Pick the country you know and the country you're comparing, then enter the child's birthday. The tool applies each country's legal entry rule and shows the grade and school stage in both. If you only know a grade, switch to the grade mode and choose it from the list.

A child who is 10 at the start of the school year is typically in 5th grade in the US and in the fifth year of elementary school in Taiwan — the same school-year count, because both systems start at 6 (the US counts kindergarten separately at 5). The birthday still matters: near a cut-off date the placement can move by one grade, which is exactly what the check above resolves.

Year 7 is the first year of secondary school in England, for children aged 11 to 12. Because English children start Year 1 at 5 rather than 6, Year 7 lines up with the first year of junior high in Taiwan and 6th grade in the US. Enter the birthday above to see whether a specific child sits on the older or younger side of each cut-off.

Two things differ: the entry age (4 in England, 5 for kindergarten in the US, 6 in Taiwan or Japan) and the cut-off date that decides which year group a birthday belongs to (1 September in Taiwan, 1 April in Japan, the calendar year in Korea, and a state-by-state date in the US and Australia). A child born in October is in one year group under a 1 September rule and in the next group up under a 31 December rule.

No. It restates the normal placement under each country's legal entry rule. Schools can place a child differently after an assessment, parents can defer entry in some countries, a child may have repeated or skipped a year, and international schools often follow their own calendar. Use the result to fill in forms and ask better questions, then confirm with the school.

Ten school systems: Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, England, Australia and Canada outside Québec. Only systems whose entry rule could be checked against an official source are included; Québec (secondaire 1–5, 30 September cut-off) and Scotland (P1–P7, S1–S6) use different grade names and rules, so they are left out rather than approximated.

ISCED is UNESCO's international classification of education stages: 0 is early childhood (kindergarten, Reception), 1 is primary, 2 is lower secondary, 3 is upper secondary and 4 is post-secondary non-tertiary. It lets you compare stages when grade names don't translate — England's Year 9 and Taiwan's ninth grade are both the last year of ISCED 2, even though the year numbers differ.