Do you like your system?

[YesIReallyDoLikeRootBeer]

I'm in America, so our system for school placement is very different to England (I believe Scotland is similar to here). Where ever you live, your DC go to the school for that address. You never apply for schools (Unless you choose to go to Private School). You never worry about where you will end up, or if siblings will be split. No being upset that you did not get the same school as a friend (unless you, or they, move out of district) or choosing a school just because friends are going there. Every year I watch on this board (and the Primary board) the anxiety parents and kids go through in the lead up to decision day. Then the upset so many feel when they dont get the school they want. Being put on waiting lists and maybe having your school change (maybe even more then once) as offers come from waiting list schools. As an outsider looking in I always have to wonder "why do it this way?" So I'm curious, do you like your system? Or would you rather a system (like in America and apparently Scotland) where you just go to your local school and never have to think about which school you would get? (this is only in regards to public school, not private)

What do people think is the best age group separation? DD will be going to an 11-16 school. Is 11-14 then 14-18 better? 11- 18? Starting secondary at 12 or 13?

I do like the fact at 16 she will have access to a massive range of options not just A levels in academic subjects... although the College has 1000 per year roughly which seems massive!

Around I'm in Hants where state schools run y7-y11 only (there are a very few exceptions). I think the fact they have to make a positive choice for 6th form is a massive plus. I see too many threads on here of DC staying on at school because it is safe even if it isn't the best choice academically for them.

However for less mature or more vulnerable students moving to a large college without the teachers knowing them / their strengths, plus reduced pastoral care can be an issue. Both my DDs have to some extent been impacted by this.

We have at least 7 colleges within reach, DD2 is at the agricultural one, DD1 attended a mixed A level / BTEC one.

I grew up in a suburb of Boston 70s-80s and school was as OP described. You went to your local school which was fairly evenly distributed throughout the area. Then there was one big high school we all went to. If it was a big birth year tough the school HAD to accommodate you - enter those temporary classrooms. They are also obliged to educate you no matter what your disability- a young girl I know with severe autism attends a specialist school which the city pays for as they cannot provide adequate provision within the state system. (It's not automatic, there are specialist lawyers who fight your case with the City).
High school you were either in basic, standard, honours or for a few Advanced Placement. I always wondered myself about GPAs - how does anyone know if an A at one school is the same as another? But it seems to work.
What I do like particularly about the US system is you do not have the equivalent to GCSEs or A levels, and you carry on studying a wide variety of subjects til 18 - no having to decide at 15 or 16 three subjects that take you in a narrow direction. My own daughter is in the UK and really resented having to drop her science- she is going into the creative arts but would have loved to do Physics and Biology at A level along with the three she is taking. In the US she could have.
There may have been homecoming etc in my school but I wasn't into that so it bypassed me.
What I don't like about the system here (other than the exam system mentioned above): there is little 'choice' ñ. we applied to our four nearest schools and did not get into any. The schools are clustered together where we are (sw London) so one child might be nearer three schools than we were to any school, and we were in the expensive part! So expensive that maybe it was assumed we'd go private, which we did in the end.
Of course property prices are affected by the quality of the school in both countries, but it doesn't always follow if you live in an expensive neighbourhood you have a good (or any in our case) state school. But unless schools are spread out there's always going to be issues. And the stress of getting your child into the next stage is ridiculous. Imagine having NONE of that.
You must have an undergraduate degree to do medicine and other specialist careers. And yes there are entrance exams. And the cost: it's about $300,000 to get through all your medical training if not more (this doesn't un held living expenses). A private university (most are, States have there own but quality not always the best), is average $35,000/year plus living expenses on top. State are about $10k/year. University degrees are four years, a masters usually two. Universities and colleges are pretty much interchangeable, though a university may be made up of different colleges. The umbrella term is still 'school'.
Other things which may have been particular to my area is in elementary school (kindergarten to eight grade - eighth grade is like Y9) is we had a system where all students did a few weeks of woodwork, then sewing, then cooking and so on. Learning to see was great and did a lot throughout my teenage years.
Also very few kids went private - only three did from my school and it was an affluent area (and with a very good school system). Our property taxes paid for it - much much higher than council tax, paid annually. .

I don’t really understand how our Property taxes are so incredibly high (Westside Los Angeles) and yet as a parent community we still have to raise $360,000 per year to pay for:

• art teacher
• music teacher
• science lab
• computer teacher
• 2 PE coaches

And a whole flipping 4th grade teacher because the district only gave the school enough money to mean we originally had 2 4th grade and 2 5th grade teacher and one that taught both grades at the same time.

But then our kids are lucky they live in an affluent area where the parents can raise these kinds of funds - there are a LOT of schools utterly failed in our district thanks to poor finances.

In terms of a system I have no experience at all but I feel like IB is the perfect inbetween solution between US and U.K.

Also I don’t think the US system challenges children properly. My DS is bright but not extraordinary, he’s in honours classes for everything and AP for maths and English and is bored, gets A’s across the board and is under challenged which isn’t great at the age of 13. And there isn’t one system - at his middle school alone there is the normal day to day system, kids in the language magnet (which he is in), kids in language immersion, and then this new IHP program for very academic kids. There are pros and cons to this but I do really like his MS despite my bashing of the system!

