Education Growing up in Scotland: A Century of Childhood

The only thing that every adult in Scotland has in common is that

each and every one of us shared a childhood.

How we were raised shaped not just us, but our nation.

Over the last century, childhood has changed dramatically,

from where and how children play

to their chances of even surviving to adulthood.

And our strongest collective memory is our time at Scottish schools.

From the remotest corners of the country...

..to our largest cities...

..a Scottish education has always reflected

the changing face of our country.

And as individuals and a nation,

our experience behind the school gates has always been a vital part

of who we are and who we are going to be.

This afternoon, we are broadcasting a talk by Sir William McKechnie,

former permanent secretary of the Scottish Education Department.

Children of Scotland,

it is a great thing to be a Scot

and it is a great thing to be taught in our Scottish schools.

You have inherited a great tradition,

you must prove yourselves worthy of it.

That, children of Scotland,

is the part you have to play as world citizens.

If you play it well,

you may rest assured that the fame of Scotland

shall continue to be great among the nations.

THEY LAUGH

680,000 pupils

taught by over 50,000 teachers

in Scotland's 2,500 schools.

An educational system that was once considered

the finest and fairest in the world.

It all began in the 16th century,

with the architect of Scotland's Protestant Reformation,

John Knox.

This is the Book of Discipline, which is, you could argue,

the foundation charter of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland.

Written in the 1540s.

But what is particularly interesting is the sections on education,

because they have gone down in history as the basis for what

eventually became an educational revolution.

"Of necessity, therefore, we judge it

"that every several church have a schoolmaster appointed,

"that in every notable town there be erected a college in which the arts,

"at least logic and rhetoric,

"together with the tongues, be read by sufficient masters,

"for whom honest stipends must be appointed."

The formulation of the Book of Discipline gave Scotland

one of the first national educational systems, to ensure that

in the 900-odd parishes of Scotland, there would be

a schoolmaster, a schoolhouse,

and the people were expected to send their children to it.

Added to this religious tradition

came a drive for universal improvement

from the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment,

to create an education system that was celebrated around the world.

You have people like

De Remusat, a great French philosopher,

saying that the working classes in Scotland were educated to a degree

beyond anything he had ever come across in Europe.

And that was a badge of pride for Scots of every class.

Certainly, by the beginning of the 19th century,

you could point to a universality of provision in Scotland.

Every parish had some kind of school

and every school had some kind of

reasonably well-qualified dominie or teacher.

Girls could go to school, so every child within that school

had the opportunity to get the kind of education that Knox had outlined.

-It was an important part of the Scottish brand.

-Scotland was

undeniably superior to England, at that stage.

If you are in bed with an elephant, as Scotland was, in relation

to a much more influential power, militarily,

economically and politically, if you are in bed with an elephant,

you strive to find out, as the junior partner,

ways in which you are their equal

or superior. And one area was education.

But, by the mid-19th century, the parochial school system,

a badge of national identity that had given Scots such

an educational head start over much of the world, began to collapse.

The new industrial age saw the working poor

leave the village parish schools behind

and pour into the factories of Scotland's new cities.

It was no longer enough to just educate people

to read the Bible, because you had to educate people to take part,

as workers in the new industrial economy of the capitalist period

of the 19th century.

And there was especially big problems in the cities,

because of the huge expansion in Scottish urbanisation,

plus of course,

there was the arrival of the Irish Catholic

and Protestant immigrants, particularly the Irish Catholic

immigrant group,

coming from a society where there was profound levels of illiteracy.

The upheaval of the 19th century

played havoc with the Scottish school system.

Once the pride of the nation,

it was now under-resourced and poorly attended.

In 1872, the state decided to act.

All of Scotland's children would now be legally required to attend school

between the ages of five and 13, and locally-elected school boards,

backed with public funds, would be tasked with modernising education.

To accommodate this new influx of students,

the school boards started building - on a monumental scale.

If you look around, not just the urban landscape of Scotland,

many of the small towns, as well,

you can still see the schools that were built in that

enormous building boom of schools

between 1872 and the turn of the 19th into the 20th centuries.

The foundations for a new educational landscape had been set

in stone and one of the first examples can still be found

in an area that was one of Scotland's poorest of the period.

This is Tureen Street school,

in the Calton district of Glasgow's East End.

It's a remarkable building, isn't it?

They are built to make a statement, and I think this statement is,

"Bring your children here. We will house them

"and we will also civilise them"! So, the immediate demand, I think,

became to provide decent, proper schools for everybody.

There was a great deal of urgency about it, I think.

These schools were built to hold up to 1,200 pupils,

but Tureen Street was extended in 1884 and 1902, to cope

with the increasing numbers.

And such was the immense demand,

Glasgow School Board had to build another, even bigger, school

just a stone's throw away.

Here is another school,

St James's Public School, within, what, 100 yards?

