Can I ask some stupid questions about life in the 80s?

[rainyeastcoast]

What benefits were available to single parents? Tax credits didn’t come in till Blair’s government, that is correct isn’t it?

How did people collect benefits before direct payments and how were people paid, did it go straight into the bank?

Was corporal punishment quite common in schools, not just caning but shoving and so on?

I was around in the 80s but was very very young so don’t know!

There was corporal punishment at the primary but it was illegal when reached secondary, primarily boys being hit with cane or football boot. Also one delightful teacher who I saw beat a working class girl up and pushed another kids head down toilet, washed mouth out with soap and beat them up threatening to do same to anyone laughing. If you were into child abuse teaching was the perfect career at that school. At the secondary several teachers were sleeping with underaged girls and everyone knew.

Child benefit I think was collected from Post Office. Don't think poverty was much different from at kids school today.

We didn't have the cane but they would make us do things like sit in our pants on the schools prickly welcome mat (we'd get sores on our bottoms if they left us on there too long). I was walloped by a teacher once when I was 5 for doing a rolypoly too soon on the gym mat. They wouldn't let us out to see at lesson time either and I remember a couple times kids crying whilst sat in puddles of wee (we were 5/6). Towards the end of the 80s, no one cared about my autism. No one cared about bullying really. At my school anyway.

It was the UB40 form for unemployment benefit. That's what the band is named after.

I went to university in 1990. The year above me had been the last to be able to claim UB in the holidays and HB.

I have a vague memory that Mum had a couple of forms in her child benefit book that meant for two fortnights a year, she could collect it from a different PO than the one she normally used, to allow for holidays (at least within Britain.)

Think there was housing benefit and more council housing. Was free school dinners below certain income level and university was free. Think there were food vouchers too.

I was aged 10 to 20 in the 80s. Schools’ attitude to discipline was certainly very different than today. I can remember children (boys mainly) getting the slipper in assembly at primary school or sometimes if they were really bad it was the cane. I saw a teacher really lose control of himself and throw a child over some desks for not turning up to football practice. I moved on to an all girls senior school where there was no corporal punishment however the all boys senior school was notorious for having an excessive corporal punishment record which carried on right up until the ban.

I was at secondary school 81-86. I was slippered, had tippex bottles thrown at head, head put down the loo and worst off all had to stand in my underpants whilst the girls walked past laughing. I wasn't a bad kid either!!

I started school in 84. There was no physical punishment!

That depends where you went to school, I started off in West Yorkshire where the local authority hac banned it but it was still legal, It was a bit of a shock moving to lancashire where it was common.

There was a benefit called FIS - family Income Supplement which seemed to be claimed by single mums.

Benefits wee in the form of a 'Gyro' sent to your home by post. You could take it to the post office to be cashed or you could pay it into a bank account, but for some reason you had to tell DHSS if you did. I was unemployed for a few months in 1985.

Schools also had the dreaded 'section 28' to contend with. Basically if a child was being bullied for being gay or having gay parents the school couldn't do much because they could be found to, 'promote homosexuality'

When I finished college I was unemployed for two or three months, and was on the "dole" it was the start of rhe eighties. I recall I had to go round to the dole office to collect my dole money, "unemployment benefit", I think every week and "sign on".

I recall I hated it and felt very embarrassed queueing up, it wasn't a lot of money, I don't recall how much, but it was not means tested in any way, as in they didn't ask your outgoings. You just filled in a form. It was seen as quite shameful then to have to claim the dole. You stopped claiming by simply not going and "signing on". As in if you didn't turn up you didn't get your money.

I was born in 1966 so was at secondary school 1978-1985. At university 1985-1989.

Don’t recall official corporal punishment with a cane, but teachers did just wallop you one in class. One used a plimsoll which he referred to menacingly as “the slipper.” He’d hit people over the head if they talked/misbehaved.

Pupils also regularly had proper fist fights with teachers. Other teachers would join in the scuffle and get the unruly lad under control/remove from the room.

I got a full grant at university and was also allowed to sign on the dole in the holidays. No tuition fees either. Amazing.

My parents were pensioners by the 1980s and lived in council house. They got their rent paid etc.

Have a watch of Boys from the Blackstuff op.

