English schools were and are full of complexity in their arrangements. Mine, a girls' grammar school (i.e. a selective school, requiring an examination pass at 11) in the 1960s, used the term 'class' and 'form' indiscriminately for a group of about 24 girls who studied together in the first three years from age 11. You could be in Mrs W's form, ie a class, which was one of four taking girls of the same year of entry. Mrs W was the classroom mistress who took the register twice a day, and was supposed (presumably) to provide some sort of pastoral oversight.These forms were variously known a III Alpha, III A, III Parallel and Form III. Each 'form' had its own classroom/formroom, and most mistresses came to you. You had a desk of your own in which to keep books, pens, pencils etc and illicit stuff like sweets, and posters of pop stars. For Art, Housecraft(!) and needlework, and various sciences, we went off to specialised rooms. The first year, for reasons lost in antiquity, was known as the 'Thirds'; there had in the past been a junior school. To fit in the year groups up to 16, there were Fourths and Upper Fourths, and Fifths and Upper Fifths. Then the Sixth and Upper Sixth. In the Fifth form, we were sorted into more specialised groups 'V Science', 'V Languages', 'V Latin', and 'Form V' who studies slightly different sets of 'O Level' exams. I only realised forty years later that there was in fact a pecking order and Form V girls did fewer O Levels and mostly left at 16. No idea if this was cause or effect of the classification. More than half the girls stayed on to do 'A Levels' at 18. Sixth Form classes were known by the initials of their form mistresses - Upper VI R-J, for instance. In retrospect it seems horribly complicated. We didn't have 'houses' at all.
We could also do a 'Use of English' paper in the Sixth Form but I chose instead to do an additional 'A Level' in General Studies, which had no lessons to support it, and seemed generally to be disregarded by universities for the purposes of admissions. It involved essays and problem solving, science and humanities, literature criticism and Mechanics, and a language translation from French, German or Latin.
And I did a one year Sixth Form elective course on 'German for Scientists', which had no science in it at all, but focussed on finding railway stations, as far as I recall. |