(no subject)
Hey there! Are you either a British person who has been to the level of education that comes before university or someone who knows a lot about it? Because I am in need of knowledge, and I suspect asking a real person instead of generic websites will give me better perspective.
Normally talking about a fic I am writing ensures that I will lose interest in it and never finish, but if I write this one blindly with no knowledge of the subject matter I would probably just be better off not writing it at all. So! I am writing what would in America be a high school AU, but it’s set in Britain and as such the setting is probably a bit different, not least in terms of terminology. For starters, I am 100% sure the level of education that comes before university is not called ‘high school’. What is it called, and how many years does it last? What sort of courses would typically be taken, and would the students go through multiple professors for each of them between years/semesters? Are there semesters? Most importantly, are there after-school clubs (i.e., chess team, things that don’t have courses of their own, not just sports), are they sponsored by professors, and, well, what do they do besides their main activity, if anything? Is there a course where the students produce plays?
It’s not a boarding school, or a particularly fancy one. Are there different terms for what Americans would call ‘course’ or ‘class’? (Note that I’ve been using ‘course’ throughout all this, even though Americans usually just say ‘class’ for both of them. Yeah, it’s kind of confusing. But we do use ‘course’ sometimes.) What kind of student council is there? (A student council being a small group of students for each year, and one for the whole school, who represent their respective larger groups and organize activities and things. They usually each have a president, a vice president, a secretary, and a treasurer, and sometimes a weird fifth member who does random stuff. My school had a ‘student coordinator’, but for the life of me I can’t remember what she actually did.)
These are a lot of questions, and I may think of more! But I very much need to know the answers, otherwise my fic is probably going to be cringeworthy for anyone who has actually gone through the British education system. Any help would be great!