A primary school (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa), elementary school or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary education of children who are four to eleven years of age. Primary schooling follows pre-school and precedes secondary schooling. The International Standard Classification of Education considers primary education as a single phase where programmes are typically designed to provide fundamental skills in reading, writing, and mathematics and to establish a solid foundation for learning. This is ISCED Level 1: Primary education or first stage of basic education. Levels of education Comparison of cohorts Within the English speaking world, there are three widely used systems to describe the age of the child. The first is the "equivalent ages", then countries that base their education systems on the "English model" use one of two methods to identify the year group, while countries that base their systems on the "American K–12 model" refer to their year groups as "grades". Canada also follows the American model, although its names for year groups are put as a number after the grade: For instance, "Grade 1" in Canada, rather than "First Grade" in the United States. This terminology extends into the research literature. In Canada, education is a Provincial, not a Federal responsibility. For example, the province of Ontario also had a "Grade 13," designed to help students enter the workforce or post-secondary education, but this was phased out in the year 2003. Primary schools In most parts of the world, primary education is the first stage of compulsory education, and is normally available without charge, but may also be offered by fee-paying independent schools. The term grade school is sometimes used in the US, although both this term and elementary school may refer to the first eight grades, in other words both primary education and lower secondary education. The term primary school is derived from the French école primaire, which was first used in an English text in 1802. In the United Kingdom, "elementary education" was taught in "elementary schools" until 1944, when free elementary education was proposed for students over 11: there were to be primary elementary schools and secondary elementary schools; these became known as primary schools and secondary schools. Primary school is the preferred term in the United Kingdom, Ireland and many Commonwealth nations, and in most publications of the