Comprehensive school

A comprehensive school is a state school that does not select its intake on the basis of academic achievement or aptitude. The term is commonly used in relation to the United Kingdom, where comprehensive schools were introduced in the late 1940s to the early 1970s. It corresponds broadly to the German Gesamtschule and to the high school in the United States and Canada. Some 90% of British pupils are educated at comprehensive schools. Most compreh... more

A comprehensive school is a state school that does not select its intake on the basis of academic achievement or aptitude. The term is commonly used in relation to the United Kingdom, where comprehensive schools were introduced in the late 1940s to the early 1970s. It corresponds broadly to the German Gesamtschule and to the high school in the United States and Canada. Some 90% of British pupils are educated at comprehensive schools. Most comprehensives are secondary schools for children from the age of 11 to at least 16, but in a few areas there are comprehensive middle schools, and in some places the secondary level is divided into two, for students aged 11 to 14 and those aged 14 to 18, roughly corresponding to the US "junior high school" and "high school" respectively. Since a comprehensive school teaches a full range of subjects across the academic and vocational spectrum, it is commonly understood that the school will need to be of a large size and to take children from a wide... less