With such various and conflicting demands our schools and our teachers are always trying to squeeze too much into the school day. Nonetheless there are many excellent schools in Britain at both primary and secondary level; and there are other schools which are not so good, and some where the teachers are struggling to make the school work at all. This is true in all countries, but in not all countries is the debate so vigorous or the demands so contradictory.
The organization of schooling in Britain differs from that in Russia. My account is of the present system in England -arrangements in Scotland and Wales are not quite the same, and there are variations in Northern Ireland. In all parts of the United Kingdom, the organisation of education is the responsibility of the local government which is based on the elected council controlling a certain region. However, the powers of this local authority have been have been substantially reduced over the last quarter of a century as, on the one hand, the planning of education has become more centralized, and on the other hand, head-teachers of schools have been given money directly from the government to spend on teachers, buildings, equipment, etc. Local authorities are left with the problems - too many children with not enough school places; buildings falling down; what to do with truants, children with health and behavioural problems; immigrants who do not speak the language; parents who cannot look after their children properly. They have become problem solvers rather than overall organizers - a situation which does not please them.
Since, in practice, education is paid for by the state (from our taxes) with only a small proportion of the costs paid from local taxes, the government argues that it should have more control over what happens in schools. Local authorities argue that they understand local conditions better, and that they are directly responsible to the parents of the children they educate. They point out that they have to oversee the running of dozens of schools in their area. Recently the argument has been exacerbated because the government has built a number of large 'Academies' in poor areas where the children were mostly failing to reach high standards of education. These academies are planned and paid for by the government, usually with a contribution from a private sponsor, and they are altogether free of local authority control. These different types of school may (or may not) be available in the area where a particular child lives. Big cities offer more choice, whereas children in the remote parts of the country will in practice have only one school to which they can go.
If one considers the course of a child's education in Britain, it is very different from yours.
Children have to start full-time school when they are five years old. Most of them start at the beginning of the school year in which they become five, so that we have many classes of four-year-olds. Children aged 4 to 6 are called infants. Their school will usually be the Infants section of a Primary School; the children aged from 7 to 11 in a Primary school are called Juniors. When they are eleven, children move to a Secondary school and slay either until 16 or 18. The vast majority of secondary schools are Comprehensives. That is to say, they take children of all abilities from the area; usually a comprehensive school is big enough to take the children from three or four primary schools, although a more common pattern in a town (of, say, 100000 inhabitants) is for three or four comprehensives to take the children from seven to twelve primary schools. The idea is that parents will have a choice of schools for their children's secondary education, although in practice this 'choice' can lead to many organizational problems. (A small group of local authorities still have selective grammar schools and secondary modern schools, but these are often unsatisfactory for many of the children and are most unlikely to increase in number.) When children reach the age of 16, in some areas the schools offer a full 'A-level' course for the next two years (see below), while in other areas, children who want to study from 16 to 18 all move to what is called a 'Sixth-Form College'. At present it is possible to leave education at 16, though the government is considering making further education or training mandatory.
(A minority of local authorities divide their education into three stages (Lower, Middle and Upper) but these are also less popular than they were. Oxfordshire organised a Lower-Middle-Upper system within the city of Oxford in the 1970s but scrapped it in the late 1990s when they decided that children had a better education when they had to make only one school move from Primary to Secondary.)
All the schools described so far are state schools. Every child has the right to a free education provided by the state. In England, about 93% of children attend state schools. The other 7% attend private fee-paying schools, sometimes called 'independent' schools. A small minority of these private schools are boarding schools where children live as well as study. You will probably have read about such schools in English novels and stories, and you may have the impression that most British school children go to them. In fact, probably less than 2% of children are 'boarders'. Private schools are very expensive, whether they are day schools or boarding schools, and many parents, even if they could afford to send their children to boarding schools, do not wish to do so. That is why so many private schools have a large number - even the majority - of pupils from other countries. The chief attraction for parents is that the classes tend to be smaller, and in some private schools with a good academic reputation, unusual subjects - such as Russian - are studied. Consequently, if you meet a young English student of Russian in your country, he or she will quite probably have come from a private school. Some private schools are excellent, others provide a very poor education. The point to remember is that they educate a very small proportion of our children.
Since I wrote the first edition of this book, pre-school education has developed hugely. I wrote of the poor opportunities for young children to attend nursery schools or even playgroups because so few of them existed compared to the services available in other countries. That has changed. Many government policies at the beginning of the twenty-first century were directed towards giving the best chances in life to children from deprived and difficult homes. They were given extra help in new nurseries. These nurseries were then extended to other children. Today all children aged three and over whose parents want to send them to a nursery get financial support: either a free place if they are poor or help with the fees. By the time these children are four they are already preparing for full-time school. For under-threes there are a variety of nurseries, play groups, childminders and crèches for children at institutions where their parents work. Most of these cost some money; most of them are attended by children for, say, three or four half-days. Parents are not encouraged to put their child in a nursery or crèche from early morning to late at night. If one parent can work part-time (which is common) or make part-time use of grandparents or friends, the mixture of child-care with periods at home with a parent or parent-substitute seems to be best for very young children.
The details of school days vary so what follows is 'typical' but do not assume that it is the experience of all children. We are less centralised in outlook and in detail than you are. The school day starts for the children at about 8.45 a.m. Teachers arrive much earlier. Most schools have an 'Assembly' at least two days a week, when all the children crowd into the biggest hall where the head teacher - or another teacher - will talk to them. In some schools Assembly will consist of a short religious service - a reading from the Bible, a hymn, a prayer. That is much less common, now that so many of our schools include children with non-Christian backgrounds and children whose parents are atheists. Sometimes speakers from different religions come to explain their faith. Teachers may devise short talks on some problem that the children can understand: for younger children the importance of looking after pets or of helping other children with disabilities. For older children a local speaker may come to discuss - for example - ideas of Justice or to talk about the problems of climate change for the world. Perhaps the school choir performs a couple of well-rehearsed songs. The idea of Assembly is to get the children together in order to develop a sense of the school community and school values. On the days when there is no assembly, class teachers will deal with class matters, and will try to check if there are any children with personal problems who might need help.