Education In Great Britain

Secondary education Education in adolescence is also called secondary education and represents a gateway to the opportunities and benefits of economic and social development throughout the world. The main purpose of secondary education is to give common knowledge to prepare for either higher education or vocational education, or to train directly to a profession.

Over 85% of British pupils attend comprehensive schools, which take children from the age of 11 and are compulsory up the age of 18. Grammar schools offer a mainly academic for the 11 to 18 years age group. Children enter grammar schools on the their abilities, first setting an entrance examination.

State or Public Schools? The present state system evolved from a gradual more towards universal educational provision which started in the 19th century. In 1944, Butler’s Education Act introduced the “11 plus” examination. All children took the test at the end of primary school and those who passed had their fees paid at the local grammar school This change had significant social and cultural effects. It enabled a degree of social mobility and introduced to post-war Britain a ‘meritocracy’.

On the negative side, the worst effect of the Education Act was that some people saw it as ‘discarding’ the 80% of children who were assigned by the test to secondary school. Children were labelled as ‘failures’ at the age of eleven, and this led to cumulative loss of ambition, achievement and self-esteem.

The Labour government, in the 1960s, endorsed a system of ‘comprehensive’ schools. Pupils of different capabilities shared the same classrooms in the belief that the bright would help the weak and that improved the social development would compensate for any lack of intellectual achievement.

Universities Oxford and Cambridge are the oldest universities in Britain. ‘Redbrick’ Universities founded in the Victorian Age. New Universities created in the 1960s include Lancaster, York and Sussex. For years education was a social cause, today it is an economic imperative.

Today's teachers the dominant model of the teacher working alone - of the artisan, we could say - is no longer viable in a knowledge society that demands that they should work collaboratively. Creativity has emerged since 2001 as an important if still minor elect in the policy repertoire once the watchword of a romantic critique of industrialism and of the miseries of mass education, it has been revalued as a quality vital to business innovation and to the communicative demands of informational capitalism.

The British Media

Written Media: Quality Papers and Tabloids Audiovisual Media: BBC Radio and Television The importance of the Internet and the creation of Blogs to support political position and orientations; pros and cons.