Your experience with US schools vs. UK schools

I'm interested to hear from people who have experienced both -- which system do you like more, and why? Obviously it's hard to generalise, and your experiences will be specific to the schools your children attended, but still, I thought this could be an interesting discussion.

In brief, its like comparing apples to oranges!

However my children's experiences in US Junior High and High School were superior to those in the UK state system. 

As for the elementary school system I preferred the experience in the UK.

Happy to discuss, not in a position to make a long post right now.

Yeah, the apples to oranges thing is unavoidable, I guess. Thanks for your thoughts. Just out of curiosity, whereabouts in each country are/were your schools?

Yes. If you are from Massachusetts, then you are in one of one of the top areas in the world for schools.  They consistently score in the top 5 for math and science and top 8 for reading.  If you are in Texas, not so much. 

Hills Rd 6th Form in Cambridge is amazing, but then a lot of the kids are children of Cambridge academics. 

It is slightly easier to compare areas in the UK because there is a national curriculum. The US doesn't even have the same curriculum in different schools in the same district. 

It is slightly easier to compare areas in the UK because there is a national curriculum. The US doesn't even have the same curriculum in different schools in the same district. 

California has a state wide standardized curriculum, or at least it's supposed to. 

My children did Elementary school in Cheshire and Cambridgeshire in the UK. I loved the freedom they had in the UK to progress at their own (fast) pace in whatever year/grade they were in, as opposed to being restricted to learning whichever page of the math book was scheduled for that day in the US. Add to that the fun they had with history projects, field days visiting historic sites, Christmas concerts, rainy lunchtimes when the painting supplies were broken out, daily assemblies when they learned about other religions...I could go on and on.

My daughter had one year of secondary school in Cambridgeshire in the UK before we transferred to Houston, TX. During that year, where she was not challenged and actually bullied for wanting to answer questions in class, we were already considering the option of private school. On arriving in Houston she was tested and evaluated at our local Junior High, and put into ability appropriate classes. Both my children thrived in the Texas school system, took AP classes and college level classes while at High School, and entered University in Texas with over 60 hours of credit each, one of them graduated early, and the other graduated in 4 years with a double major.

So that is our experience, based on the comprehensive, mixed ability system in the UK, and the "streamed" system in a fairly affluent area of Houston. Neither system is perfect but I am grateful for the emphasis on discipline and academic achievement in their schools in the US.

Interesting post -- I do have vague memories of being made to feel (by my peers at UK secondary school) that there was some shame or stigma attached to trying to do well in class.

My kids both attended schools in the UK a while back now (DS is now 32)  DD went all the way through to A-levels but her results were surprisingly disappointing.  She didn't get offers from any of her university choices, had to have a year out and eventually got in through clearing.  DS transferred to US high school at age 14 (Massachusetts).  The guidance counselor there wanted to put him ahead a year (having started school at 4) but I insisted he be with his age group.  I would have said he was a poorer student than his sister but he did very well and was accepted by all but one of his college choices. 
I believe the US school offered him things he would not have gotten at the high school here.  There was much more opportunity to do extracurricular activities such as sports, for example, and in a more formal environment.  He played soccer and was on the track team.   They also offered a course in photography (dark room, etc.) which he wouldn't have had here and he showed quite a bit of talent.  The teaching of languages was different.  He had started German here so they put him in 2nd year.  He was floundering and had to go back to 1st year.  That surprised me -- I think maybe languages here are taught with a view to business communication while the US approach is leans more toward literature and so on.  (I could be wrong there -- just an impression)

Not sure if this is helpful but my son is in an American International school here in Hong Kong, and our neighbor (same age) is in the British school following the UK curriculum. While they are the same age by about a month one is in Grade 2 and the other Year 3 given the difference in class names, start times, etc.

They do pretty much the same homework--in fact, sometimes the exact same worksheets and online games. However, this term the American school has been pushing some more advanced math than our neighbor is getting at the UK one, while the UK school started reading a full semester earlier than they did at my son's place.  Of course the usual differences with spelling, $/£, etc.

Culturally it was remarked once here that the American school 'expects more of the parents' than the UK ones. I put that to the UK expats in the US forum and the response was "no, it is about the same" to "yes, the US schools expect more volunteers, donations, chaperones, etc".  Not sure if that is noticeable over there, and of course that tapers off as the children get older.

Hi Everyone! I just discovered this site and was curious to hear more about UK education. My son is a rising 3 year old and currently in a nursery with 2 year olds. He is enjoying it.

Could you say more about the comparison in education in what I would describe as the primary grades/grammar school. Does it make much of a difference in the US/UK comparison?

We hail from an area in the US northeast where the public schools are very highly regarded and I wanted to know what the comparisons might be with the UK system for the primary grades, not having much experience with it in general.

Thanks in advance!
Cheerios

I have just stumbled across this site, and I don't know if you're still reading this, Cheerios. My daughter just started year 7 and we have lived here since she was born. My experience is also with the north-east US, and my American friends with kids are mostly there also.

