Ugh, the portakabins. So cold that you'd be sitting in your coat and woollies all day, taking your gloves off when you had to do some writing, and putting them back on again as soon as you'd finished, and trying to ignore the fact you needed a wee because it would mean going across the icy playground through biting wind to the toilet block with the freezing seats, high cisterns and Izal Medicated tracing paper toilet roll. And cacophonous with a combined y1/y2 class running about inside.
I was in primary school through the early- to mid-90s, towards the end of a long period of Tory government, where the lack of investment was really starting to show.
Every classroom had buckets you had to pick your way around, to catch the drips.
Some days, the caretaker didn't manage to get the cantankerous and capricious antique boiler working for the main school buildings, so we'd be sent home. (Not that people being cold was much of a concern; presumably they needed hot water for the kitchens or something.)
None of the water fountains worked, not one, and nobody brought their own bottles of water, of course — don't even know if it would've been allowed.
Some days, the water coming out of all the taps would be a deep, rich brown, so we couldn't even have water with lunch (and weren't allowed to bring our own lunchtime drinks).
There were something like three computers for the whole junior school student body, all elderly, all different, with different software. 5¼" floppies, FFS. Everyone knew my generation would need computer skills, but what we got was maybe one session a term playing an educational game on an Apricot.
There was a severe shortage of textbooks, or any books really, meaning we had to share in the classroom. Alright for history, but try sharing one textbook between three in maths when you're all working at very different levels on different pages.
School meant spending every day in a dilapidated, damp, cold, leaky mess of a building, full of hazards, with insufficient resources. The staff did their best with what they had, and the PTA did what they could to raise money for textbooks, but it didn't touch the edges, especially since nobody had any bloody money. At least the running-down of industry and the town's subsequent decline meant that class sizes were small, I suppose — under 25, which at least put less strain on the textbook situation.
I think this is just what happens when you have the Tories in for long enough to allow them to run down public services. I just hope it doesn't have to be bloody 18 years again this time.