I write an essay for my final examination. I have to hand it tomorrow. Please correct it for me. I write about British Education System: Successes and Failure
Thanhs in advance.
INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, Education becomes a sensitive social, economic and political issue in most European countries. Britain is no exception. It becomes increasingly clear that education is of vital importance to the nation and to the individual and the legislation pass necessarily reflects this conviction. It also reflects political tendencies, as well as the social and economic needs of the nation.
The British education system has comparatively little control or uniformity. It is managed by three separate government departments: the Department for Education and Employment is responsible for England and Wales alone, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own departments. Although, the basic features of the British education system are the same as they are anywhere else in Europe: full-time education is compulsory up to the middle teenage years; academic year begins at the end of summer; compulsory education is free of charge, but parents may spend money on educating their children privately if they want to.
Together with country developing, British education system has many significant changes that are successes and also failures.
SUCCESSES
British Education has long attracted and welcomed high caliber students of different nationalities and backgrounds.
In the 90s, thanks to the harmonious combination of classical education method and the local traditional values, the number of British’s Schools in South-East Asia is strongly increasing. In England, Harrow is a famous boarding school for male only. Pupils always are encouraged in developing their natural aptitudes and the knowledge about their homeland. The famous of schools in England help the Asia’s education organizations to achieve satisfactory results. For example, in 1996, Dulwich International School (in Phuket island, Southern of Thailand) has 76 pupils. After 5 years later, the numbers of pupils are increase over 2000 pupils.
Britain has long been a popular destination for Indian students. With more than 150 institutes of higher education to choose from, all equipped with extensive facilities, Britain is able to offer a broad spectrum of subjects from the highly academic to the purely practical in anything from architecture to zoology. Having already been thoroughly versed in reading, writing and arithmetic, secondary education provided an expanded range of subjects, including literature, science, mathematics, history, geography, a selection of languages, and, possibly, some tuition in the aesthetic arts, including music.
British Education today builds on hundreds of years of experience in providing quality education to international students. To ensure that the quality is maintained, Britain has implemented unrivalled quality assurance and academic audit systems. The university departments are obliged to meet stringent standards by professional bodies. Standards are high not just in teaching but in other facilities as well : Libraries, computers, research equipment and living accommodation.
British higher and further education provides value for money by offering shorter, more intensive courses than are available in many other countries, thereby reducing living expenses and time spent away from home. Closely supervised study in an intellectually and culturally stimulating environment, together with an emphasis on student welfare and close contact between staff and students also ensures that individual students get maximum support and, as a result, pass rates are high and the drop-out rate for international students is very low.
Effective public education is developed through a realistic appraisal of the situation at hand, an understanding of the political side of the issue and knowledge of the processes through which people learn.
FAILURES
The British government attached little importance to education until the end of the nineteenth century. It was one of the last governments in Europe to organize education for everybody. Britain was leading the world in industry and commerce, so, it was felt, and education must somehow be taking care of itself. Schools and other education institutions (such as universities) existed in Britain long before the government began to take an interest in education. When it generally did, it did not sweep these institutions away, nor did it always take them over. In typically British fashion, it sometimes incorporated them into the system and sometimes left them outside it. Most importantly, the government left alone the small group of schools, which had been used in the nineteenth century (and in some cases before then) to educate the sons of the upper and upper-middle classes. At these ‘public’ schools, the emphasis was on ‘character-building’ and the development of ‘team spirit’ rather than on academic achievement. This involved he development of distinctive customs and attitudes, the wearing of distinctive clothes and the use of specialized items of vocabulary. They were all ‘boarding schools’ (that is, the pupils lived in them), so they had a deep and lasting influence on their pupils. Their aim was to prepare young men to take up positions in the higher ranks of the army, in business, the legal profession, the civil service and politics.
There is one theme in British education, which has survived every change in intellectual fashion and ideology, from the rise and fall of academic selection and the corruption of the comprehensive ideal, to the fierce debates over teaching methods and the content of the national curriculum.
Since the focus in British education policy shifted away from social integration and back to raising standards more than 10 years ago, central government has attempted to bring about change by imposing uniform practices from the Department for Education and Employment. Successive Conservative governments introduced a national curriculum, standardized assessments, school performance league tables and a new inspection regime. The Labour government has followed in their wake with the “naming and shaming” of failing schools, hit squads and framework agreements for local authorities. In other words, the new education consensus under the New Labour government has the same essential element as its predecessors - relentless pressure from the center works. Most parents might instinctively agree. After all, it is the duty of politicians to act to improve standards in our schools. Prime Minister Tony Blair captured the public mood very well when he announced that the three priorities of a Labour government would be “education, education and education.”
Certainly, Britain’s state education system is in trouble. Standardized tests — themselves hardly arduous — show that fewer than 50 percent of 11 year-olds are at or ahead of expected levels of English and Maths, and many are as much as four years behind. Every year, 40.000 16 year-olds leave full-time education without a single qualification and around 280.000 children are attending English schools classed by the Office for Standards in Education as “failing”.
In the critical period, they failed to either develop or articulate any alternative to the Left’s model of universal comprehensive education as the solution to class division and social inequality. It is well worth noting that Margaret Thatcher, as Secretary of State for Education in the mid-1970s and then as Prime Minister, closed more grammar schools than any of her Labour counterparts. In the end, the comprehensive-school revolution proved to be one revolution too many. Ever since, consciously or unconsciously, the thrust of Conservative education policy has been to undo its consequences. And the platform for the Party’s counter-attack rapidly became the national concern over falling educational standards.
By the 1980s a consensus position had emerged: British educational standards were disgracefully low, particularly for the “long-tail” of working class under- achievers, and when compared with other countries. The final end of imperial delusions of grandeur and inflationary demand-management had brought about the rather belated realization that Britain's future depended entirely on the skills of its workforce. No matter that the Conservatives had adopted the Left’s strategies in the absence of any of their own: for the first time, the Conservatives were in a position to turn around the charge that it was privilege for the few which explained the low standards of the many. Labour’s education policy had been “in power” for more than 20 years and it had “failed the nation.” But the Conservatives answer to rapidly falling standards was not to decentralize or deregulate education, as might have been expected, but to centralize it even further.
One result of the difference between the speech of many children in Britain and the language of the school system is that lack of educational success is frequently explained in terms of some kind of mismatch between pupils’ language capabilities derived from their home background or social class and the language demands of the learning environment
REFERENCE
http://edu.kde.org http://www.opensource.org http://schoolforge.net http://www.britishcouncil.org I will sent you a special present. Please, send your correct to
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