Although they are two separate schools,

in many ways, they are making a very similar statement about the kind

of relationship they have with the community around them.

It is almost like

a citadel fortress looming over the neighbourhood.

It was a school for the public, but it is reminding the public

exactly who they are in relationship

to the education board that has provided it.

They were, if you like, temples to learning -

that is putting it positively - or temples to social control.

If you teach people in schools to be obedient, to follow rules,

to turn up on time,

then you are teaching them also to be obedient workers

in a capitalist industrial economy.

For the first time,

the children of the urban poor were gathered together under one roof,

and soon, the condition of those children became all too apparent.

The future Labour MP, James Maxton,

was a teacher at St James's Public School.

He was asked to take an exercise class

and was appalled at what he saw.

"30 out of 60 youngsters could not bring both heels and knees together,

"because of rickety malformations."

The poverty of the era did not stop at the school gates.

Now that needy children had been gathered together in one place,

the authorities took the opportunity to make a meaningful change.

So what you find from round about the period of 1905 to 1908

is the beginning of a child welfare programme,

the beginnings of things like free milk being provided to children,

subsidised meals, as well.

The schooling in Scotland

became almost a precursor of what eventually

happened after 1945 - the development of the welfare state.

'Health authorities and educationists combined

'to look after the health of every child.

'They arranged for children whose parents were hard up

'to get a free meal every day.'

There was quite a poverty.

At 12 o'clock every day, there was a bell that rang and...

..certain children rose and just went out.

That was the beginning of the school meals.

'Milk has great body-building properties,

'and the daily issue in the schoolroom helps to balance any

'irregularities in the child's normal diet.'

When they brought your crate up into your classroom,

and everybody just went and...

When it came to interval time,

you would collect your bottle of milk and your wee straw.

My mother told me,

the reason I was a foot taller than my father

was because of school milk.

'Medical examinations, like Scholastic ones,

'are regular things in the life of every schoolchild.'

All these things were regarded as a necessary part of education policy,

because unless we could equalise the living conditions of pupils,

then there would never be true equality of opportunity

in the school system.

There was one further issue of equality to be addressed in early

20th-century education.

STRUMMING GUITAR, CHILDREN SINGING

An issue that still polarises opinion today.

Separate and state-funded schools

for the children of Roman Catholic parents.

Like here, in Notre Dame School in Glasgow's West End.

We are a state school.

Glasgow City Council, they provided this school for us.

But Catholic schools have always got that special link

with their local parish. It is at the heart of everything that we do

and that is the beauty of being in a school, a faith school.

Not all of the children in the school are Catholic.

Most are, but not all.

But parents choose the school because they like the ethos

of the school and they know that we promote Gospel values

and they see that that is something that would be important

to their children's upbringing.

-ALL:

-In the name of the Father

and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

THEY CONTINUE TO PRAY

By 1918, there were 450,000 Catholics in Scotland.

Their children had often felt unwelcome in the system provided

by the Protestant Kirk.

And despite paying taxes towards the new state system,

Catholics deliberately exiled themselves from it

and chose to attend their own separate schools.

The children of Catholic families in the 1920s and earlier can,

by and large, be thought of as the children of an immigrant group.

Historically, there was no way

the Catholic community in Scotland

didn't deserve its own education system,

because they were a people under siege.

They were beleaguered, they were persecuted.

I mean, in many ways, the Kirk was the kind of Ukip of the day.

I mean, it opposed this Irish influx.

They probably wouldn't have been tolerated in the local,

so-called, public schools.

So a distinctive Catholic elementary system continued until the early

1920s and that was supported

by the Catholic people of the period

through fundraising, etc. And, of course, at the same time,

they had to pay the educational rate.

It meant, despite that courageous stand,

it meant that gradually,

the standards in these schools were inferior.

In 1918, a new education act offered Scotland's Catholics a fairer share

of the country's resources.

The 1918 Act gave extraordinary generous provision

for the continuation of Catholic instruction in schools,

and above all, to give the Catholic Church a veto

on the appointment of schoolteachers.

Nothing like it happened

in any other Protestant country in Europe at the time.

There was a lot of Protestant ill feeling

towards a system of education which might have to provide

on the rates for the education of Catholic children.

You get not only murmurings,

but protest from some extremist speakers

about "Rome on the rates",

and so, that is the reason why, down to this very day,

at least in the view of many,

the denominational educational system which,

you could argue, should be lauded,

because of the way the state responded to the needs of a poor

and disadvantaged part of the community, is controversial.

For some, the policy of separating children

according to the religion of their parents was hard to take.

I remember disliking very much the split,

that I didn't see the girls from across the road

any more that I'd played with when I was four.

'These are Protestant children in their playground.'

After we went to primary school,

we never really played with each other again.

'And here are the Catholic children in their playground.'

Really awful. Incredibly divisive.

