It wasn't so much the quality of the school, as the crappy syllabus, which probably at least a quarter of the schools in the country would be following.
(Dunno how things over there work, but over here we have a handful of institutions which write the exams, and essentially say "teach this, don't teach that". I think there are only three main ones, and it was one of them that told the school what the IT course should involve.)
It's GCSE (Secondary school) level (also A-Levels (Sixth form/college) work that way) which I think is the same as High school, so yeah.
And yeah, at University level they decide on their own stuff here.
