Things you did at school you wouldn’t be allowed to do now.

[TwillTrousers]

I’ve only just remembered this. At primary we played ‘basketball’. 2 kids would stand at either ends of the hall standing on a chair holding a wicker bin to catch the balls in (all wearing pants and vest). In fact I can remember standing on chairs a lot, now banned of course.
I can also remember going to sing at the hospital sitting in the boot of a teachers reliant Robin in secondary.

Paint the cricket pavilion after end of year exams
Climb on to the railway line to retrieve tennis balls
Heat asbestos mats with bunsen burners until they cracked.
Play poker at lunchtime in the scr
No doors were ever locked
The front door was reserved for visitors and parents only. Pupils and suppliers had to use the back door.

In P7 being a monitor and essentially in charge of the infants.

Including using cotton wool and salon on any cuts and grazes. I was the most responsible of the four monitors so it was my call who got sent to the office and who we treated ourselves.

We were also allowed to keep children in if they misbehaved in the playground.

Four of us in charge of four infant classes for every break and lunchtime all year. The only adults around were the janitor, who walked through once per break, and the office staff who were a flight of stairs away.

It would also never be allowed now because we went for our lunch 15 mins early every day so we were ready when the infants were, and we left our class 5 mins before every break - that's a lot of class time we missed through the year!!

*cotton wool and savlon

Oh, and cross country runs that involved leaving school grounds and running through a nearby village, usually stopping for a snack at the village shop. We were unaccompanied so it was basically the PE teacher telling us to disappear for an hour. 😁

I bought a rabbit off my teacher for £2.50.

@Namechangeyname We did the blowing into sheep's lungs, didn't even use a straw! @Cairneyes Glad to know kids still do it. We also did dissecting an ox's heart; or watched our teacher do it.

@twosandwiches We also had a day of litter picking in a nearby sports field: no gloves, or anything. We were rewarded with a canned drink. I too pick up litter as an adult.

When I fell over and hit my head in the playground, a teacher took me straight to hospital in her car, without so much as a backwards glance. (It happened to be before the school day, and the adult who brought me was still there, she came too.)

Playing Blind Man's Buff in the playground.

Creative ways of humiliating naughty children:
A pushchair was wheeled in, and two children who messed about in assembly were asked if they would like to sit in it.
Boys who laughed when told off were made to laugh in a mirror.
Children who messed about with sticks were made to spend a playtime sitting blindfolded, so they would know what it might be like to have an eye poked out. (We had recently heard the story of Louis Braille.)
When one boy allegedly weed on another, two teachers discussed making the offender write about it. I imagined this lad sitting down to write "I weed on John".

PE in vest and pants, at primary. We would get changed in the classroom, then we were made to put shoes on without socks to walk to the assembly hall, before doing PE barefoot, following instructions from a posh voice on a cassette player. "Curl up small, pretend you are the Ugly Duckling."

The kitchen staff selling drinks and biscuits, including hot chocolate, in the playground.

French exchange trip - we wrote a few letters to someone we’d never met and then turned up in France a few months later and stayed at this house for 2 weeks and vice versa. I only ever remember a teacher visiting once to make sure all was okay and the dad where I stayed was super creepy.

eating so many good biscuits and proper fried chips, truanting endlessly with no one noticing, smoking, going to the pub with the tech bloke, getting the art teacher to do my coursework, playing with mercury, cross country beyond school grounds, off site at any break, going to the pub for the afternoon, running g a tuck shop from my bag.

One thing I also remember from primary was for school dinners occasionally we got hot drinks instead of water in massive jugs for everyone - sometimes this was coffee 😂

Making massive slides on the ice (no gritting in those days) in our sloping playground. Great fun.

There was 45 in my Yr6 class in the afternoon. They had an extra teacher in the mornings so all the classes just took extra in the afternoon.

One morning a week our class didn't have a teacher, just a young supervisor and we just copied from printed sheets into our exercise books. That was our "history" lessons.

I was in the advanced Maths group. We wee basically just given a harder textbook and told to work through it.

In fact... I don't actually remember being taught in Yr5/6.... just taught how to study independently.

Being let out of school class without parents picking you up. We all walked to and from school without a parent from Reception age. We used to stop off in the local park to play on the swings on the way home.

