Abstract
Denominational secondary schools in Scotland have been an influential means by which Catholics have achieved full social citizenship. Most of the Catholic population of Scotland has its origins in late-nineteenth-century migration from Ireland into low-skilled occupations. Although the church built a system of Catholic primary schools, it could not afford to extend this for secondary education, and so a compromise of 1918 allowed the state to take over the funding and management of almost all Catholic schools while the church retained a role in appointing teaching staff. The resulting public-sector secondary schools provided the Catholic population with unprecedented opportunities. The patterns of social and educational change affecting Catholic schools are studied here using a unique series of surveys of school leavers covering the whole of the second half of the twentieth century.
Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2020.1811080.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.