Quarter-Shillings In Britain - Did I Miss The Memo On This?

If you talk to old folks who were working adults back in pre-decimal days, many of them still retain the ability to do financial sums (in their head!) using £sd. But this is now a dying art. It might be taught in history classes that shillings and pence used to exist, but nowhere else. The whole rationale behind "going decimal" was nobody would ever again need to learn how to count in base 12 and base 20 just to use money.

In British school maths textbooks (and yes, the abbreviation of "mathematics" is spelled "maths" everywhere outside of North America) you're probably more likely to encounter questions asking students to calculate money using the Harry Potter monetary units of knuts, sickles and galleons, than shillings and pence. The students are more likely to relate to Harry Potter's money.

Up until 1990, you could still easily find shillings and florins in change in Britain since they were the same size and composition as 5p and 10p coins, so that generation would have still been aware of what a shilling was worth, but with the 1990 coinage reform, even this link to the old coinage system has been lost.