Higher education in UK教程.docVIP

Higher education in UK “Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education, education.” ----Tony Blair, Speech to party conference, October 1996. From “The Times Higher Education World Universities Rankings 2011-2012” we can see University of Oxford ranking fourth and University of Cambridge ranking sixth. Twenty-six British prime ministers, at least 30 other world leaders, 12 saints and 20 archbishops of Canterbury have been Oxonians. Cambridge alumni loom large in the making of the modern world: Newton on laws and motion; Rutherford splitting the atom; Darwin on evolution; Turing’s prototypical computer; Crick and Watson with DNA. Without doubt, higher education in British has been in the world’s leading level, which has close connections with the government paying special attention to education and the good academic environment in British universities. Today British education is run by government, which provides money, oversees standards and tries for all quality education. The 1944 Education Act made entry to secondary schools and universities “meritocratic”. Children would be admitted to schools not because they were of certain social class or because their parents possessed a certain amount of money, but because of the abilities they displayed. All children were given the right to a free secondary education and the main concern was to make sure more children had access to a good education. British universities are public bodies which receive funds from central government, except the only one privately-funded university ---- the University of Buckingham. Higher Education has a long history in the UK. Oxford and Cambridge date from the 12th and 13th centuries, while Scottish universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen from the 14th and 15th centuries.There are more than 200 universities in Britain. In the 1960s a large number of universities were built. In 1992, the number grew when polytechnics and other higher