I came to Scotland having already spent years covering education in the United States — and a childhood spent going through the American system myself, from the rural South to university. Both of my parents were teachers, with a half-century of experience between them. I thought I knew what schools looked like. I thought I understood the arguments, the pressures, the fault lines. I hit the ground running at my first job, but I was still surprised by how often I came across something in my coverage and paused to ask myself, "Wait, why?"
The differences between the American and Scottish education systems aren't just logistical. They are philosophical. They reflect different foundational assumptions about what school is for, what a child needs, and what society owes its young people.
I will also preface this with a reminder that the United States is truly massive. As much as someone's experience in Edinburgh is different from someone's experience on Shetland, I cannot stress enough just how different the experience I had in North Carolina will be from that of someone from New York City or Anchorage, Alaska.
I could spend endless column inches detailing every major difference between Scottish and American schools.
Why aren't hundreds, if not thousands of you, turning up for the high school football game on Friday night? What do you mean, first-year grades at university don't count the same? Why is 'Maths' plural?
Where are all the middle schools?
Instead, I will try to stick to a few of the most jarring examples, which I think tell us something about the fundamentals at play in each system, the assumptions each is based on, and what we want for — and from — young people.
God 101
The presence of religion in schools was one of the first things that stopped me in my tracks. In the United States, the separation of church and state is repeated like a mantra, even when it isn't always applied in practice.
The idea of a public school hosting organised religious content, let alone building it into the timetable, would trigger immediate legal challenge in most American states (I said most, Oklahoma).
In Scotland, that separation simply doesn't exist in the same way. The public school system is historically tied to the church and in many ways owes its existence to the work of the Church of Scotland. Some public schools are religious schools, something that I still can't wrap my head around intellectually or grammatically.
A class like Religious and Moral Education at a public school is as fascinating as it is striking to me. I would never have seen that on the elective list at my high school, although I would have signed up in a heartbeat.
Practices like religious observance – the expectation that students gather during school time for something that functions, at least in part, as collective worship – are even more striking. In Scotland, these have their detractors and challengers, but they are not so obviously constitutionally problematic.
But perhaps the most significant difference to my mind is an institutional one. The presence of religious representatives on council education committees — including representatives of the Church of Scotland, the Catholic Church, and any other religious group with a local presence — is written into Scottish law.
These representatives sometimes vote, and sometimes to significant effect: Perth and Kinross Council removed these voting rights after Blairingone Primary School was closed as a result of votes cast by two religious members.
But I have spoken with current and former religious representatives, church leaders, and the groups who staunchly oppose this structure.
This isn't just about faith. It reflects something deeper about how Scotland understands the relationship between community institutions — church, school, local government — and who has a legitimate voice in how children are educated. For this American reporter, it remains one of the hardest things to explain to anyone back home.
Results Day, really?
I want to be clear: high-stakes testing is not foreign to me. In the US, we have EOCs, EOGs, APs, SATs, and ACTs — all at various stages of education and all of which feel life-ending to teenagers.
But something about the focus on exams in Scotland has always felt different to me. It lands differently. It's not just the importance placed on them in the lives of young people — it's the wider public's apparent fixation on performance.
I have written about this for The Herald before, so I won't rehash it here — but there was nothing like SQA Results Day when I was in school, or when I was covering education in the US. And had there been, it would have felt like a lurid fluff piece at the expense of the young people who didn't get the scores they needed. I've written features about first-generation college students, read about others who were accepted to Harvard University from a trailer park, and I understand the pull of good news and the desire to shine a light on accolades.
But the camera-ready celebration of results — the league tables, the front pages, the public accounting of institutional and individual performance, inviting reporters to the same high school year after year to interview a group of students who got the same good grades as a group of students from last year — all of this feels different.
Maybe it reflects something about how Scottish society has come to understand academic achievement as a public, not just a private, event. There are organisations similar to Qualifications Scotland in America, but Joe Public is extremely unlikely to have any opinions about them.
Whether that scrutiny ultimately serves young people, or simply gives the public an opportunity to perform concern for them, is a question I am still asking.
The career train is leaving early
There is also a very different approach to specialisation in Scotland. Most students in the US take general education classes through their third year of university — the broad survey of subjects, the "well-rounded student" ideal, is deeply embedded in American educational culture at every level. The idea of zeroing in on a career path at 18 or earlier is genuinely foreign to most American students.
There are pros and cons to each approach. I would have told you 15 years ago that I shouldn't be wasting my time in half my classes and should focus on history. For context, I wanted to be a historian. I would have been wrong because, for further context, I am not nor have I ever been a historian. For my undergraduate degree, I double-majored in History and Political Science with a minor in Religious Studies. To satisfy that degree requirement, I took three separate science courses, including a lab.
There will also be young people here who feel they are starting down a track too soon and feel trapped rather than prepared. I have spoken with many young people, and more at later stages in their lives, who feel they powered through high school, senior phase, and university on momentum alone, and now realise they took a wrong turn as teenagers. Neither assumption is obviously wrong. But they produce very different human beings at 18 — and they place very different kinds of pressure on young people at very different moments in their lives.
What I Recognised
But it wasn't all foreign — even from the beginning. My first post was covering education in the islands, and I immediately recognised the similarities: the challenges and the benefits of that region compared to the rural mountains of Western North Carolina, where I had worked previously, and the more general rural South where I grew up. Questions about misrepresentation. Questions about being ignored. Struggling attainment tied directly to a lack of resources and infrastructure — a lack of resources and infrastructure that could be tied directly to the decisions of centralised decision-makers: politicians and businesses operating on criteria built entirely around profitability and efficiency, and not around doing the best by young people, schools, and families.
But there was more I recognised. Something I think you'll find in every education system, and something that cannot be overlooked without real cost to the system and to society as a whole. Creativity. Perseverance. Dedication. Commitment. These traits are abundant in Scottish and American schools alike. They are too easy to leave out of the equation — out of the conversation — when debates get boiled down to big-picture arguments, industrial disputes, and high-level curriculum questions.
In Scotland and in America, schools work because teachers, parents, and students make them work. And the worst thing that could happen to any system — either system — is for all of that to be lost.
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