Having been schooled in imperial measurements with metrication coming in during my student days, I tend to use both, imperial where I need to divide lengths in halves, quarters or eights which in metric soon ends up in measurements needing to be calculated and often involving fractions of a mm.

In defence of schools teaching only metric measurements, imperial is going nowhere so why teach something that will only add to confusion. After all was it not NASA that missed Mars because someone mixed up imperial and metric, so if some of the top scientists and engineers can confuse things what chance have kids got.

An awareness of imperial is needed but only in those areas of work where legacy products exist and in those cases it is beholding on the industries involved to train their operatives in the skills required.

Richard