Education in the United Kingdom is coordinated and supervised by the ministry of Education and Employment.

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Education in the United Kingdom is coordinated and supervised by the ministry of Education and Employment. However, there is much differentiation in terms of the education and training provided in England, Scotland, the Wales and Northern Ireland, respectively, as this department is responsible for England and Wales alone. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own departments. However, the general framework of the educational system and the qualifications acquired are similar and mutually recognized. The British educational system is mainly characterised by great its flexibility and multiplicity of alternatives offered to a student.

None of these central authorities has much control over what happens in the county’s schools. Their main function is to ensure the availability of education, implement its overall organisation and set general learning objectives up to the end of compulsory education. In fact, as many details as possible are left up to the individual schools or the Local Education Authority (LEA). The Central government does not determine a programme of learning or the used books and materials; it does not dictate the number of schooling hours, or the exact days of holidays; it also does not manage the institutions’ finances. The Central Government says, in broad terms, what schoolchildren should learn, and decides how much money to give to the institutions.

In Britain quite a strong emphasis has been put on the quality of person that education produces, as opposed to the qualities of ability that it produces. Despite the fact that there is now great concern about literacy levels, much of the public debate on educational policies still focuses on how education might help creating a better society, and not so much on how to develop useful knowledge and abilities, i.e., efficiency.

As a consequence, in general, at British schools priority is given to the development of understanding, casting aside the acquirement of factual knowledge and how to apply it to specific tasks. Thus academic ability is more emphasised than practical ability. The result is a high-quality education for intelligent, academically inclined students and little attention to the other students’ educational needs.

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Due to this style of teaching it appears that young Britons do not have to work as much as other young Europeans do.

This approach together with lack of centralised power lead to vague aims and to the importance of the school as a community. This is why British schools give such importance to sports, as a way of enhancing the institution’s reputation by the team’s success.

In the second half of the twentieth century some changes took place on British education which showed the increasing egalitarianism in the social process. The once elitist institutions, that set the pattern ...

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