The School Certificate was a United Kingdom educational attainment standard qualification, established in 1918 by the Secondary Schools Examinations Council (SSEC). The School Certificate Examination was usually taken at age 16 and it was necessary to pass Mathematics, English and three other subjects in order to gain the certificate. The School Certificate was graded by the following: Pass, Credit and Distinction. To gain the School Certificate, the pupil was required to gain a minimum of six Passes and five Credits; anything less meant a Fail. If the pupil failed, then they would have to retake the School Certificate Examination. The School Certificate's layout is, essentially, similar to the BTEC Extended Diploma of today. Some pupils who did so then stayed on at school to take the Higher School Certificate at age 18.
It was abolished in 1951 following the introduction of GCE O-Level examinations. The School Certificate also existed in a number of Commonwealth countries such as Australia and Singapore at various times.
Famous quotes containing the words school and/or certificate:
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)