If you went to school in the 70s/80s what happened that wouldn't happen now?

[TheVampiresWife]

I started primary in 1976, left secondary in 1989. Some of mine:

Corporal punishment (the most obvious one for a lot of us I think). In junior school (early 80s) we had a headmaster who would save all the week's canings for Friday afternoon assembly. The kids lined up on stage and were caned in front of the whole school. It was fucking horrific looking back - I remember a boy in my year crying and wetting himself on stage and he never lived it down, the nicknames followed him to secondary school

Girls doing needlework/cookery while boys did woodwork/metalwork

Boy in my class whose surname was Gaye. Geography teacher used to call him 'Poof' and 'Queer' which of course other kids found hilarious and joined in. He changed his surname halfway through secondary school

In my primary class an overweight girl was made to stand on a chair so the whole class could see what we would look like if we were greedy and ate too much

The headmaster who caned kids on stage also used to get girls to kiss him on the cheek and say thank you at prize givings. He also used to make comments about how we were 'developing' and once said in a conversation with my mum that I was getting 'a broad back'. The mums didn't seem to mind his comments

In primary school the children in the SEN class were described as [vile word I can't bring myself to type] by teachers and children alike quite unselfconsciously

In secondary school an English teacher had an affair with a sixth former and she became pregnant. He left but wasn't reprimanded and got a teaching job in another school the following year. The couple are still together all these years later!

It really was a different time and not necessarily for the better, either. I do have lots of happy memories of school too though!

*huge jugs. She didn't hug him.

French teacher throwing a chair across the classroom. Poor bloke we had wound him significantly,

Showers with the teachers holding the towels for us.

Teaching bouncing on the trampoline in PE shoring us girls what to do. His penis was hanging out and he carried on bouncing. My dad just said to me “he would have known that he was exposing himself”. Nothing more was said about the incident!!

DS came out of school and told me sadly "Mark doesn't love his mummy." They had been making Mother's Day cards and their teacher looked at Mark's and said something like " If this is your best card, you can't love your mummy very much." They were in reception class, it was late seventies. One of his friends told his mum the same story, so I know DS didn't make it up.

@Clawdy

DS came out of school and told me sadly "Mark doesn't love his mummy." They had been making Mother's Day cards and their teacher looked at Mark's and said something like " If this is your best card, you can't love your mummy very much." They were in reception class, it was late seventies. One of his friends told his mum the same story, so I know DS didn't make it up.

To be fair, his real name was Damien, and he'd drawn knives all over it!

Thrown board rubbers.

Billowing smoke from staff room.

A swimming pool and a school pond that weren't fenced off, we were just expected not to go near them!

Making ice slides on the playground.

Music on the record player walking in to Assembly and hymns hand written on the OHP to sing from.

PE in vest and pants and boys and girls getting ready for swimming just in the class room altogether, we left our clothes on our chair!

Just remembered another that probably came from a good place but wouldnt happen now in the same way. A girl from a traveller community was given a bar of soap and told to go in the teachers shower naked and to wash properly rather than with us girls rinsing off in the main showers our swimsuits.

Reading these are fascinating.
I wonder if some pp went to my school. We had a boy who bolted too. Looking back he was going through a terrible time with three siblings who died and was probably struggling massively but he could easily get out and anyone could get in. It was just a latch gate and some mums would chat to their kids at breaktime over the gates. I remember being disappointed my mum never did, which was sensible now I realised

I was shocked how locked in kids' are at school these days, when I first took mine, it's sad it's necessary.
We were age order on the register in lower school and at middle we were one of the first years that boys and girls did cooking and woodwork/metalwork I loved that.

Age 7 in primary school - our teacher was particularly cruel - things like lining up the children who hadn't brought in the exactly lunch money and threatening to cane them each week and telling us to call one table of children The Elephants because one of the girls was overweight and another boy's ears stuck out.

@Marguerite2000

Kids smoking in the toilets and behind the sportshall. Spending our dinner money on fags. Skiving off whenever we felt like it. In our top class junior school we didn't do afternoon lessons other than PE (basically rounders, netball/football for the boys. We also had a beauty contest. The boys got to judge the girls, and everyone was graded from last to first.

Oh god yes, we had a beauty contest in my primary school too. Girls only of course. Madness!!

Having the girls and boys separated in the 3rd year (year 5 now) so The Period Lady could talk to us about periods and applying sanitary towels. Also to rip used ones in two before flushing them - 1986ish. She also said that girls would put on weight so to only eat treats once a week. Also I remember my teacher made a disdainful comment to my classmate "Jenny" because she was told that "Jenny" had told the boys the girls were having a talk about periods!

And the nit nurse. She undid my braided Afro hair that my mum had painstakingly done the weekend before. My hair looked really awful and everyone was laughing at me. I laughed too but inside I was humiliated. I was about 6 - 1981. My mum was furious when I got home too.

@Papergirl1968

Ohh, skipping reminds me of the trend for jumping through elastic held around the ankles of two other girls. French skipping?

We just called it ‘Elastics’ 🤷‍♀️

It got progressively more difficult because the elastic got moved further up the legs after each round. The rounds were named after the leg part: ‘anklesies’ ‘kneesies’ ‘thighsies’ etc. Not many people could manage thighsies or above.

My junior school also had its own proprietary game which a previous teacher had invented I think?? It was called ‘Foursquare’ and there were sort of ‘courts’ for it painted all over the playground. You had to bounce a ball to someone standing diagonally to you in a square, or something.

God, that’s SERIOUSLY outed me now if anyone else went to my very weird school!

