Primary School in the seventies (or sixties)

[YellowCardiganNavyJoggers]

If you were at primary school in the seventies what are things that today's children would probably be shocked at.

Here's a few of mine.

Teacher kept 'words on paper scraps' in a tobacco tin. You got called out and you had to read the words of the paper. I still remember the green flat tobacco tin.

When someone wet themselves (puddle on floor) and nobody would own up to it the teacher would take each child into the toilet and pretty much feel between their legs to see if they were wet. Can you imagine them being allowed to do that now.

Teacher was bad tempered and strict. Kids were pretty well behaved and quiet. I was quite scared of my teacher and jealous of the other Primary 1 kids who seemed to have nicer, younger teachers.

School 'jotters' - you know the books you got to write in.

Your dad covering things with old wallpaper. I can't remember what it was exactly - was it books or folders? Or was this high school and I am getting mixed up

The highlight of my day was the milk crate. Oh my god I used to get quite excited to get a whole bottle of milk (and straw) to myself. I was always hungry. Typical seventies child living in cold council house with basic and scarce diet. That bottle of milk was looked forward to each day so much. To this day I still love drinking milk and always have pints and pints of it in the fridge.

Desks with the little pull out drawer underneath. We also sometimes had drawers in a sort of unit with each persons name on a drawer.

Coat hooks outside the classroom with your name beside it and a picture on it. Do they still do this?

Play area in the corner of the room with little cooker etc. I used to love to play on it as we didn't have many toys at home.

Going up to the teachers desk to use 'the big sharpener' on the teachers desk. It was sort of attached to the desk and you stuck your pencil in and turned a handle.

If you were at primary in the seventies (or sixties) what do you remember?

Yes to the tracing paper toilet paper. Scrunching it up was the only way it made it slightly absorbant.

Rock hard lumps of Liver and bacon in watery gravy with lumpy grey mash. Made off site driven for miles and served up warm. So gross.
And I've never drunk milk since about 1975 because it was warm with cream globules floating in it.

Pink solid blancmange. But the most delicious syrup sponge.

Teachers or dinner ladies pulling out wobbly teeth.
Plimsolls or pumps used to smack kids on their bums.
Peter and Jane books. Here is Peter , here is Jane, here is Pat the dog.

One of our teachers (primary 4, so about 1970) held a wasp killing competition. Everyone who killed a wasp got a point and the winner got a box of chocolates! I remember hardly anything from that year but I do remember the wasp killing!

I remember the big tortoise stove in the middle of the classroom with a massive fire guard round it. We used to go to sleep for 3/4 of an hour on rubber mats every afternoon. The milk was always off. I was selectively mute the first two years and was put in remedial classes. There was nothing wrong with me bar I was traumatised by what I had seen and heard at home.

Hated the milk. It was always warm and disgusting

70s primary school kid here. God, where do I start…

School dinners of lumpy pink custard (highlight was butterscotch tart though). Liver also appeared to be routine fare - for primary school kids!

Sawdust, mop and bucket - for after you’d eaten the school dinners.
Isel (tracing paper) toilet paper - ditto above.

Writing out lines eg “I will not talk in class”.
If you were badly behaved you were also sometimes made to stand facing the wall. I don’t think that would be allowed nowadays.

No school uniform (until they introduced it in year 6) and being quite conscious of my clothes not being ‘fashionable’. Not sure if that would be popular with today’s kids though..probably.

Walking to school alone age 7 and home again; was pretty normal.

Long white socks to my knees and often above (embarrassing).

PE wooden frames and trying to climb the rope. Some boys did to about 10 foot with only a thin mat to catch them if they fell. Don’t think kids would attempt this today, terrifying.

Regular checks by school nurse of hair for nits and feet (not sure what they were looking for here). Today’s kids would probably refuse!

@Sweetandnice my parents were divorced. My mother was matron, kindergarten teacher and general factotum at our school. My father was in the navy. We were broke.

I started primary school 1980, and amongst many things doing p.e. in knickers & vest, no p.e. kits in those days just a bag for pumps!

I was at school in the seventies and I had one teacher who every so often would bring in ‘birdie bread’. Literally the crusts and a few slices of her loaf that she toasted and tore into pieces. She would walk behind us and drop a bit in front of each of us 😂 the excitement that we all felt for a surprise piece of dry toast was bizarre! We also ate lunch in our classroom. It was delivered on a trolley and dished out by a dinner lady. The ‘slow eaters’ were always served first 😂

I remember taking in flowers for the teacher - a bunch of lovely smelling roses from our garden, quite often. I once ruined them by hitting a boy round the head with them when he was being rude to me.

Someone upthread said that parents didn't question the teachers. I agree for the most part - I had an awful Junior 3 teacher (aged 10) - he would never ask the 'clever' kids their times tables, so we ended the year without the full row of stars on the progress chart, then wrote that in our reports. The only time my mum made a complaint was when he asked all the kids to draw a picture of their dad for Father's Day, but stopped me and one other boy (my father had died, his parents had divorced) and made us do sums instead. I was very upset, and when mum heard she made a fuss.

