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:
“The first rule of education for me was discipline. Discipline is the keynote to learning. Discipline has been the great factor in my life. I discipline myself to do everything—getting up in the morning, walking, dancing, exercise. If you won’t have discipline, you won’t have a nation. We can’t have permissiveness. When someone comes in and says, “Oh, your room is so quiet,” I know I’ve been successful.”
—Rose Hoffman, U.S. public school third-grade teacher. As quoted in Working, book 8, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“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)