Oh well, in for a penny : the school also had a pet minah bird, which lived in a cage in the main corridor. When I first arrived there aged 7 (we’d moved from somewhere else so I went to a different infants’), there was a very chatty minah bird which could say all sorts of things. Sadly I can’t remember what, as it died very shortly after, and they got a new one, which was named Toby. We were all instructed that in order to teach it to talk, it could only be exposed to a certain number of set phrases. These were ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Hello Toby’ and ‘Goodbye Toby’, and it was made extremely clear to us that if any child was ever heard saying ANYTHING else to Toby, it was a Very Serious Matter. Toby’s cage was placed just inside the door where we all trooped in from the playground, so four times a day for four bloody years, every single child dutifully intoned ‘Hello Toby’ and ‘Goodbye Toby’ every time we passed him.

Bloody bird never uttered a single syllable!

Music on the record player walking in to Assembly and hymns hand written on the OHP to sing from

Overhead projectors! Now there's a blast from the past. We had a special 'music assembly' on Tuesday afternoons in primary school and the music teacher would play hymns, Welsh songs and current songs on the piano and put the lyrics on the OHP for us all to sing. He was a massive James Bond fan and I remember singing 'Live and Let Die' - he illustrated the lyrics with little guns.

In secondary I spent literally hours copying notes from the OHP, particularly in history lessons. My hand hurts just thinking about it!

11 and 12 year old's still play skipping! It's such a fun game.

I also remember giving and receiving the birthday bumps, wanting to be the special one who got to put the overhead projector film on the surface and you've just reminded me about country dancing lessons! We LOVED those so much!

We also played elastics game but called it 'Chinese Elastics'. We also played a game where you had a tennis ball in a long sock and had to stand spreadeagled with your back to the wall and as you recited a rhyme you had to swing the sock behind you and whack the ball onto the wall into certain places. You whack it above your head, between your legs and to the right and left

When I was in the first year of junior school, so year 3 now, I was told by the teacher to go out of the classroom and choose a reading book from the selection in the hall. The headmasters office was just next to the books, and he called me in and must have asked me to sit on his knee for a chat - nothing untoward happened but wouldn’t have happened now! I must have been there a while as the teacher came in to the heads office completely panicking that I had gone missing!

We just called it ‘Elastics’

Yes! - God it's come back to me now. That's what they called it where I was (North West England)

@VerticalHorizon

We just called it ‘Elastics’

Yes! - God it's come back to me now. That's what they called it where I was (North West England)

We called it ‘jingle jangle’ for some reason! Southeast

We had a beauty contest in my first year of secondary school at the Xmas party. Judged by the pervy old metalwork teacher. I won for some reason and had to give him a kiss on the cheek before being presented with my sash & crown then have a 'first dance' with him.

My friend's little girl was desperately ill in hospital for weeks. The younger daughter was in reception class, and each day, her teacher took her back to teacher's house, and gave her a meal and looked after her till one of the family picked her up. They never forgot her kindness, but it wouldn't be possible now.

Did you have to steel yourself for a riveting experience?
I'm surprised you didn't make a bolt for it!

Primary - Corporal punishment and also remember a kid having his head pushed down the toilet and then his mouth washed out by soap and water and beaten by a teacher. Another girl being beaten by same teacher.

Secondary - Several male teachers having sexual relationships with 14 year old girls, Head knew but nothing happened, just said girls were easy and what could they do.

Physics teacher saying physics isn't for girls, none of you should chose it because your brains aren't capable of studying it. Girls made to do languages and ladylike subjects otherwise no man would want to marry them. When I was at 6th form one of the female teachers took me to a female only hotel and shared a room with me.

@Clawdy

My friend's little girl was desperately ill in hospital for weeks. The younger daughter was in reception class, and each day, her teacher took her back to teacher's house, and gave her a meal and looked after her till one of the family picked her up. They never forgot her kindness, but it wouldn't be possible now.

It’s amazing how different school staff were in helpfulness.

When we first went to live with my GP’s my sister was in her last year at primary and I was only 7. We lived too far from the school to go alone, my Nana didn’t drive and it was the middle of winter. I finished an hour earlier than my sister so when Nana collected me we had to stand outside for an hour. There was nowhere to shelter and once the snow started Nana spoke to the school and asked if she and I could wait in the library and they said no. She asked jf they could keep me for the hour. They said no as the school was too busy. Then she asked if my sister could leave an hour early on the days the weather was really bad - again no.

The only two suggestions they had were that my sister (bearing in mind we’d been taken from our parents because of the violence in our home) make the journey herself - it took an hour and two buses - or because that was unsafe that one of us have the day off on an alternate basis so that the other could be collected without delay…

The lovely HT who had been instrumental in getting us out was off sick when Nana made the request. When she came back she was furious with the Deputy head and for the rest of term (I was moving school at the end of term) I spent the hour in her office. Either doing my homework or helping her with something.

@VerticalHorizon 😂

Primary school, 1980s - force feeding by cruel Head Nun, knuckle rapping with rulers, teachers bearing really hateful, spiteful grudges. Boys being publicly assaulted by the Deputy Head for misdemeanours. One teacher who ended up having a public nervous breakdown telling us which of us would have probably ended up in gas chambers in Nazi Germany based solely on hair and eye colour. WTF?!

Secondary school, 1990s - teacher/pupil relationships, body shaming PE teachers (if they thought I was "plump" then they'd be grossed out at me now), graphic pro-life literature displayed in RE class in first year - no notes to parents beforehand as assumption was they'd agree with the stance (which was true). Weird cultish groups like the Rosary Confraternity and tiny gold feet pins worn on ties. Self-harm, mental health issues, etc. deemed attention seeking.

On a slightly lighter note I was one of the usual crew sent to the nurse to have my nail polish removed, and often had earrings confiscated as I wore 6 instead of the 2 permitted.