How similar is the British education system to the Canadian education system?

How does the standard of education in the public American elementary school system compare with primary schools in the UK? and is there a grading similar to Ofsted for comparing schools?

• I'm looking to relocate to the Palo Alto, CA area from England, and would like to understand the impact to my 6 and 4 year olds education from someone with first hand experience. Currently my 6 year old goes to an ofsted approved 'Outstanding' school.

• Answer:

  People will often try to give a blanket answer on schools in the U.S..  Basically what you will find is that if the community demands good schools, they will have them.  If the local citizens don't care, then it can be a crap game with the quality usually set by what teachers happened to come to that school.   I would be surprised if the people in Palo Alto did not expect to have good schools.  While funding and lots of other things can make having a good school difficult, when you have a community that cares, that usually translates into a community who helps.  One is that they will find ways of providing things that the schools need.  Another is that they volunteer to help the teachers.  I teach at a university where our physics/engineering students go tutor local elementary students every week in mathematics, science, reading, and other topics as part of what they see as their public duty.  I know of a case where a very good person was hired as the superintendent of a school system, and he decided to do whatever it took to make the school he was in control of move from being at the bottom end to the top.  One of the things involved in doing this are local school bond elections, where the local citizens vote to pay extra taxes so that the schools can borrow money to do something such as build new buildings or equip classrooms with whatever is needed.  In this case, it was a poor, mostly minority community, but they approved adding to their tax bills to help the schools in elections where approval of the bonds passed with over 90% approval!  After 5-10 years, people were moving into that community because the school system there outperformed almost every city in the area.  I grew up in a tiny town in Texas that had a school board who insisted on a high quality science education.  I discovered after visiting other high schools that we had a more extensive chemistry lab in our tiny 1-A school, than the 4-A and 5-A schools I visited.  Our physics lab had equipment that usually only showed up in universities, mostly thanks to a teacher who went to government surplus programs and gathered up oscilloscopes, voltmeters, electronic parts, optical components, and many other items.  The coolest was a weather balloon!  If you want to look up another example, look at Huntsville, Alabama.  That is were many German scientists were moved to after World War II.  They expected and demanded a good school system, and they got one.  Cities near the Johnson Spacecraft Center in Texas, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and similar areas are willing to make sure their schools are good.  Years ago when I was interviewing for jobs after finishing my Ph.D., one of the questions the companies always were prepared to answer was what the quality of the schools were in their area.  They knew that a physics Ph.D. was unlikely to agree to work in a place without good schools.  So it is used as an important recruiting tool by many. In summary, you can ask around where you are getting a job while doing something, such as hunting for a place to live, and you will quickly learn the qualities of the different schools in the area.  You should use this to help you decide exactly where you want to live in a place where you take a new job.