I have found that the UK system is less rigourous, and considerably less successful at teaching basic skills compared to the US. They seem to learn everything quite a bit later here, and there is more dancing around the topics rather than just getting to work and learning them.

Having been an employer for many years, I have also noticed the education issue from this viewpoint as well. In the 1990s university graduates were fine, but from around about 2000 the graduates started coming to us with a serious lack of basic skills (regardless of how good they looked on paper) and it was a big problem for us.

I also think that in the UK the kids are much more dependent on their parents for learning (although we don't have the pressure to be volunteers and fundraisers etc). Because the schools are missing out on fundamental learning, it makes a bigger difference whether the parents are filling in the gaps were not. I found that in the US, it was not meant to matter whether the kids had parents who were academic, or had time to teach them - reasonably motivated kids at least theoretically would have a roughly equal chance regardless of the parents.

The biggest issues I personally have noticed have been with English and maths, but I have heard from different sources that only kids with scientist parents can get good enough grades in science subjects to study these at university. We recently moved to a scientific area of Cambridgeshire, and the secondary school gets very good results for science. I can certainly say that as far as I can see, it is definitely not on the basis of what the school is doing, but on the basis of what the parents are teaching. The school doesn't even seem to cover the curriculum, and encourages the parents to fill in the gaps. We are doing so, but if my husband weren't a physicist, there would be no chance with that portion of the curriculum.

We previously lived in a part of London where the parents tended to work in the City and be excellent at maths, and guess what, there the kids were doing very well at maths. All the parents we knew were teaching at home, and I can confirm that the kids would have lacked basic maths skills without this. My daughter's school did step up to the mark however, and in year six accelerated the maths for all pupils, so by the end of the year they were doing year nine maths (which were in fact probably equivalent to what my American friends' kids were doing in sixth or seventh grade). All the kids (unstreamed) were thriving and actually enjoying the maths. But then we moved and it was back to simple arithmetic they should have learned years ago, she is bored with it, and we are back to topping up at home. The kids are not too knowledgeable about maths, but they do go round reciting the periodic table, biology taxonomy, etc. (I have not found that kids disparage learning here, it's fairly prestigious to do well – maybe that will change when she gets older, or maybe it's because we live in quite a "geeky" district.)

My advice is to stay involved in your son's learning, and trust your instincts, especially if you have doubts about what the school is doing. Don't be tempted to think, well they are the experts so I'll go along with them. (Again, as an employer dealing with the ultimate results, I would underline that what they are doing now is not working.)

Penguin

They seem to learn everything quite a bit later here, and there is more dancing around the topics rather than just getting to work and learning them.

Interesting, I've found it to be the opposite - I have young cousins in the US (age 8-13) and they seem to have learned everything much later than my brothers and I in the UK... we learned to read at age 4-5, while my cousins in the US did not learn to read until age 7 (the youngest is still struggling with her reading).

Then you've got GCSE's (age 16) which are considered the same level as a US high school diploma (age 18), while A-levels are considered approximately equivalent to an Associates Degree or university-level classes in the US.

I did a year abroad in the US as part of my undergrad degree and I went straight from second year university courses in the UK to fourth- and fifth-year classes in the US. I also took a first-year Astronomy class as an elective and they were teaching stuff that I had been helping my little brother with for his Year 9 SATs :S (the final exam in that class was a 15-minute multiple choice test, in which some of the answer options were obvious jokes... for example, What is a Meteor Shower? option c) What you have after your meteor breakfast).

Four years later, I taught undergraduates in the US (Environmental Science) and the stuff I was covering in their university-level class was what I had learned in Year 9-10 in the UK... I actually had a student in one class who believed that a kilometre was equal to 100 m, and other students who had never heard of sedimentary, metamorphic or igneous rocks, or the water cycle, or the carbon cycle (which from what I remember are all taught at KS3 in the UK, if not earlier).

Having been an employer for many years, I have also noticed the education issue from this viewpoint as well. In the 1990s university graduates were fine, but from around about 2000 the graduates started coming to us with a serious lack of basic skills (regardless of how good they looked on paper) and it was a big problem for us.

I agree to some extent that basic skills are not taught as well in the UK - I do think they should be more rigourous with teaching the basic skills here. I stopped taking English after GCSEs and I wasn't taught about sentence structure or anything... I still have no clue which type of word is a noun, which is a verb etc. - I understand when sentences and words are used correctly, but I could not break them down to explain why they are correct.

I didn't have to write any essays in my degree, other than my dissertation, so I came out of undergrad having no clue how to write an essay, how to reference properly, how to conduct a literary review etc.

The biggest issues I personally have noticed have been with English and maths, but I have heard from different sources that only kids with scientist parents can get good enough grades in science subjects to study these at university.

I don't believe that to be the case - I'm a scientist (I left school in 2001), but neither of my parents is one.

