First school

A first school or lower school was the first part of the 'three tier' school system, the others being middle school and upper school in rural areas of England and Wales. Virtually all have now either been merged into primary schools or converted to infant schools or junior schools.

History

The notion of first schools was mooted by the Plowden Report of 1967 which proposed a change to a three tier model including first schools for children aged between 5 and 9, middle schools for 9-13 year-olds, and then Upper or High Schools for 13-16 year-olds. First schools were officially introduced into the first areas to use them in September 1968.

In practice, this model is used:

Other options were implemented in different authorities, including using the term primary school in place of first school.

Some English local education authorities have introduced first schools since the 1960s.

Primary education

Primary education or elementary education often in primary school or elementary school is typically the first stage of compulsory education, coming between early childhood education and secondary education.

Millennium Development Goal

The United Nations Millennium Development Goal 2 is to achieve universal primary education by the year 2015, by which time they aim to ensure that all children everywhere regardless of race or gender, will be able to complete primary schooling.

Due to the fact that the United Nations OF specifically focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, as they are both home to the vast majority of children out of school, they hypothesize that they might not be able to reach their goal by 2015. According to the September 2010 fact sheet, this is because there are still about 69 million school-age children who are not in school and almost half of them are in sub-Saharan Africa and more than a quarter are in Southern Asia.

In order to achieve the goal by 2015, the United Nations estimates that all children at the official entry age for primary school would have had to be attending classes by 2009. This would depend on the duration of the primary level as well as how well the school schools retain students until the end of the cycle. In half of the sub-Saharan African countries, however, "at least one in four children of primary-school age were out of school in 2008."