Same in New Zealand. The only times I ever saw anything with 12x tables it had escaped from the US education market and had exercises involving nickels, dimes and quarters etc.
My experience in New Zealand differs, we learned the 12x tables at primary school and there was nothing vaguely imperial about it. This was around about a decade ago.
I learned all the way up to the 12 times tables here in England, I was born in 1965. My kids only seem to have learned up to their ten times table however.
Personally I strongly believe that this is so important that it should be enforced by rote memorisation very early on (as in my case).
For some reason far too many people see no problem with insisting children learn their alphabet to ensure literacy but suddenly lose interest when it is times tables in order to ensure numeracy.
Fortunately we have just had a (wrongly much derided) Education Secretary in Government called Michael Gove who has done an excellent job at demanding that these basics are covered and as a result is now widely (and wrongly) hated.
He has also insisted that school IT courses should involve teaching programming. Up to now, they have just been about to create a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation, or how to use Microsoft Word. Yes, seriously. That bad. They squandered the early lead the UK had with IT by dumbing down everything to such an extent that no bright kid would want anything to do with computers.