And of course, our school wasn't a Protestant school,

it was just a non-denominational school,

but the non-denominational schools in central Lanarkshire

were just called "the Proddie school" and everybody knew it.

'Segregation at school, often until the end of their school days,

'creates in young minds a feeling of separateness that remains for life.'

And I do think they should really have tackled that,

because I think sectarianism, that is what the legacy of it is.

A lot came from being brought up in different schools

and treating each other as enemies.

# And Jesus said you must love one another... #

They are often described by critics nowadays as being divisive,

but in fact, the main social role which the Catholic schools played

was to integrate Catholics into a common identity,

a common education system, and the long-term effect of that

is that there is no longer any difference

in employment opportunities between children of Catholic backgrounds

and children of non-Catholic backgrounds.

But for the increasing number of parents

with no religious affiliation,

the division of Scotland's children remains controversial.

Militant secularism is probably now more a threat to that system

than Protestant sectarianism and bigotry,

which is, in my view, slowly dying out.

I think those that were against the system

are crying or whistling in the wind.

If the parents agreed to the process happening,

that is not a problem.

But if there was any attempt to impose a dissolution

of those schools, then I think it would create outrage.

While Scotland's schools have retained

the religious divisions of 1918,

their classrooms are often 21st-century.

So you would go into your log-in, and I'll just put my log-in quickly.

There I am, there. That's my avatar.

And, in this top bit up here, you can choose your maths,

your reading or your writing.

But their parents and grandparents had no such freedoms

and endured the strictest of environments.

It is a story of ordinary children having to submit themselves

from nine o'clock in the morning to four o'clock in the afternoon,

day after day, to the kind of education

which was possible under the economic circumstances

of a mass provision, and that is regimentation, discipline.

The desks were all in, kind of, serried rows,

the teacher, kind of, marauded up and down, like on a stage.

There was no nonsense tolerated.

There was very little fun in the classroom.

The teacher would write on the blackboard, two or three times,

the same thing. "June is the month of roses," I remember that so much.

And this was called cursive writing.

CHILDREN RECITE LESSON

There is a great poem by Alexander Scott,

a series of little poems that he wrote,

and his one on Scottish education just goes,

"A telt ye. A telt ye."

So, that was the ideal in Scottish education,

the teacher telling you and you learning,

and don't give any feedback.

Tell me the names of six towns in the County of Midlothian.

-ALL:

-Edinburgh, Leith, Portobello, Musselburgh and Dalkeith...

One of the non-glories

of Scottish education, compared to others in Western Europe,

is that it was very authoritarian.

You weren't allowed to talk, no.

You couldn't speak, not even to the person sitting beside you.

It was complete silence.

That was very strict, very strict.

The least achieving pupils

would sit right there under the teacher's desk.

Which I think taught children

that the way they should see themselves is

as beings to be licked into shape and to be regimented,

and of course, not all children took to that at all.

I was bored. And I think a lot of the kids were.

So my memories of Scottish education

are not actually very happy or stimulated.

It puzzles me, because I know that, at the time I was a wee boy,

Scotland was supposedly famed for its education,

so in a sense, school was something you had to get through.

There is a practical reason, of course.

I mean, how else can you teach and keep control

over as many as 60 children without having,

I think, a fairly strict regime?

Because the teacher, of course, had the power of summary execution,

by reason of the tawse.

The stiflingly strict atmosphere in Scotland's schools was enforced

by the use of a thick leather whip.

Known as the tawse, it left its mark on generations of pupils.

I can remember being afraid to go to school.

You would be called out to the front,

with your two hands together like this.

Cross your hands. Cross your hands. Cross your hands.

And it was terrifying.

I just think it is absolutely appalling to think that we would

hit children with a belt like this.

It is just incredible to think there was actually a production line

producing these, so that teachers would always have one.

For years, these leather straps were seen as an essential part

of the teacher's trade.

And near the small town of Lochgelly,

the leather works that supplied more than any other

is still operational today.

I'm Margaret Dick, daughter of John Dick

and granddaughter of George Dick,

who are well known for the Lochgelly tawse, for manufacturing it.

It's just part of the history of my family

and, like it or lump it, I'm stuck with that.

There you are.

That's my Lochgelly.

I used that.

I did use it.

Just mark the shape of it...

The threat of physical violence was present in schools,

but then it was present in families, it was present in communities,

it was present through the church.

The schools simply saw themselves as reproducing that,

that ethics were to be instilled partly by the threat of violence.

The culture of the society completely accepted this.

The parents were all for it.

If I went home and said I was getting the strap,

my mum would want to know why.

And that was worse!

That was worse than the teacher.

We are edging it now, which is taking the sharp edge off,

because obviously, we want to hurt the hand with the tawse,

but we don't want to damage it, make it bleed.

Corporal punishment was actually used

not only for reasons of disciplining,

but also for academic reasons.

