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By Oreoluwa Tokan-Lawal

I am 16 years old and I have lived two very different lives. I moved to the US in 2021, having spent all of my then 14 years in London, England. Never has there been a more drastic difference in anything so important in my life.

From smaller roads and cars, to the busier cities and completely different education journey, adjusting to the US system was a major change when I arrived in Richmond.

I started at Collegiate in the 9th Grade and was initially inundated by my new reality. I was coming from an all-boys grammar school with a conservative dress code: a blazer, white shirt, black pants, dress shoes, and a tie. Collegiate is a co-ed school with the most relaxed form of dress I had seen. Students wore jeans, shorts, t-shirts, sneakers, and sometimes Crocs. It was insane!

School uniform of St. Olave’s Grammar School in Orpington, UK. Photo credit: St Olave’s Grammar School.

Next was the curriculum. In the US, the nomenclature for school divisions is elementary, or Lower School; Middle School; and high school, or Upper School, and classes are called grades. It is Primary and Secondary School for the divisions and “years” for the classes in Britain. I came in at what is considered the start of high school here, when I was only a year away from writing my GCSEs in London.

University is the standard name for post-secondary education in Britain, while they’re mostly referred to as colleges here. Both education systems share core subject requirements, such as English, math, some form of science, and a language. The method of learning these subjects is, however, not the same. There are grammatical differences in spellings, and the intensity and depth of the curricula are nowhere similar, especially in a college prep school like Collegiate.

Students in the US have APs, SATs, and ACTs, while British students have GCSEs, A-Levels and O-Levels as the path to post-secondary education. Where high schools in the US go up to 12th grade, British students need to take their GCSEs in Year 11 (10th grade in the US) and score a required number of points to be able to proceed to Sixth form for their A-levels, which is equivalent to Grades 11 and 12 here. The A-levels and O-levels are courses that students choose to take further study in for a subject-based qualification in the UK necessary for getting into university, somewhat like the SATs and ACTs, except those are standardized, and you can’t choose subjects. British students choose at least three A-level classes depending on the school where they are enrolled. A student’s choice of A-level subjects is influenced by their career ambitions. While this can be said to be the same for US students, their choices are not as narrowed down as early as those across the pond.

Sports is a fundamental part of life for both systems. There’s commitment and dedication to sports at all levels, from Little League in the neighborhood all the way to professional sports. However, they play very different sports. In the US, the major sports include football, basketball, and baseball, while in England, it’s football (called soccer in the US), rugby, and cricket.

Rubgy match between England and Argentina.
Photo credit: World Rugby.

Most high schools in the US have a football and basketball team. In England, rugby is the go-to sport to play for your school. If you want to play soccer in England, you would need to join a club or an academy. Because of the level of global participation and professional requirements, schools are not equipped to offer it as a sport. There’s only interest in American sports when it’s the NBA finals, and or when the NFL comes to the London Games. Whether you are a soccer fan or not, the Premier League, England’s First Division soccer League, is the highlight of everyone’s weekend, showing just how influential soccer is in the UK.

In England, cities like London have smaller cars and narrower roads and streets, so it’s not unusual for people to use at least one source of public transportation every day, whether it’s a bus, train, or subway (London’s Underground, or “The Tube”). An efficient transport system makes commuting easy and is an essential part of life there. Kids are very quickly integrated into this system towards developing independence. Every day, I would take a bus to school and a train back home.

Double decker bus in London. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons user bitboy.

I missed that when I moved here, because here I am chauffeured everywhere by my parents. The cars, the roads, the streets are so much larger here in Virginia and come in different sizes. High schoolers in Virginia are able to start learning to drive from the age of 15 years and 6 months, as long as they pass a permit test. Being able to drive at the age of 16 is incredible to me, as I would’ve had to wait two more years if I still lived in England, where the legal driving age is 18.

In my opinion, food is much better in the US than the UK, although it’s a bit unhealthier. Foods such as burgers and hot dogs are more common. Traditional street foods in the UK include fish and chips and sausages and mash(ed potatoes). Places like Chick-fil-A do not exist in the UK (although they plan to open up there in 2025), and I think they are missing out. Some fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC taste better in the UK than the US; the French fries and hot wings are amazing. School lunches seem to have more variety in the US than the UK, or at least at Collegiate. At my old school, we had fish and chips every two days and pizza every Friday.

It’s been two years since I moved here. Honors Chemistry and AP Physics have been some of my greater challenges thus far, but the sense of community at Collegiate has been way stronger than at my previous school. I feel like the stress that can come with A-Levels and O-Levels in the UK is dissipated in the US, but Collegiate still manages to keep a similar rigor of classes available. The sense of more freedom in America is very visible. There are highs and lows from both places, but I love both!