Hello Moody,
As others have said form can mean class as in the group of pupils of the same age with whom you share a lesson. Depending on the school, nowadays, there are up to thirty people in that form.
Form when given a number like first form, second form etc means year group. Since 1990 in state schools in England this has changed to being called Year. Primary school starts at age 4 (the September after your fourth birthday so you may have someone who turned 4 on 31st August and someone turning 5 on 1st September) with a year group called reception, then year 1, 2, 3 and so on with the top year being year 6. Then you start secondary school/ senior school/High school at age 11 in year 7. Years 12 and 13 still get called sixth form.
Girls’ private schools usually stick to the same pattern of starting in the senior school at age 11. Boys’ private schools, many of which are now mixed, sometimes start the senior school at age 13. It varies a little from school to school but that first year group is usually called third form. So if you start age 13, you are in the third form, then fourth, then fifth, then lower sixth and upper sixth. A girls’ school is likely to call the year group with the eleven year olds the third form, then have lower and upper fourth, lower and upper fifth, and lower and upper sixth.
To complicate matters further, a few areas of England used to have middle schools, though I think these have all gone. At any rate they have gone from the area where I used to live. In those cases, you went to primary or first school, then middle school from age 8 or 9 until age 12 or 13 and then senior school.
What Enid Blyton describes in Mallory Towers, with her towers, is what is usually called houses. In a boarding school your house will be literally the house, or section of the building in which you live, and there will be an equal number of pupils from each year group in each house. In a mixed boarding school you would expect separate houses for boys and girls. Sometimes the sixth form, or the upper sixth have their own houses. Day schools also use the term house for a similar division but without there actually being a physical house. In that sense it exists for competition. There may be sports matches between houses, or house drama competitions, or house points given for good behaviour or attendance. There may be a house badge or each house may wear a different coloured tie.
The timing of the school year is based on the church and on the harvest. So a long Summer holiday to work in the fields, then the school year starts in September. There’s a Christmas holiday then the second term, an Easter holiday, then the third term. Each term has a (usually) one week holiday in the middle for half term. My step mother tells me that she went to a boarding school in England in the 60s where most of the pupils had parents living in the colonies, and they only had two terms with no break at Easter and no half terms because of the expense and time involved in the pupils travelling home to Asia and Africa. |