The United Kingdom (UK) has been divided for a very long time. The north– south divide that cuts across England is the bestknown divide and it is also often very starkly apparent in educational outcomes. However, what this book reveals is that the four countries of the UK have been becoming even more divided in recent years, not least in terms of the very different and increasingly divergent attitudes of the different national administrations to both education and to children who are growing up in poverty. To put it bluntly, Scotland is most progressive – moving towards a Scandinavian norm of caring most for the poorest; Wales is next most progressive but lacks Scotland's powers; England lags far behind both – often aping the educational disasters of the USA – while installing an educational dictatorship worthy of Russia or Turkey; and all through this Northern Ireland remains largely locked in an educational timewarp of sharp divisions between grammar schools and secondarymoderns, amid stark and enduring religious divisions that are only very slowly reducing.

Of course, there are wide geographical variations within each country of the UK in terms of education outcomes as Figure 0.1 makes clear. The figure shows the average educational level by areas of people now entering retirement (the data used came from the 2001 census).

What Figure 0.1 reveals is more than threefold differences in the average qualifications received by the grandparents of today's school children in the UK outside of Scotland, and twofold differences within Scotland. Scotland has been different for some time, but is becoming increasingly different to England. Scotland's people took education more seriously for religious reasons. Many more powerful people there than in England once believed that if a child could not read, then they could not read the Bible and would go to hell (they also believed that this mattered for all children, not just their own). Later Scotland came to have similar levels of literacy to England once England caught up. However, something began to change in Scotland before the millennium. As Figure 0.2 reveals, there was much less variation by area in Scotland for children aged 16 or 17 in 2001 than for their parents.