Yes, its a vital part of the GCSE NEA.

cross country runs along the local bypass with the lorry drivers leering at us, loads of 13-year-old girls, no teacher
in junior, several of the teachers were raving alcoholics, and after lunch were well pissed
open gates at the school, no one to check in with, so bunking off was a breeze. in junior school, you could pop down the town for chips and sweets, then be back before anyone knew

If you were sick a teacher would drive you home.

If you felt ill but not vomiting you could ask to lie down in the medical room. I had migraines, but I must admit not all the time. Nice to spend an afternoon on an examination couch.

We had a tuck shop that was run by students. On the odd occasion I forgot my PE kit I would prep the sweets or them instead of doing PE. I know damn well that the PE teacher knew I hated PE. The tuck shop was stored in the showers. Not a communal shower, pink individual cubicles. But we never used them.

Some girls' were allowed to go home for lunch, only if they lived near the school.

In what would be year 8 our science teacher was off for a couple of months, planed op and recovery.

So for science we wither went in to a class with another group but we also had a session in the 'science demonstration room' with no teacher present.

We were supposed to do a workbook on 'electricity' and learn to make a power circuit.

Well I'd had an electronics kit for a few years by then. So I gave everybody the answers and then set the circuits up as a 'buzz off' game but with lights.

In 1982 I think there was a lot of snow and ice and the school closed for a week because some pipes had burst. When we went back in to school we still had to wear uniform, even though there was no heating. Some lessons we did what I think would now be called aerobics. Our uniform included a skirt and cotton knee socks, even though it was literally freezing we still had to wear it.

@TheNightingalesStarling Good for you; being left to your own devices with a textbook, you probably learned a very useful skill. I tutor A-level pupils, and many of them have no idea about independent study at all.

Having said that, I remember hating it at primary school when questions said (for example) "find out why Galileo was put in prison". Even though we had classroom encyclopaedias, it wouldn't have occurred to me to use them.

At secondary, if the boys were in teams for PE lessons, they would have one side "in shirts", and other side "in skins", i.e. bare-chested. Outdoors. In cold weather.

(Their PE teacher was very old school, certainly remembered corporal punishment, and would have used it if he could get away with it.)

I went to a grammar school in the nineties so my school life was really boring. The most exciting thing that happened was that someone brought in a slow worm once in a box 🙄 😂

I remember school day tripes to France. Leaving the Midlands in the middle of the night, ferry across to Boulogne, then left free to roam (aged 11) and told to meet back at the ferry at a certain time, and home by late evening. Lots of cigarettes, knives fire crackers and assorted paraphernalia were brought home.

Primary, mid 80s - if you said you felt sick you were put in the library with a bucket. The library actually part of the main school corridor so all the kids walking by would peer in the bucket to see if you had actually vomited 🤢 yet

I may not have learnt what a Fronted Adverbial is, but yes, I did learn the value of hard work and self sufficiency.

I don't know the name on our ice cream van man but yep we did the same.
He must of made a bomb from all the kids and a lot of the teachers.
Also onec we were in 2nd year we were allowed to leave school grounds at lunchtime, most went across the Rd to one of 3 takeaways.
By 3dr year we had to walk about 20 mins along a very busy dusl carriage way to the local sports center for pe / swimming but we didn't have to swim if we didn't want to so most messed about in the squash courts

Primary school , all the kids walked to on from school alone , during the summer lots went straight to the park attached to the school and hung around till god knows what time.

I left school in 1973.

Prefects took classes when teachers were off we never had supply teachers. I hurt myself in a PE lesson taken by a prefect.

6th formers employed as cleaners. It was a sought after job as you could start straight after school.

The Art teacher invited all the 6th form Art class (only about 8 of us for Yr 12 and 13) to his house for tea in the Christmas holidays. It was perfectly above board, his wife and son were there. We played silly party games and it was really nice.

From 3rd year subjects like history and modern studies came with self study projects, where you’d be allowed to spend the lesson in the school library. My friend lived literally next door to the school, she and I would excuse ourselves from class to “go to the library”, while nipping to hers for hot chocolate and ginger bread. No one ever checked where we were, or whether the work was actually being done. I spent two years of O Grade History and Modern Studies bunking off, and then crammed like crazy for the exams.

Having to sit through an entire day's lessons after being told during first period that our classmate had blown his head off with his dad's shotgun.

Being taken to the funeral in the school mini bus on a Saturday and then all being expected to just get on with it on Monday. No counselling, no support.