There is plenty of evidence

that if you failed to gain a certain mark,

then the belt would be produced.

Some teachers would belt people that had more than three spellings wrong,

so, you know, the idea of how dyslexic kids would have got on

in those days, they must have ended up

with hatred of education, I would think.

For most, an appointment with the Lochgelly tawse

meant a day of discomfort.

But for others, there could be far more serious consequences.

I got belted one day for spelling Canada with a small C,

and it led to a, kind of, mini breakdown,

it was almost like a mental breakdown.

The consequence of which was, I became almost...

Well, withdrawn would be one way to put it.

I missed a couple of years of school.

And that is a Lochgelly tawse.

Another consequence of the expansion of education was an increase

in demand for secondary schools.

Nowadays, it is taken for granted that pupils move from primary

to a senior school, but before the turn of the century,

secondary education was the preserve of the few, not the many.

Previously, secondary schooling was available only in some cities

and only for quite well-off, middle-class children.

That was felt to be unfair, on the grounds that it was available

only to people who were rich.

And as the working classes and the generality of

the population became more and more aspirational,

the education system had to respond to that.

But when secondary schools were provided for Scotland's children,

the assumption was that it wasn't a right,

but a privilege, for the clever few.

The governing assumption,

both politically and among educational administrators,

was that only a relatively small proportion of

the population had the ability to go on to what was called, at that time,

higher grade schools.

There was a, kind of, almost anthropological belief

that talent was rationed out in any society.

By the 1930s, a two-tier system

of junior and senior secondary schools was well established.

A qualifying exam would allocate pupils,

according to academic merit.

A pass or a fail, deciding the fate for generations of Scots.

'Here are some of the questions that now decide

'the Scottish child's immediate future.

'Could you answer them correctly?'

Why do steel warships float?

Because steel is lighter than water?

Because steel is heavier than water?

Because they are full of air?

'On the basis of these marks,

'the pupil goes to an appropriate secondary course.'

As one educational historian put it,

that system was the sieving of the working class.

Obviously, the 11 Plus favoured articulate kids

who came from articulate, well-educated families.

They were virtually bound to, kind of, walk in.

And the rest were left

as the rude mechanicals, as it were!

Everybody was sort of pigeonholed.

I mean, the lower classes weren't allowed to take a language.

Things like that.

CHILD READS IN FRENCH

So, people's entire life course was determined by this qualifying exam,

taken at round about the age of 11 or 12.

Nowadays, you've got colleges

where you can go and pick up Highers and things,

but then, it more or less condemned you to a certain type

of educational oblivion.

One of the things we have learned, I think,

in educational research and policy over the last 100 years

is that people's rate of maturing varies enormously.

That if you decide that there is a fixed point in somebody's life

in which their destiny is determined,

then you're going to be wrong.

I would condemn Scottish education

for imbuing kids with a real sense of failure.

One of the reasons why there is very little opposition to

the comprehensive system in Scotland, compared with England,

where it is still highly controversial,

is because of that knowledge of what the 11 Plus system did to a couple

of generations of children, and the parents of the current generation,

and the grandparents of the current generation, remember that.

A further weakness in Scottish education was the question of

just how Scottish it actually was.

That no amount of country dancing would atone for the absence

of the country's own literature and history.

I think the paradox is that,

although Scottish education was said to be Scottish,

it was actually working to a British Imperial model.

If you are wanting an education system which gives pupils the chance

to rise to the top, and that top meant a British top,

you had to think to emphasise a non-Scottish curriculum.

The priority was always seen as helping children to get on

within a British context.

And the way to get on in the high noon of union,

the high noon of unionism, was through the British route.

If you want to find out about Scottish history,

you do it in your own free time, your private time,

but it is not seen to be fit and appropriate

for systematic educational purposes.

The claim is often made that the Scottish curriculum lacks

Scottish content, in the sense of paying attention

to explicitly Scottish topics.

Actually, that is a bit of a misrepresentation.

'Here, the ground is being prepared for a lesson on Scottish history.'

But they were not the kinds of content

that we regard as, perhaps, acceptable today.

They tended to be quite conservative elements of Scottish culture.

-RADIO:

-'This is the Scottish Home Service for schools.

'Stories from Scottish history.

'Last week, we heard how Mary Queen of Scots

'was taken prisoner by her nobles...'

What we have in this period is the hybrid identity of Scottishness

and Britishness, but in terms of formal education,

it was overwhelmingly British.

One of the great tensions is between the culture of the home

and the immediate community and the type of standardised,

centralised culture of the school system,

and often at the centre of that,

particularly in Scotland, is language.

One of the ironies of an Ayrshire education in the 1950s

was that you got a prize one day of the year

for reciting Rabbie Burns' poetry,

and then you were likely to get the belt the other 364 days

for speaking his language.