My mum does have a degree in maths, but she has never used her degree in her working career, and my dad didn't go to university but got an English teaching qualification, which he didn't use, and now he works as a drummer and music teacher (he goes round local schools and teaches kids how to play the drums). He knows nothing about maths or science (he gave up both after O-levels/GSCEs) - I usually have to explain those things to him .

Despite this, I got double-A* in GCSE Science and an A in GCSE Maths, an A and a B in A-level Physics and Maths, respectively. I also have an MPhys degree in Theoretical Physics, an MSc by Research in Science of Natural Hazards, I completed 8 months of a US PhD in Geodynamical Modelling, and I now work as a Meteorologist for the UK government/military.

> I did a year abroad in the US as part of my undergrad degree and I went straight from second year university courses in the UK to fourth- and fifth-year classes in the US.

We are quite opposite then, because I did a year abroad in the UK as part of my US (business) degree, and I found that the UK classes were far less advanced! However, in the US people have to take classes other than their major ("distribution requirements") and often do not take their major classes until the last couple of years, so it makes sense that you would go from second year courses in the UK to fourth year in the US.  Also, I know that even in my day the science classes were not that advanced in high school, relative to the UK (from comparing notes with my British scientist husband, who didn't have scientific parents either, but this was back in the 90s). But the British science level seems to be sliding downwards relative to former years.  I'm glad that you have not found any issues with this subject in the UK. I hope I will find that this is still the case. I guess it doesn't really matter for us personally, but it is not good for the country if people who are naturally talented at science (like you obviously are) end up bypassing the field.

On the basic skills, as an example, the kids I know in the US learned to read at 4 or 5 also, and a couple specific ones I can think of knew long division and multiplication at the age of seven, and they are considered academically average. My 12-year-old daughter (here in the UK) has been taught these this year, she already knew them but said the other kids didn't already know. And this is at a high-ranking state school.

> I didn't have to write any essays in my degree, other than my dissertation, so I came out of undergrad having no clue how to write an essay, how to reference properly, how to conduct a literary review etc.

This is the kind of thing we had to deal with at work, not important for science but in business where I worked it was crucial, and it became impossible to find people under a certain age who could write documents that could be used externally, even with editing and correcting. There was trouble with maths also, just basic use of numbers for everyday purposes, nothing fancy, but wrong decisions will get made if they can't deal with the numbers. It sounds like codswallop when politicians and industry leaders talk about skills shortages, but I have noticed a distinct trend. But now I am straying into politics and rather far from "pregnancy and parenting"!

I don't know...I think today's kids are the brightest to ever have existed. We are smack dab in the middle of a Golden Age of learning...being driven by youthful scientific exuberance.   

If you could unearth Newton and revive him somehow and you took him to any decent university, the average kid in a lab coat would blow his mind.

Thanks for a really interesting discussion.

I think that for university levels, there can be a broad range of talents and abilities on both the students and universities. I think that in the US, there is certainly a broad range, so it would really depend on the specifics of the point of comparison. Also, the US system is 4 years and the UK system has 1 fewer year. Freshman year in the US university is seen as a transition from hs to college.

I have heard many times that the UK undergraduate university system is like a graduate level degree. I think that may be true for the depth of discussion that is engaged. I don't believe however that students are actually learning more overall in university in the UK.

One of the things that I see here in the UK is that a good deal more work must be done by the student outside of the classroom and that there is very little accountability to make sure that these things are happening. Learning seems to be more of a binge experience to prepare for exams at the university level and it happens alone, oftentimes without much close contact with the professor. Furthermore, depending on the university, not all years of study even count toward the final grade.

I am not entirely convinced that this model is really effective at teaching career or work-related skills. The example has already been made: good and effective writing/communication which is needed for a business or research context is difficult to teach overnight. Basic skills that give a candidate some employment versatility later in life (and many Americans do change careers at least once in their lifetime as companies are downsized) would be taught across the board in a US institution.

My observations generally support what Penguin has observed at the lower levels of instruction, where there is much more responsibility for work placed on the student's own personal at-home resources whether he/she gets help for that from the parents or private tutors. This continues in the university where students are expected to do the bulk of learning on their own (since contact time with professors is much less given the term times).

Personally, I find that there is an enormous range in the US university system that allows for different talents and abilities to thrive both individually and within a group context. At the best US university systems it really can't be beat. There are also plenty of US universities that are mediocre! I find that the UK university system prizes singular skill sets and independent success.

So, depending on what you value, you might see the UK or US university graduate differently. If you value a very specific research field, the UK graduate will look more attractive. If you value a person who has demonstrated a high apptitude for learning broadly, the US graduate is more attractive. Our world is changing so rapidly, there are careers that our children will have available to them that we don't even know how to describe.

Also, I am not sure that today's kids are the brightest ever to have existed. If anything, the dramatic increase in the kinds of knowledge that are available now make it the case that kids in today's classroom have less firm knowledge about the broad basics, and likely hold more random knowledge about things generally.