The magnet points things is outdated and now does the opposite of what it was supposed to do in LA, originally brought it to try to break segregation and offer opportunities for non-white kids to attend (better) schools outside of their local areas where their families were forced to live, because it hasn’t been adjusted for the change in population demographics now all it means is that WHITE kids actually have more options because the demographics have changed considerably since the 60’s. Every year you have ti apply to a magnet school you know is oversubscribed because you get points if you apply and don’t get in, the more points you have the more likely you are to then get into a school when you do want to go (as mentioned we used ours to go to the language magnet) but you lose your points if you’re offered a place and you turn it down - but you also need to understand how to navigate that.

Re pledge of allegiance at our elementary school they just do once a week in assembly on Monday, I actually don’t know about the middle school!!

@turkeyboots some High Schools are very big, some are small. My son went to biggest High School in our state. There were over 800 kids in his grade (year).

@TeenPlusCat I dont know if every school in America has the Pledge every morning or not (but I would suspect most do). We cant force anyone to do it though (not sure if that is a State law or a National law). So at my school every morning they do the Pledge before morning announcements. My class is 14 kids and I would guess maybe 3 actually do it regularly. All we require is that if you are not going to do it that you stay quiet while its being said.

@KobaniDaughters and @lljkk what I find very interesting is you are both from Southern California and have a very different experience to what I've talked about. I have family and friends across the country and they all have experiences that are much more like mine then what you guys explain. I dont know if its a "huge city thing" (San Diego and LA) or a "California" thing that its so different. Probably more of a huge city thing. I know NYC does this funky "apply for middle school" thing, and at one point Boston did have busing (not sure if they still do).

@EllieNBeeb your description of the school you are moving to sounds just like what I'm use to. What part of the country are you moving to?

@MaizeAmaze thats a hard question to answer because every district would handle it differently. I know adding "portable classrooms" was a popular thing to do around here. If you are just talking about one year group that is bigger then normal I dont think districts would do too much about it. If it was going to be a longer term issue (if more housing was built in an area) then they may look into more permanent changes like redistricting (moving around what school kids attend if there are more then one in the district) or even building a new school. Again that all depends on whether we are talking about a rich district or a poor district. I will add when I read on here that a Primary class size in England is 30 I always thing how HUGE that is. For this I can only speak of my school and my sons' schools but they have never had that many kids in one class at that level. In higher level schools (age 11 and up) they never had that many in anything either (except PE, Band or Chorus). Of course that is just the schools I have first hand knowledge of. There absolutely is over crowding in some schools in America, but its not in all of them.

@YesIReallyDoLikeRootBeer I'm from textbook middle America, I don't think I appreciated it much growing up, but having spent ten years over here, and having gone from loving to loathing London, and now having a kiddo who will be nearing school age in the next few years, I'm really excited to be getting back!

@ukborn I also grew up in Mass in the 70s and 80s so it's not surprising our experience is the same. You say you were from an affluent area. I grew up in a small working class town (so small our high school was 3 towns combined) yet we both had all the same options it sounds like. At least back then, and in Mass, it seems we were able to get the same education even if we came from a working class area (One kid in my small graduating class even went to Harvard after graduating). I'm now in New Hampshire and I'm sure things are a lot different since EVERYTHING is pretty much funded by property taxes here (we have no state taxes). So more affluent towns have more money for schools. I use to live in the city I work in. When I bought my house in a different town literally everyone at my school that I told where I was moving responded excitedly "Colin will get to go to (name of school)".

Middle schools are different across the board here - we sent our son to a smaller ones that I think caps out at 900 kids, two other main non-charter options both have 2000 kids in each and there is def a feeling of sardines stuffed into a tin in the classrooms of up to 40 kids! Charter schools are much smaller, one highly praised one locally has max 25 kids and another that does IB locally has 15 in a class

@EllieNBeeb I'm in New England but sounds like we have the same style systems for attending school. My sister moved to Ohio and the one big difference that shocked both of us though was she had to pay for text books. This was back in the late 80s and 90s so not sure if its still that way or not. We never had to pay for books here.

I was born and raised in one of the 5 boroughs in NYC (not Manhattan). It was easy to find good school districts - but need to pay the property taxes ($8k, $18k, $40k+p.a). It’s like paying for private schools in London (obvs works out better if you have 2+ kids). So unless you want to keep paying those property taxes forever (i.e. tuition), when your kids move out you will probably downsize or move out of the area soon after! But your kids are sorted from elementary through to high school, no hassle.

I never saw any new schools built despite the growing population (too dense). I only noticed my high school bulging at the seams during my last 2 years - they added a few trailer classrooms and by my last year, there were shifting start/end schedules for different year groups to minimise the congestion. I graduated from a high school of approx 4k students and it all still felt very “chill”.
I much prefer the flexibility of the US system and not having to deal with A levels and choosing subjects at 16.

As others mentioned, there are honours and AP classes to stretch kids. There are also specialised high schools which you can travel across boroughs for.
The real decision-making wasn’t until looking into universities but even then you have the flexibility to change/move around as long as you do all your general electives and major in last two years (unless you were going into med or law).