So, very little status was given

to the vernacular that the majority brought to the classroom.

I remember one guy, an inspector came to the school

and he was dead keen to answer a question.

He stuck up his hand, the teacher...

He said, "I don't ken."

When the inspector left, he got the belt.

You don't say "ken" to the inspector.

He got belted for it. And he was being enthusiastic, you know.

You learned from a very early age that to speak Scots

was almost like sticking your tongue out at the teacher,

it was giving cheek, and you could be belted for it.

Some people switched off, I think, from education because of that,

because their culture was given no status whatsoever.

Attitudes are slowly changing

on the use of the Scots language in the classroom.

Right, folks.

Today we're going to have a look at Gary Robertson's Gangs Of Dundee.

Here at Morgan Academy in Dundee,

the English Department has placed the Scots language

at the centre of their teaching.

HE READS IN SCOTS

So I've been in primary schools

where the class teacher will confidently say,

"I've nae Scots speakers," because they don't speak Scots in front

of the teacher, but when you actually speak to the bairns,

they are Scots speakers, they just have hidden that.

And that has almost been a learned response over generations.

"Scots isn't right in the classroom, so we don't use it."

HE READS IN SCOTS

It's about time we realised we are not a monolingual nation, really.

There's very, very few folk that just have English.

Folk, at least, have an understanding of Scots.

Like, so, "affy" means really.

Right? "Are we really daft?"

But "ower" is more like "too", so what do you think?

The idea that you had to be a monolingual English speaker,

educationally, we now know that that was a wrong attitude,

but it was ingrained in a lot of Scottish teachers

that for the children to get on, they would have to be less Scottish.

If you are in Scotland, sure, you should learn Scottish stuff.

The campaign to normalise the use of the Scots language

is in its infancy compared with Gaelic.

Here in Tiree, the local school now provides

for both English and Gaelic speaking pupils

in their own preferred language.

SHE SPEAKS GAELIC

In days gone by,

Scotland's remotest island communities

felt themselves being pulled apart

by the competing cultural forces in their schools.

I was brought up here

and I was constantly hearing stories in Gaelic,

and songs, rhymes, recitations.

In the community too, it was Gaelic that was spoken.

Donald Meek was raised in Tiree in the 1950s,

a time when, despite the majority of pupils here

speaking their native tongue,

their schooling was to be conducted in the foreign language

that was English.

I remember my first day at school only too well.

I can remember being left there by my mother

and going into this large classroom.

We had no Gaelic teaching whatsoever.

It was a completely alien environment.

'Among other things, they learn English,

'which to them, is a foreign language.'

-ALL RECITE:

-As if her song could have no ending,

I saw her singing at her work...

It was like being in a little island of English in an ocean of Gaelic.

One of the things that you learn pretty quickly when you are trying

to learn English was you were a product for export.

The whole education system was particularly geared to make

the brightest, as the education system saw it,

move away from the island.

'But there's not half the number of children here now

'that there were when we were at school.

'That is because so many of our folks

'have left the crofts and gone away to the towns.'

For Donald, the language and culture of his birth was more important

than climbing the academic ladder.

I very well remember being prepared

to sit an examination which would have taken me,

if I had been successful, from Tiree to Oban,

to begin secondary schooling.

But I deliberately failed it.

I did not want to sign my own death warrant

by performing well in the examination.

I knew what was going to happen,

so I took avoiding action

and I stayed here in Tiree until the age of 16,

and during those formative years of my early teens,

I learned an immense amount

about life on this croft and in the island.

TEACHER SPEAKS GAELIC

The new education that Gaelic children get,

and particularly children with no Gaelic,

were being taught to learn Gaelic.

THEY SPEAK GAELIC

I see all the missing components in my own education.

Now, the schools are like little islands of Gaelic

in oceans of English.

It's as if the whole thing has completely reversed itself.

It's another world.

But it's a good world.

BELL RINGS

From the tiniest islands to the biggest cities,

Scottish schools had been notorious

for their harsh, no-nonsense teaching.

But in the 1950s, that began to change,

when the old world of discipline and repetition was rebuilt

into a world of inclusion and imagination.

There was an international movement, in which Scotland was actually

one of the leading players.

It was what was called the New Education Movement,

which was to create a more child-centred kind of learning.

'Teaching methods in all our schools

'have changed as much as architecture and equipment.

'Reading and writing come more easily, for example,

'when combined with Plasticine and play.'

The child was taken to be the focal point of education.

It is difficult for us to imagine a different system now,

because we've become so imbued with the ideas of child-centredness.

'Nowadays, there is a bright, sunshiny touch

'to primary schools and schooling.'

Along with this new approach to teaching,

the long division of the qualifying test finally came to an end.

Now, every child, regardless of perceived ability,

would be taught under the same roof.

A comprehensive education was to be the new way forward.