I remember musical movement, watching things on the TV wheeled in, and occasional use of the climbing equipment pulled out from the walls. I loved country dancing, and we were lucky to have a teacher who taught us the recorder, and in Junior 4 we formed a recorder group that performed at several outside events.

A single teacher managed to control a class of 36 kids (no TA) - most were fair rather than used fear, but even the nice teachers would hit your knuckles with a ruler or throw the board rubber at you.

I got the school coach each day, and one of my earliest memories is bursting into tears on the way home on my first day in infants, as I didn't understand that that was the end of the day - I thought we were going on to something else school related and I was already really tired! Mum collected me from the bus, and we then walked the half mile home together.

Was at a Victorian village school from 1970-76. I loved it and have very happy memories of it. Music and Movement classes in our vests and pants to a huge radio with a grille on the front and the very RP announcer ... "Theess eess the Bee Bee See for schoolss"! Outside, unheated loos, the lovely headmaster wandering around with a cigarette permanently welded to his fingers, dropping ash all over your book when he bent over you to check your work, Christmas pudding with real sixpences and then 5p pieces every year, the nit nurse, annual hearing checks, prayers at the start and end of the day. The only bad thing about it was the dreadful school dinners. They used to arrive in a van from a school in a nearby market town as our school hadn't the cooking facilities. Lumpy semolina, lumpy custard with a thick skin on it, salad with creepy crawlies in it, mashed potato like glue, stew with crunchy chunks of unidentifiable meat that your teeth used to bounce off, slabs of chewy fish in watery parsley sauce and all the greens boiled to within an inch of their lives. No burgers, no pizza, no pasta and no chips! The only good things were the puddings, treacle sponge, jam roly poly, chocolate pudding and Bakwell tart - lovely!

Infant school - the milk, the rainbow book reading scheme that you worked your way through, the toilets with the wooden seats and the crunchy toilet roll, school dinners not being great, the tapioca walls in the corridor, the nativity where Angel Gabriel fainted, Assembly where you drew a snake on the next person's back, had a fabulous time overall.
Junior school - my 3rd year teacher ( yr 5 now ) stopping and picking me up on the way to school and smoking all the way ! He was an interesting teacher in that he taught stuff that would never be on the national curriculum, he brought in army photography books depicting the Wars, full of dead horses and soldiers because he thought the boys needed to know what war really meant. Telling us ghost stories whilst sitting in a store room, scaring us but in a good way. PE with him involved us either learning to waltz or learning to fall and land as if we had parachuted out of plane. Teaching us, a bunch of white children, how to make chapatis, I am still not entirely sure why ! He certainly made us all interested in the world outside our small Yorkshire town and made us look at things in a different light, questioned our ideas and our still forming opinions.
Yr 3 and 4 teachers were more old school and instilled the basics in us ( still not forgiven yr 3 teacher for slapping me, corporal punishment still being a thing ! ) learning times tables by rote, nature tables and project books. Yr 6 was quite the disciplinarian who was, in hindsight, out of place in primary education, he should have been doing something more academic and couldn't really deal with anyone who he didn't deem average or above, as well as being a massive snob, which was made obvious by which sets my classmates were put in when going up to secondary, anyone who lived on the council estate was automatically put in the lower sets despite several being far brighter than me

I started primary school in September, 1969. Playgroups, called Playschools then, were just starting and I went to one in the leader’s house. It was an ultramodern sixties house with the living rooms upstairs and the bedrooms downstairs. In the July before I started school, I went with the other children who were also going to school in the September two by two in a crocodile to visit the school and then, when term started, we went into school with no preamble. The birth rate was at an all time in the sixties so we always had very large classes with just the teacher and no other adult help. My school was a two form entry and newly built in the late sixties as the old building was no longer adequate but, because of the aforementioned large numbers of children, the two reception classes were in what was called the Annexe at the other end of the village. This consisted of a mobile building where the two classrooms were, a large playground and another building which, looking back, was not too dissimilar from a Nissen hut left over from the war. This was where we had indoor PE and school dinners. No choice and even then we ate from proper crockery with the crest of Norfolk County Council on it. Our water was drunk from glasses. We regularly went on nature walks, two by two in a crocodile with the teacher as the only adult in charge of almost forty five year olds. Parents were firmly kept outside the school gates. Lessons were formal but with a lot of play and fun activities too. Each day ended with a story as we sat on the floor. Then a home time prayer. My teacher, Mrs Scales, was probably in her forties at the time and very experienced. She was firm but fair and we felt very safe and thrived in her class. It was a lovely start to school with only the youngest children there and l can remember coming home from school on the last day of the summer term and crying because I would not be going back there. However, new adventures and experiences awaited at the main school. if anyone is interested, is interested, l will will recall more of my primary school days. Of more than half a century ago I another pos

89s child here, I remember the day that they switched the rolling chalk boards for filling white boards and we felt like we had time travelled to the future, actual pens instead of chalk 🤣
then one day they set up a computer lab and in pairs you could use… Microsoft Paint!! We drew circles, squares and marvelled at the technology.
there was a computer already in each classroom it used those huge first type of floppy disk, and we could if we had been good play on it, the game was a text based game where it wrote out a scene and you had to choose to do a or b, I absolutely loved that game. It was green writing on a black screen, no graphics just text.

