Scotland

At its union with England, Scotland retained

• its own legal system (based on principles of civil law rather than common law),
• its own educational system (with far higher literacy rates than elsewhere in Britain, and a proud claim to be "the first country in the world with universal education"),
• a separate established church (the Church of Scotland),
• and its own aristocracy and gentry.

All this was accompanied by all the heraldry and symbolism of legal, academic, ecclesiastical and noble life.

Scotland is more sparsely inhabited than England, but contains a number of impressive cities. The largest is Glasgow, a major centre of industry and ship-building in the 19th century, "the second city of the Empire", with all the social problems attendant on industrialization and postwar industrial decline.

Edinburgh, Scotland's capital, is a centre of administration, law, banking, learning and culture.

Aberdeen, anciently important in North Sea shipping and fisheries, and a minor centre of 19th-century industry, became the energy capital of the U.K., and to some extent of Europe, after the discovery of North Sea oil.

Geographically and culturally, the Highlands of Scotland are set apart from the Lowlands. Much of the romantic imagery of glens, lochs, castles, crofts, kilts, bagpipes, etc. derives from the Scottish Highlands.

The Sixties

Britain in the 1960s looked rather like a country reinventing itself. From an imperial power renowned for stiffness, Stoicism, formality, hypocrisy, and clearly marked class divisions, it became an international trend-setter in popular youth culture. British bands topped the charts not only at home but across the Atlantic and even across the Channel - the Beatles and the Rolling Stones most famously, but lesser-known groups also produced songs which many will still recognise by ear, even if they don’t know the name of the band.

Popular youth culture began to become a media phenomenon in the 1950s, with public disturbances caused by gangs of Teddy Boys (who dressed in a parody of Edwardian gentlemen’s attire), or in the 1960s by the fights between Mods and Rockers (two radically alternative styles of youth culture). It was only with the Beatles, in the early 60s, that pop concerts became national news. Crowds of screaming teenage girls were very far from any traditional notion of typical British behaviour, but were the background noise to the popular music of the era - even that of Scottish singer-songwriters in the folk tradition (see here).

Some of the stereotypically "Sixties" sights on the streets of London were, besides the mini, the new Routemaster bus (which went into production in the late 50s, but was only a familiar sight on London streets from 1961) and the miniskirt.

The new sensibility was reflected in a swathe of permissive legislation, rolling back the power of the law over what were coming to be thought of as purely private affairs, on the grounds that it was not the business of the state to tell people how to live their lives.

The late 50s and most of the 60s were an era of economic prosperity, technological advance, and massive expansion of access to university education (which in Britain had been among the least egalitarian in the industrial world). The importance of education and technology was given strong emphasis by the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (in office 1964-1970 and 1974-1976).

Butler Education Act

The Conservative politician R.A. Butler was President of the Board of Education in Churchill's wartime coalition government. In 1944 he saw a bill into law that determined the shape of education in postwar Britain.

The Education Act 1944, also known as the Butler Education Act, contained a number of important provisions.

Most significantly, it made secondary education free and compulsory up to the age of 15. Previous legislation had made school attendance up to the age of 14 compulsory, but this was widely flouted (George Formby was far from unique in leaving school at the age of seven), and the poorer pupils who stayed in school beyond the age of 11 were often in "senior elementary education" rather than secondary education. Girls, in particular, were beneficiaries of the new law.

The act instituted the "Tripartite System". At the age of 11 pupils leaving primary school would sit an exam to determine their "abilities and aptitudes". This exam was initially known as the "scholarship exam", later as the "11 plus", and would determine whether their secondary education would take place in a grammar school, where the emphasis was on Latin and maths (for the most academically able 20 to 25%), a technical school (but very few technical schools were built as they required considerably more investment), or a "secondary modern" school (for the vast majority). This meant that children from poor backgrounds who already showed academic ability at the age of 11 were much more likely to get a good academic education than had ever been the case before, but most children from poor backgrounds were sent into a system designed to prepare them to carry out manual or household work.

One of the provisions of the act with no parallel in most European countries - and certainly not in the United States, where the separation of Church and State has been a highly emotive issue in education - was that "each school day begin with an act of worship" at which the whole school was present (although teachers could opt out on an individual basis, and parents could opt out their children). This "school assembly" was often, in effect, little more than a morale-boosting or inspirational song or speech, but it gave the school day a different shape from that of many other countries.

Central government laid out the new requirements, but left it to Local Education Authorities to see that they were met. There were major programmes of school-building and of teacher-training to make the functioning of the system possible.

A private sector of fee-paying "independent schools" continued to exist, providing socialisation into the relatively closed circle of the nation's elite, and for children with wealthy parents a way to get a decent education without needing to be terribly bright. Some of these schools were the famous "public schools" ("public" in the sense that anyone could attend who could afford the fees - there was no parish, civic, professional or other qualification), such as Eton (George Orwell's old school) or Harrow (Churchill's old school) - a far cry from the sort of Secondary Modern pictured above. Such schools did also provide a small number of places to "scholarship boys".