Younger students take typical school subjects such as math, science, reading, etc. However, when you get to secondary school, students take a test (called GCSEs) to determine a specific career direction that the classes prepare you for, although you are not locked into those choices as you can freely change majors in university. These tests determine whether you should take more math classes or lean into mechanics and woodshopping, or provide a unique combination of them all. Many students in my masters course took creative writing, art history, literature, and history for their GCSEs, fufilling their math requirements in younger years. This test also determines which secondary school (high school) you can go to as you apply to them similarly to college. Some schools are known to be filter schools, helping you easily get into a specific univeristy, like Oxford or Cambridge. Others are better known for getting you a job that doesn't require a university degree or landing you an apprenticeship or internship when at "uni" (university).
Students don't recieve homework the way we do in the US, or at least in New Jersey. They get a lot less homework, but instead are assigned much bigger projects to work on over the course of time. In primary school, their work might cover a few days to a week. But as they get older, they might receive a larger assignment to work on over the course of a month or too, similar to college classes. As a masters student here, I am assigned one assessment for each class I take, making my grade entirely dependent on that one essay or research collection.
