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United Kingdom

Government and society > Education > Primary and secondary education

Overall responsibility for education and children's services in England rests with the Department of Education, which is accountable to Parliament. Separate departments of education are headed by ministers who answer to the assemblies in Scotland (Education and Lifelong Learning Department), Wales (Department of Education and Skills), and Northern Ireland (Department for Education). State-funded primary and secondary education are a local responsibility, generally overseen by the local authority. There is also a small private sector.

Primary education is free and compulsory from age 5 to 11. Secondary education is organized in a variety of ways for children aged 11 to 19 and is free and compulsory to age 16. In most parts of the United Kingdom, secondary schools are comprehensive; that is, they are open to pupils of all abilities. Pupils may stay on past the minimum school-leaving age of 16 to earn a certificate or take public examinations that qualify them for higher education.

The state finances primary and secondary education out of central and local tax revenues. Most expenditures take place at the local level, though about half of local revenues derive from the central government. Under the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, a new type of school was introduced—academies, which receive their funding directly from the central government (though they are eligible for some local funding and were initially required to have private sponsors). Academies operate independently of the local authority and have greater freedom than traditional (“maintained”) state schools over their curriculum and finance, as well as teachers' pay and conditions. Academies generally arise from underperforming schools that have been given over to a new provider, whereas free schools, another new type of institution, operate as academies do but differ from them in that they are wholly new schools. Although the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government led by David Cameron pushed for a significant expansion of academies and free schools, in the early 2010s they still constituted only a small percentage of state-funded schools.

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