Our teacher in primary 5 was an elderly man who was obsessed with the Bible- we spent most of our time copying out biblical paragraphs which he wrote on the board. The other thing was that he was a raging alcoholic. He was clearly drunk much of the time - he even sipped from a hip flask during lessons!

He was from the eminent family in our mostly working class West of Scotland small town. Both his brothers were the local doctors (alcoholics too). None of them had married. They all lived together in the big house.

And no one dared question any of them. All the parents knew what was going on but parents like mine were in utter awe of this family and no way did anyone complain.

He had a bit of a nervous breakdown - i remember he stormed out and sat on the playing field with his hip flask and he didn't come back.

The things schools got away with (this would have been about 1970).

Sorry, my ipad is old and not behaving itself, which is why the end of my post was rather jumbled. The ending should have said that if anyone is interested, I will recall more of my primary school days from over half a century ago in another post.

I began teaching in 93 and many things from
my childhood were still happening. A colleague near retirement was still smacking, if you had no PE kit it was vest ,pants and bare feet for infants. The TV rolled in on a trolley ( im
still watching Numbertime from the 90s with my class!) and Singing Together on the radio. I’ve spent most of my life ruled by bells!

The milk was ok but pretty grim when the birds got to it first and pecked holes in the foil lids. The tuck shop was amazing- Trios, Wagon wheels and club biscuits.

Dick and Dora, Singing Together and “Wide Range Readers”

Banda sheets. Remember the smell? The BBC computer playing “granny’s garden”

The strap, getting smacked on the bum. Regulation knickers, showering with no doors on the stalls. Semolina pudding, Runny mince and mash served with an ice cream scoop. Latch key kids coming home to an empty house.

Pe in your vest and pants ,my vests were hand knitted

Oh yes we had a maypole too! It had pink, turquoise and brown streamers but then in 1977 then got some red white and blue ones for the jubilee.

I also remember when it was our year’s turn I broke my foot so was one of the bored kids sitting on the bottom 😂

I recall it being an enormous thing but there was a picture of (presumably the same) maypole on the school website and it was about five feet tall 😂

So I'm guessing that's why you were at this school

In the 80s:

PE in vest and pants, which included putting our shoes on bare feet to walk to the assembly hall, past the other classrooms of children giggling at the sight of us naked. I remember the instructions from the posh BBC voice on the cassette player, telling us to curl up small, or to be the ugly duckling.

No hitting, although some older teachers talked wistfully about it. My teacher used to drag children by the wrist when telling them off.

One teacher used to make naughty children stand on the table, once interrupting another’s teacher’s class to make a boy do this.

I was often asked to read aloud, because I was good at it. I also attended a group involving hopping, skipping, balancing etc. I later learned that this was a remedial group for gross coordination!

We sometimes played a game of guessing who was speaking in a funny voice. The first time we played it, the teacher asked me to be the first guesser, and I remember thinking how easy this game would be - until I was blindfolded.

One boy who weed on another was made to write about it - I heard the teachers discussing this in the corridor.

I also remember that at the Christmas parties the head would offer the boys seconds from the buffet - never the girls. I remember feeling outraged by this.

70s PE in knickers and vest
climbing frame on concrete
my primary still has same uniform as I did but I think they have finally made blazers optional but wierdly won’t allow girls cullottes

Upper primary in late 70s early 80’s school near the coast - PE lessons in the summer sometimes we would be taken in the battered mini bus and dropped off at a beach then the teachers would get back in the bus and drive to the next village a mile away where there was a pub next to the beach. The teachers would wait at the pub for us to walk the mile to get there. Amazing to think that, that was deemed a good idea! Although I must admit we loved those lessons and I don’t recall anything bad happening to anyone.

Very late 60s and 70s here for primary, in Dublin.

Indoor and outdoor shoes, shoe bags on pegs in our cubbies, which lined the corridors.
Singing class - we learned old music hall numbers like 'My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown'. And hymns. Singing exams twice a year. Each of us stood individually and sang out loud. Terrifying.
Art at our desks once a week.
PE in our PE uniforms (shorts plus school blouse).
Uniform included a tie.
Lunch eaten at our desks - no lunchroom. There was no free milk or any school lunch. We packed our own.
I was in charge of taking my sisters and several other children home on the bus.