Originally Posted by Riku

It's not just America and England that are different; as a matter of fact, Scotland and England are very different, too. Ridiculously different. I'm not really fond of the way my system works, but there we go.

We start with Nursery at about age 4 or 5, and that's just basically a cheap creche. There wasn't much for us to do there; although, back in the day, some pedal-bikes with 10 stabilisers on either side and a sand-pit was more than enough for us.

Incidentally, my Nursery was built as an extension to the Primary School. At about age 5 or 6, you go into Primary 1, all the way to Primary 7 at about age 11 or 12. There's not much variety in Primary School and there wasn't much of a definitive course for us to follow. Although, looking back at my age now, there must have been SOME kind of schedule to follow.

We then pop off to high school, still at age 11 or 12. High School works in terms of years, so we're in 1st year, all the way up to 6th year. We sometimes say S1, S2 all the way to S6, short for Secondary 6.

In first year, my school had 4 compulsory periods of Maths and English every week, two perids of music, three of science (which rotated every term between Physics, Chemistry and Biology), three of social studies (which also rotated each term between Modern Studies, History and Geography). There were three periods of French/German [to this day, I'm not certain how the decide which language you have to take when you get to high school], two periods of PE and two periods of RE, three periods of Computing [ICT] and three more periods of Home Economics.

When we get into second year, it's exactly the same, except me may or may not change teachers, and Home Economics is exchanged with CDT [Craft, Desgin and Technology].

At the end of second year, we're given option forms. This is the first chance we're given to pick out own subjects, but the classes are divided into 8 columns based on ... genre? Maths and English were, again, compulsory, and so was a secondary language and a primary science, but these were multiple choice.

The columns change often, but I picked; ( [] indicates number of periods per week)
Maths [4], English[4], History[3], French[3], Chemistry[3], Business Management[3], Music[3] and Biology[3], in that order.

Two more periods of PE and RE were also compulsory, making the weekly 30 periods as per usual.

Now, for the next two years, we're stuck with those subjects because, at the end of fourth year, we're given our first set of exams, the Standard Grades. With the exception of English, graded in the typical A, B, C, every subject is graded in levels.

Level - Grades.
Credit -1 & 2.
General - 3 & 4.
Foundation - 5 & 6.
Fail - 7.

Credit being the highest and Foundation being the lowest. Now, for the bright sparks, English isn't sat at a Standard Grade, we're often stuck in either an Intermediate I or an Intermediate II class, Int. 2 being the highest.

So we sit our exams at the end of fourth year, but not before choosing five subjects for 5th year - where we get our Highers, the qualifications, which allow us into Universities and whatnot. We get six periods of every subject, which works out as every class, every day and a double-period of each class every day. I think mines works out as double Music on monday, double Maths on tuesday, double Chemistry on Wednesday, double English on thursday and double Biology on friday.

The only compulsory subject to take in 5th year is English. Even RE can be dropped at this stage. We can pick which levels we want to sit, too - Highers, Intermediate II's or Intermediate I's, Highers being the highest.

I'm currently in fifth year (or, at least, I will be when the summer ends on Tuesday), but I know how sixth year goes, mostly. English can finally be dropped and we have to take a minimum of three classes and have the oppurtunity for free/study periods if we don't want to fill the final 12 periods. I believe the levels are 'Higher Still' and 'Advanced Higher,' AH being the highest.

We'll see