The scale of transformation was so rapid,

and it is amazing, the resilience of the system,

that it managed to cope with it.

I think the major reason for that was there was an awareness,

especially among educational administrators and many

enlightened teachers, that the old system wasn't simply working.

So, the new system was welcomed.

'Knightswood Secondary School, one of the many big new schools.

'And in its size, design and layout

'can be seen the shape of things to come.'

So, you have the notion of the comprehensive school

that everybody went to.

And if there were to be differences, they were within the one school.

Bill Sweeney is a former pupil of Knightswood Secondary.

He started in 1961, just three years after it opened

at the dawn of the comprehensive age.

Brought up in a working-class household in nearby Drumchapel,

Bill's time here helped him on his way to become

a renowned composer and professor of music.

HE PLAYS THE CLARINET

'The music department in Knightswood was particularly strong.

'It was really exciting, actually, to come here.

'You felt as if you were going to something really sort of quite big

'and certainly modern, you know.'

It is very recognisably the same place, with the same...

The original buildings.

Every so often, I definitely do get a little bit of the 1960s

coming jabbing back at me.

A little bit uncanny at times.

My parents had to leave school at 14,

both very intelligent people,

well-read people, who just weren't able to access education,

so they were absolutely all for it,

and certainly that ideal of everyone should be educated,

you should get the best out of everybody,

was still something that was built into the school

from when it was opened,

that it was for everybody and not just to sort out

the ones that could from the ones that couldn't.

The comprehensive ideal, perhaps you could regard as the final fulfilment

of the democratic ideal that was laid down in the 16th century.

It took some centuries to work out, but when you consider the economic

and democratic and social developments that had to take place,

maybe that is not surprising.

By their very nature, comprehensive schools are geared

to provide a better standard for the majority.

But can such a system also encourage academic excellence

for the top achievers?

We are probably doing less well now

for the most able students than we were in the past.

The most able students are not stretched as far as they were

in the past and they don't get the same acquaintance

with inherited culture of the greatest kind

that they did in the more elite system of the past.

But for some children,

there has long been another option to state-funded education.

We have in Scotland, from the 19th century,

a set of endowed schools,

that is schools where some wealthy benefactor had left some money

to help establish a school.

Often that benefactor has their name embodied in the name of the school,

such as James Gillespie or George Heriot.

So, private schools were set up in Scotland,

which were based on English public schools -

we call them private schools -

so that Scottish children from middle-class backgrounds

would be able to make it in the British Empire.

There continued to be an elite system of independent schools

in Scotland, where fees are charged to parents,

unlike in the state system, and where there is a selection test.

Today, just over 4% of children in Scotland attend fee-paying schools,

and well under a quarter of them go to boarding schools,

a system which traditionally starts at the age of eight.

-Hello, I'm Josh.

-I'm Terry.

-I'm Cora.

We're going to show you around Ardvreck School today.

Built in 1883, this is Ardvreck Prep School in Perthshire.

Some of our children leave home to come to board with us,

so we have to create a home from home, when they are quite young.

So, school becomes a way of life.

-This is our bedroom.

-This is our dorm.

This is my bed space.

And my bed. You get the higher up beds,

you get three drawers and a big compartment underneath

to keep your stuff in.

My bed space.

I stay here on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

It feels a bit weird that you are not seeing your family as much,

and you don't go home and have supper with them.

Then, it is, kind of, basically the same,

just your parents up there

and you just have your friends the whole time.

This is the ICT room.

We have a six-day week. We work Saturdays.

We have a longer school day.

So, this is the senior French room.

Parents have high expectations for the children,

we have a high expectations of our children.

Because people have paid for us to be here,

you really feel as if you've got to work hard in lessons.

For a full boarding place at Ardvreck School,

the fees are about £6,000 per term.

Three terms per year.

It's what it costs to educate a child.

We have just chosen to do it without involving the state.

Some parents can clearly afford it.

Other parents really struggle,

they make huge sacrifices in their own lives,

in order for their children to attain the education they have here.

For those who can afford it, part of the appeal of Ardvreck

is its more traditional curriculum, which preserves subjects

which used to be commonplace in the Scots classroom.

We do have Latin.

It may be a surprise to some people to see Latin still on a curriculum,

but we also have classical literature and translation,

classical studies...

For the children themselves,

it is the environment and freedom Ardvreck offers

that is the primary attraction.

When I was younger, I went to school in London,

a little primary school.

But then you come here and you just see the difference between,

like, a little garden and, like, a massive, 42-acre playground.

There is space for everything that you want to do,

like, there's a playground, there's tennis, there's cricket.

I know that we are very privileged

in order to have what we have to offer to our children.

I don't take that privilege lightly.

We are blessed.

This is a business, we have to run it as a business,

but it is a business where children are offered

the best opportunities in life.

For the majority of children,

the private school experience simply isn't on the cards.

