Education in Great Britain

English children must go to school when they are five. First they go to infant schools where they learn the first steps in reading, writing and using numbers. Children are divided into two groups according to their mental abilities.
When children leave infant school, at the age of seven, they go to junior schools until they are about eleven years old. When pupils come to the junior school for the first time, they are divided into three «streams» - A, B and C – on the basis of their infant-school marks or sometimes after a special test. The brightest children go to the A-stream and the weakest – to the C-stream. The school year normally begins in early September and continues into the following July. The year is divided into three terms of about 13 weeks each.