Organization

Despite recent changes, it is a characteristic of the British system that there is comparatively little central control or uniformity. For example, education is manager not by one, but 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. In fact, within England and Wales education has traditionally been seen as separate from 'training', and the two areas of responsibility have only recently been combined in a single department.

None of these central authorities exercises much control over the details of what actually happens in the country's educational institutions. All they do is to ensure the availability of education, dictate and implement is overall organization and set overall learning objectives (which they enforce through a system of inspectors) up to the end of compulsory education.

Central government does not prescribe a detailed programme of learning or determine what books and materials should be used. It says, in broad terms, what schoolchildren should learn, but it only offers occasional advice about how they should learn it. Nor does it dictate the exact hours of the school day, the exact dates of holidays or the exact age at which a child must start in full-time education. It does not manage an institution's finances either, it just decides how much money to give it. It does not itself set or supervise the marking of the exams which older teenager do. In general, as many details as possible are left up to the individual institution or the Local Education Authority (LEA, a branch of local government).

One of the reasons for this level of 'grass-roots' independence is that the system has been influenced by the public-school tradition that a school is its own community. Most schools develop, to some degree at lest, a sense of distinctiveness. Many, for example, have their own uniforms for pupils. Many, especially those outside the state system, have associations of former pupils. It is considered desirable (even necessary) for every school to have its own school hall, big enough to accommodate every pupil, for daily assemblies and other occasional ceremonies. Universities, although financed by the government, have even more autonomy. Each one has complete control over what to teach, how to teach it, who it accepts as students and how to test these students.

Style

Learning for its own sake, rather than for any particular practical purpose, has traditionally been given a comparatively high value in Britain. In comparison with most other countries, a relatively strong emphasis has been put on the quality of person that education produces (as opposed to the qualities of abilities that it produces). The balance has changed in the last quarter of the twentieth century (for example, there is now a high degree of concern about levels of literacy), but much of the public debate about educational policy still focuses not so much on how to help people develop useful knowledge and skills as on how education might help to bring about a better society - on social justice rather than on efficiency.

This approach has had a far-reaching effect on many aspects of the educational system. First of all, it has influenced the general style of teaching, which has tended to give priority to developing understanding rather than acquiring factual knowledge and learning to apply this knowledge to specific tasks. This is why British young people do not appear to have to work as hard as their counterparts in other European countries. Primary schoolchildren do not normally have formal homework to do and university students have fewer hours of programmed attendance than students on the continent do. (On the other hand, they receive greater personal guidance with their work). A second effect has been an emphasis on academic ability rather than practical ability (despite English anti-intellectualism). This has resulted in high-quality education for the intelligent and academically inclined (at the upper secondary and university levels) with comparatively little attention given to the educational needs of the rest.

The traditional approach, together with the dislike of centralized authority, also helps to explain why the British school system got a national curriculum (a national specification of learning objectives) so much later than other European countries. If your aim is so vague and universal, it is difficult to specify what its elements are. It is for the same reason that British schools and universities have tended to give such a high priority to sport. The idea is that it helps to develop the 'complete' person. The importance of school as a 'community' can increase this emphasis. Sporting success enhances the reputation of an institution. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, certain sports at some universities (especially Oxford and Cambridge) and medical schools were played to an international standard. People with poor academic records were sometimes accepted as students because of their sporting powers (although, unlike in the USA, this practice was always unofficial).