I left senior school in 1985. I can vividly remember blackboard rubber or a piece of chalk wizzing past my head.
I think it was better times for kids. No social media, not as much peer pressure to look good. You made do with what you had & most folk were in the same boat.
I can remember my Dad being on strike in 1984 as he was a miner. That was a long year but I can remember never suffering from it. My parents must have hid their worries well from me!

Shit, got my maths wrong, it was the end of the eighties,not the start.

School in the eighties I got the belt, I never quite worked out why, and corporal punishment was rife.

I was at school in the 1980's. In 1981 when I was 8 a teacher at my Primary school lost the plot with the whole class after an assembly when a few kids had been messing about. She called out all the naughty ones (over half the class), put them over her knee one by one and whacked them very hard on the bum. They were all crying. It was awful. She went off on long-term sick with stress afterwards.

I remember corporal punishment in my infant school (started in 1979) but a tap on the hand , not really anything more. Interestingly, doing a sort out some months ago I came across a pamphlet from my old junior school (so around 1982 or so) and in the 'discipline' section it stated that boys only may be sent to the head for corporal punishment for misdemeanours!

I was a child of the 70's so a teen in the 80's.

People were canes at school but it was rare. When it happened the news spread like wildfire around the school.

I don't remember having OFSTED inspections (I was in Wales though so maybe different?). Teachers used to get away with all kinds of stuff.

My RE teacher was always drunk. You could smell the gin of him and he used to stagger and shake (and shout).
My Maths teacher used to hold two massively heavy encyclopaedias over our heads and bark mental arithmetic questions at us. If we got it wrong or were too slow to answer he would whack the book on our head.

If you failed at something, you failed. No-one cared much. Private tutors were unheard of, in my experience anyway.

Despite a lot of these things I really enjoyed school! There was some real characters that made some great memories.

I saw teachers punching children in the stomach (we were made to stand as a class and watch) and repeatedly smashing their heads against the wall in my school. (mid to late 80's).

It can't have been legal to do that, even then. But wouldn't have occurred to anyone to report it.

There wasn't OFSTED, but we occasionally had HMI in - they'd just sit quietly at the back of the classroom for the lesson they were observing. It didn't seem to produce the mass panic that OFSTED these days seems to.

I was at school from 1972-1985, and went to a total of 5 schools.
Not one of them still used capital punishment of any kind, so it wasn't universal by any means

Invalid Care Allowance - now Carer's Allowance - was established in the mid 1970s but married women couldn't claim it until 10 years later when Jackie Drake took it to the European courts as blatant discrimination. It's thanks to her that many women didn't lose out on state pension entitlement because of their need to look after someone.

I dreaded the thought of my DC starting school, fortunately teachers are much kinder now and my kids generally love school.

We don’t all just send our kids to the nearest school either which IMO is fabulous for a lot of kids (how different my life might have been if it had been ‘a thing’ back then to drive your DC right past one school en-route to a one that suits them better).

Our headteacher was cruel and he went unchecked, as kids we were taught that adults were correct and that was the end of it.

Thank goodness they didn't use capital punishment steppemum

Remember HMI inspection in secondary, first time physics teacher - the one who used to say he didn't want girls taking this subject as they couldn't do it - marked books. Also remember people used to say they were failed teachers. One came into our maths lesson, maths teacher said this question isn't possible to solve inspector agreed so I pointed out how you solve it and that the female maths teacher next door could solve it. 😂 If maths teacher had spent less time sleeping with 14 year old pupils maybe he could have solved it too. Nothing ever seemed to change after HMI.

Ice cream vans in the playground at lunch time , we had a girl's and boys playground(Catholic school) imagine the outrage on mumsnet if that was allowed now, also there was a chippy near my school that did roaring trade at lunch,there were four high schools practically next door to each other Catholic,CorE , Community highschool, and a private school, so.it must have done well from all the teachers and pupils.

Ah yes school inspections. When my mother taught - 1940s and 50s they had totally unannounced inspections in those days so no preparation work to do so in some ways better. She told us how the inspector sat in her class for quite a while whilst she was trying to get on with the lesson and then she got sick of him sitting there so said - Miss X is next door if you want to move on to her class. He had never in his life had a teacher dare to suggest he had inspected enough in their class. I think he was quite amused and he moved next door.