a) Primary school children study English (and Welsh in Wales), maths, science, history, geography, art, music and physical education. Secondary-school pupils study a modem language up to the age of sixteen in addition.
b) Parents choose the school their children go to
c) All children assessed by national tests at the ages of seven, eleven, fourteen and sixteen.
d) Each school responsible for own budget, deciding whether to spend it on books, salaries or other services.
e) Parents vote on whether to make their school independent of local authority control and receive money from central government.
f) All schools are inspected by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted).
g) Results of inspections are publicly available and are used by parents to choose their children’s school.
h) Schools follow a national curriculum including compulsory literacy and numeracy lessons.
i) All children are tested at “Key Stages” by Standard Assessment Tests (SATS).
Exercises and Tasks
Use the information above to answer the questions.
1) Define the following:
Abolition, assessment, catchment area, local education authority
2) Which subjects in the British National Curriculum have you studied in your own school system?
3) Match each government change with a feature of schools in 1988.
4) Find the outcome in 2001 which resulted from each of the government changes.
5) Which of the changes do you think are improvements? Why?