'S scary. Some more trivia - the school of which I speak is in fact Bolton School, alma mater of Ian McKellen. Isn't that nice?) Reception is I believe the alternative of Kindergarten, and it's basically half playing, half learning. Then you enter infant school - years one to six. I think the Year 1, Year 2 thing equates to the first grade second grade thing. At the end of each year, in June, you take your end of year exams. Once you have finished year six, it's off to secondary school!

Secondary school or high school, is years 7-11. We don't have middle schools. If you want to go to a comprehensive or a high school (basically public schools) you can just wander in, more or less. If you want to go to a grammar school (like me, swagger swagger), you have to take the 11+. The eleven plus is an exam sat by year six's, usually in the half term of the summer term, and I *think* is a standardised test from the government. However, my school also set a level on it - for example, my friend Joanne and I got a place at the school, wheras my friend Andy passed the exam but didn't get a place. Another friend, Danny, didn't pass - the idea being you need, say, 60 to pass, but 80 was the "get a place" level set by the school.

In years 7-9, you can basically screw around (God I wish I'd known that in year 7, I was such a goody-goody!). In year 10, however, the work starts. Years 10 and 11 are devoted to your GCSEs, and year 11 ends in May for study leave, so you can revise without worrying about lessons or homework - or in the case of me and my friends, go to the pub every night and worry about revision the morning before the exam. There are no end of year exams in year 10 so you can continue to work towards the GCSEs. Well, I say there aren't - the usual end of year exams involve the timetable being suspended, and the exams take place in silent classrooms, where everyone sits at their own desk or is seated beside someone from a different year. In year 10, there are end of year tests in each class, but these are much more informal and are usually conducted in class.

In year 11, the year Dan, Emma and Rupert will be in, you take the GCSEs. The GCSEs are written by the exam board, not the school, and are standardised - in every school in the area (eg. my exam board was NEAB because I lived in the NW of England - people in the south had, I think, SEQ) English Lit students are sitting down and taking the English Lit exam, there is no way to ring a mate of yours at another school and ask them the answers. If you miss an exam, you have to bring a doctor's note (if it's a cold, it's basically shut up and put up) for your absence and you then take a different exam after all the others have finished (there is a set time for the resits as well). The point I'm trying to impress is that the education bit of the government takes the GCSEs very seriously, it's big news when people get their results (Results Day usually ends up with people on the news or on a magazine show opening their results live on air) and they do not allow, as you say, much, if any, flexibility.

If Dan, Emma and Rupert screw up their GCSEs, it could affect their chances of getting into sixth form. Sixth form college, or senior school, is probably the equivalent of college in the US. You study from 16-18 taking your A Levels (or NEWTs ;) ), and to get into VI Form usually requires at least five grade C GCSEs (which are pretty easy to get, considering you take 9 subjects by law). Then, in A Level, you study four subjects, which in year two you drop to three. If you get good results in these - and A Levels are *much* harder than GCSEs in my opinion (I got four As and five Bs in my GCSEs and CDD in my first year of A Levels), you can take the course you want at university (I think our uni degrees are about the equiv of a master's in the US). If you want to do English at Oxford, you'll probably need three As; Health Sciences at Preston, and it'll be more like DDD. I wanted to do Creative Writing at Leeds, which was CCC, somewhere in between :D.

So the long answer to a short question is yes, these exam they are taking next year can indirectly affect their future, as it could mean they won't get into the uni they want. However, I'd imagine Rupert and Dan will probably stay in the movie biz, even if Emma and Tom don't (or can't!), so it might not worry them too much. Whether it will worry Radcliffe and Grint Sr, on the other hand, is a different question - I think the world over people can identify with their parents wanting them to do well at school!

Hope you've been illuminated, or at least not *too* bored!

Susan
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