They rely on the state system, which, by the 1980s,

had been thoroughly modernised.

But there remained one painful reminder of a draconian past.

I would say that the strap is a salutary and effective means

of maintaining discipline in a school,

and sparing use of it is perfectly right and proper.

Belting children, some as young as five, was still commonplace

and society's support for these beatings still appeared strong.

'In Edinburgh, a few years ago, they tried to keep a record

'of how many times the strap was used in a term.

'They got to 10,000 and, after that, they stopped counting.'

It didn't do me any harm.

As a matter of fact, it made me respect the teachers more.

With all due respect to the teachers, I think, most of the time,

I don't deserve it.

You got belted today, didn't you?

For going to the toilets and not asking the teacher if I could go.

We were in the hall, getting a free period.

Do you think it is fair to get belted for that?

No, because you might be bursting.

But Scottish mother Grace Campbell was fed up

with the state-sanctioned violence.

She brought a case against the UK authorities

to the European Court of Human Rights,

and the thrashing of pupils began to be challenged.

My mum asked for an assurance from

the local education authority

at Strathclyde Region that my brother and myself

would not be belted at school. And they couldn't give that assurance.

They said that the law prevented it

and, so, it then became a question of, how do you change the law?

-NEWSREADER:

-'The court did rule that beating children

'against their parents' wishes

'violated the Human Rights Convention.'

I'm very pleased with the outcome of the case

and I feel that a speedy implementing of the findings

will improve the educational environment

for both teachers and pupils.

In 1982, Grace Campbell won her case

and schools across Scotland would now have to enforce discipline

without whipping children.

-WHISTLE BLOWS

-In twos!

But not everyone was behind the ban.

The old guard, if you like, were very keen on keeping what they had,

and couldn't understand why anyone would want to get rid of it.

I would imagine the public here in Scotland would view the abolition,

at a stroke type of abolition, with some concern.

There was hate mail. We had graffiti daubed on the front door.

We had a half brick thrown at the window.

We were shouted at in the street.

It was kind of like... It was almost like we were undermining

social structures by just asking not to be belted at school.

Grace Campbell's victory had ensured the end of legalised violence

in schools, not only in Scotland but right across the UK.

Very, very proud of my mum and dad.

And particularly now, when you think about, you know,

if we speak to children now, they've got no idea, and are horrified.

I think it's to stretch out and bring things forward.

It's like a snake's mouth.

-Is it...

-A chocolate bar!

You hold a whip like the cowboys, when they go like...

"Go, horsey, go!"

-That's a whip.

-No, it isn't.

They whack people with it.

No, they don't.

One day, my mum got hit with the belt, in olden times.

It's nice to see that, as far as my own kids are concerned,

they will never be hit at school,

and that, I think, my mum would be really happy about,

if she was still here.

Scottish education had long been a political football,

never more so than in the 1980s, when a former UK Education Secretary

declared war on Scottish teachers and their unions.

-NEWSREADER:

-'Mrs Thatcher made it clear

'that, in her list of priorities,

'replacing out-of-date primary schools came before

'giving free milk to 7 to 11-year-olds.'

Most parents can afford to provide their own children

with milk, or to give them money to buy milk.

They can't, in fact, provide the school buildings. That's my job.

Margaret Thatcher arrived at Number Ten in 1979.

Almost immediately,

her Conservative philosophies of parental choice were applied

to Scotland's schools.

Good afternoon, Prime Minister.

Part of the Thatcher years, of course,

and the reason why they had such a decisive effect on the development

of Scottish politics, was because we had not seen such interventionism

at all levels, from the economy through to education,

since the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion in the 1740s.

As long ago as that.

There were big challenges.

The performance amongst poorer communities

and on the worst housing estates was pretty appalling.

And everybody went round saying,

"Scottish education is the best in the world."

Well, it was no longer the best in the world.

Teachers' wages had fallen well behind other professions

and mixed with the febrile political atmosphere of the early '80s,

this had a major impact in Scottish classrooms.

I had wanted to be a schoolteacher

from the age of about seven or eight,

and I found myself in 1983 in the classroom,

and then, one year in, the big bang of a teachers' strike

suddenly ripped all that away.

Scottish teachers are determined to make their stand.

Well, everyone was terrified of the EIS.

The Educational Institute of Scotland

was a really powerful trade union, which was determined, at all costs,

to protect the interest of its members and seemed little concerned

with creating opportunities and new ideas. It was very politicised.

So you have that period of industrial action,

probably on a scale never seen before

in Scottish educational history.

The bitterness of the strike meant

a kind of withdrawal of labour from unpaid work.

I can recall, again, the number of teachers who would stay on

after hours, who would appear at the weekends in the sports fields, etc.

Almost all of that collapsed and, in many parts of Scotland,

it has never reappeared.

