Social inequality in Catholic schools in Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century

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.

Keywords:

• Catholic schools
• comprehensive schools
• attainment
• curriculum
• social class
• sex

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (grant number MRF-2017-002). I am grateful to Dr Linda Croxford, of the Centre for Educational Sociology, Edinburgh University, for data for the surveys 1974-6 to 1998, to Professor Ian J. Deary, director of the Lothian Birth Cohorts, University of Edinburgh, for data from the 1952 survey, and to the UK Data Archive for data from the Education and Youth Transitions series.