Since 1707, when the Scottish and the English Parliaments united to form the Parliament of Great Britain, education has been one of the areas (with the church and the law) reserved to Scotland. To what extent can the Scottish education system be judged today as providing more equity to its people – especially its students – than the English one?

For most Western countries, education represents a huge investment in their future prosperity in terms of financial and human resources, thus this activity is highly monitored, assessed, and documented by governments and international organisations, as much as it is scrutinized and criticized in the medias. Education in the United Kingdom (UK) is no exception, and relevant literature on the internet can quickly become overwhelming, not only because of its quantity, but also because of the lack of objectivity or accurateness of their authors. For instance, although education is devolved in the UK, Shu Yung-Min and Lin Ren-Jie, in their 2018 article ‘Social Justice and Equity in the UK Education System,’ focused on educational justice in England and did not take the other UK parts into account. Even the “independent” report Elitist Britain 2019, written by The Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission, focused on the English elite when it “painted a picture of a country whose power structures are dominated by a narrow section of the population: the 7% who attend independent schools, and the roughly 1% who graduate from just two universities, Oxford and Cambridge”.

So, in my essay, I researched to what extent the Scottish education system can be judged as providing to young people more equity and/or opportunities to learn than the competitive, marketized education system existing in England. To do so, I started to compare the global situation of the UK education with the other countries of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Then, after explaining why the English and Scottish education systems are different, I compared their main features and assessed them according to the equity criteria used in the Eurydice 2020 report. In a third part I compared the government policies and actions developed in Scotland and England to tackle child poverty through their education systems, as well as their impacts on the attainment gaps of disadvantaged students. To conclude, I gave my personal answer to the initial question: is the Scottish education system more equitable than the English one?

I invite you to read the complete essay, available in the pdf document here below, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it. You may download it and use parts of it for your own research work but beware of plagiarism: do not forget to indicate your references as soon as you quote, reformulate, or cite any part or idea written in this essay.