I was about 14, 15 when the strikes really started to take hold,

and I went from having a lot of extra-curricular sport,

a lot of opportunities, to that pretty much being eliminated.

The extracurricular, whether it was sport or music or drama,

it was the heart of the school, it ran through the school's DNA,

and I don't think we appreciated what we had lost

until it wasn't there any more. We were hugely reliant on

the goodwill of the teaching staff

to give us opportunities, extra-curricular,

outwith the classroom.

And I think it never quite recovered afterwards,

which is a real shame for the generations after me.

The strike lasted two years and was brought to a close in 1986

after concessions were made by the government.

But there was a serious problem in the system

and the problem was that there was a complete distance

between the people within it and government and Parliament,

which was distant, not listening, and certainly not valuing

those who were actually delivering the service.

With a majority Tory Government at Westminster,

but a minority of Tory MPs in Scotland now the norm,

things would remain far from settled.

And the new man in charge of Scottish education

was determined to make his mark.

I accept that there was a lot of change.

I was driven. I remember Margaret Thatcher saying to me,

"You don't go into politics in order to be popular.

"If you are popular, then you are telling people

"what they want to hear and, in education in Scotland,

"the last thing we need is for the trade union leaders

"to be told what they want to hear."

Scottish parents were less than happy

being told by a Prime Minister few had voted for

how their children would be educated.

The reaction of Scottish parents to this was almost not simply

a reaction to the specific educational reforms,

but almost because, like so many aspects

of the government's policies in that period,

it was regarded as an attack on Scottish identity.

But within a decade,

policies seen as the worst excesses of Thatcherism

became widely accepted by parents and the other political parties.

The Conservatives not only reformed the curriculum

in a very democratising way, but they also introduced things

that have subsequently become very popular.

For example, they enabled parents

to choose the school that they would send their children to.

No subsequent government in Scotland,

whether Labour or Liberal Democrat or SNP,

has even raised the possibility

of restricting parental choice of school.

While the individual policies,

testing and parents being more involved in school and so on,

have stood the test of time,

the resentment that the way they were brought in created

had a much more negative impact than the individual policies ever had

and a feeling that decisions were being imposed.

That was the key element which finally put the spine

into the movement for Scottish devolution.

More than any other issue,

education was the trigger for Scotland's new Parliament.

And to this day,

Scotland's schools remain a barometer of the country's life.

Schools like Dalry Primary, in the west of Edinburgh, built in 1876.

And this is the school song, performed by the class of 1942.

PUPILS SINGING

This is the modern version,

sung in the multitude of languages now spoken in the school.

# Welcome to our school, your second home

# Our ring of respect, you feel included... #

There's 27 countries

and 35 languages spoken currently in the school.

A century before, Irish immigrants had been held apart

from the mainstream.

Today's immigrant communities are encouraged

into the heart of Scottish education.

# Welcome to you, As-Salaam-Alaikum

# Peace be with you... #

It's a really interesting community,

it's a really amazing weave of people.

But immersion itself is the key thing,

children as a resource is really important,

because children teach other children English.

They are learning about children from other cultures,

they are learning about different religions.

I think it breeds tolerance, you know.

If children learn there is nothing to be afraid of

in children who are from other cultures,

then that sets an example to us all.

Scotland has always, historically,

been a weave of different nations coming together,

and I don't see this as any different.

I just see it as part of that continuum.

So, I really celebrate it at Dalry. I'm really, really proud of it.

# Peace be with you Shanti, Shalom - yeah! #

People in Scotland have always thought of their schools

as constituting the morality of the nation, if you like.

Constituting the way in which people should behave towards each other

and the way in which they should view the wider world.

Education has long been part of the fabric of this nation

and the way we teach our children has never stood still.

Perhaps, along the way, we overstated how good it actually was.

But when we look to the future,

we should also look back to the ambitions of the past.

As an aspiration, as an ideal, Scotland should always be proud

of its educational system.

It is a great heritage that we have fallen heir to.

That ideal has been there since 1560

of educating the mass of the population.

That is a wonderful ideal we should pursue with vigour.

For all the problems that Scottish education faces today,

if we look back 100 years,

we can see that Scottish education is doing far, far better

for the majority of the population than ever before.

We may have improved educationally, in absolute terms,

but comparatively, we are certainly not doing as well as we did

in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Other countries have caught up and that's good.

But it doesn't mean to say

that we should give up being proud of Scottish education.

Next time, the world of the Scottish child and how it has changed

in the last 100 years.

A spike from an old railing, that was your javelin.

Or a slate from a roof, that became your discus.

Your parents never saw you whatsoever until you were hungry.

From the children of the slums, to the children of suburbia.

-Hi, Mike.

-Call me Dad, Gregory, or Pop or something.

It makes me feel better when you call me Dad or Father.

And on to the boys and girls of modern Scotland.

Play on the iPad, play on the phone,

play on the computer, watch TV.