FURTHER EDUCATION

Many people decide to leave school at the age of sixteen and go to a Further Education (FE) College. Here most of the courses are linked to some kind of practical vocational training, for example in engineering, typing, cooking or hairdressing. For those 16 year-olds who leave school and who cannot find work but do not want to go to FE colleges, the Government has introduced the Training Credit Scheme. This scheme allows young people £2 000 to buy training, leading to a National Vocational Qualification from an employer or training organization that participates in the scheme. Because the young people pay for their own training it encourages employers to give them work. It also gives the trainee valuable work experience. Only about one third of school leavers receive post-school education, compared with over 80 per cent in Germany, France, the United States, and Japan.

Full-time courses are provided in universities, polytechnics, Scottish central institutions, colleges of higher (HE) and further (FE) education, and technical, art and agricultural colleges. Oxford and Cambridge, founded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries respectively, are easily the most famous of Britain's universities. Today 'Oxbridge', as the two together are known, educate less than one tenth of Britain's total university student population. But they continue to attract of the best brains, and to mesmerize a greater number, partly on account of their prestige but also on account of the seductive beauty of many of their buildings and surroundings. Scotland boasts about four ancient universities: Glasgow, Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Aberdeen, all founded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. With the expansion of higher education in the 1960s many more plate-glass universities were established, some named after counties or regions rather than old cities, for example Sussex, Kent, East Anglia and Strathclyde. After some initial enthusiasm for them, they had become less popular by the 1980s than the older institutions. University examinations are for Bachelor of Art, or Science, (BA or Bsc) on completion of the undergraduate course, and Master of Arts or of Science (MA or Msc) on completion of post­graduate work, usually one - or two-year course involving some original research. Some students continue to complete a three-year period of original research for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

Thirty polytechnics in England and Wales provide a range of higher education courses, up to doctoral studies. But their real purpose was to fill the gap between university and further education work, providing an environment in which equal value was placed on academic and practical work, particularly in order to improve Britain’s technical and technological ability.