For those of you who left school quite some time ago a lot of the terminology for the English education system must seem fairly strange. So over the next few week, we at Supa Swap thought we would explain some of the more popular terms.

This week we thought we would loom at class/form names.

Originally class names started at 1 and went through till 6 or the 6th Form as it became known. Recently you will hear phrases like year 11 and this must be a little confusing.

So lets start at the GCSE year (O Levels as we knew them). What was known as the 5th Form, the year we took the final O Level exam, is now year 11 and all years below that go in numerical order, 4th Form is Year 10, 3rd Form is Year 9 and so on.

Funny enough the 6th Form is still fairly much known as Lower 6th and Upper 6th and not Years 12 and 13, although you will hear people refer to them as that.

There are also groups of Years known as Key Stages and relate to the National Curriculum. Years 7, 8 and 9 are Key stage 3 and the GCSE years, 10 and 11 are Key Stage 4.

Below is a table that should hopefully make sense.