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?

And it was all on tarmac playgrounds.
We used to set up long ice slides in the playground in the winter as it was on a slope.

We also had a game of jumping off a wall that must have been about 4 feet high and the dinner ladies just laughed when one boy reckoned he’d broken his leg.

I was a dinner lady for a while in the early 00s and the children weren’t allowed near a 1 foot wall and had to be supervised in small groups to play on the playground equipment. They weren’t allowed skipping ropes because of the risk of strangulation and one time were made to all sit in the shade because it was supposedly too
hot.

The big TV wheeled into the classroom showing The Boy from Space!

Teachers smoking.
The Head used to smoke a pipe in assembly!

Sour milk in the glass bottles (can’t drink milk at all as an adult as a result, not even in coffee), the dinner ladies forcing you to eat everything, having board rubbers thrown at us, headmaster hitting kids with a ruler, the Victorian building being freezing cold, outdoor toilets. I was so pleased to escape to secondary school.

Someone above mentioned the class pet, I can remember being allowed to bring the guineas pig home and look after if for the weekend.

Being sent along to the staffroom to wash the teachers cups. It was always stinking of coffee and fags.

Same as already mentioned with the milk which was either lukewarm or frozen and that terrible toilet paper.

Learning dancing, boys lined up one side and girls on the other then the boys would have to pick a girl to dance with. We would learn the St Bernard's Waltz (still remember 1,2,3 up down...) and Scottish Country dancing.

The belt! Never got it at primary school, but do remember getting put outside with my desk and chair for talking too much.

I can remember going to school at some point in the 70's when it was really dark in the morning and we wore orange fluorescent arm bands so cars could see us. Was there a year when they experimented with not changing the clocks back?

Happy carefree days.

At school in the early 80s (a huge 3 storey Victorian building that is still a popular primary today - Belmont primary) and we had a top table for the clever children (including me). It was never disguised as red/ blue etc. Definitely top table.

We used to have assembly and sing Beatles songs rather than hymns (lefty London council) as well as a football song that made everyone go crazy. I still remember the excitement when this was the song chosen that day. Words were put on the screen using an overhead projector.

There was a huge (to us) tarmac playground and a metal climbing frame with no protection from the tarmac. I remember a girl falling odd and following the trail of blood into school.

We also had those huge high gym bars and ropes to climb and again, I remember a girl falling off and breaking her arm and being carted off.

Oh the tracing paper loo roll!

We used to put our milk on the radiator to make it luke warm 🤪

The green straws for the milk - we used to make animal shapes out of them ....

1970's....Outside loo block with Izal paper!
Boys doing science while girls had to do sewing.
Country dancing..which I loved!
Musical movement.
English comprehension and working though cards and plotting marks.
School trip to milk bottle factory!! Odd.
...going to sharpen pencils at teacher's table, fun!
Christmas ti.e full of paperchains, making snowmen from toilet rolls and cotton wool and 'gloy'.
Haha became a teacher and used the big rolled chalk board in 90's would end the day covered in dust!!

We had stoves like this in my Primary school too. I think they changed to gas heaters in about 1972. The stoves plus the railings took up a huge space in the classroom.

80s child. Remember all those.

Pe in vest and pants.
Collecting teachers tea and coffee for them.
Tracing paper style loo roll.
Panda pops at discos
Everyone had same lunch: Sandwich, crisps and a chocolate biscuit.
Chalk boards
Overhead projectors.

The banda machine. The first secondary school I taught in still had one in the 1990s!

Wooden desks that flipped up
outside toilet block - so cold and tracing paper loo roll - grim

marble games on the drains
skipping games
dinner ladies being horrible !!
semolina
banana custard
’wet playtime’ all in the hall doing singing through the playtime !!!

Not being allowed out of the dining room until you had eaten all of the school dinner ( including pudding). Although that rule did get dropped not long after the day I was still in the dining room at 2.15 and still not touched the rice pudding in front of me. T'was 7 year old me's finest hour.

Started school in ‘72. Loved the school dinners! My mum was a terrible cook and we didn’t have much money (who did?) so I couldn’t get enough of the hot dinners and jugs of gravy. Hated the tracing paper toilet paper. Liked the milk bottles in winter but not in the summer when it was warm.

I managed to dodge ever being whacked on the hand with the wooden ruler. I also never had to go and sit in a drawer as punishment! Loved the ‘rotating’ blackboard. The teacher used to push the board around for the next subject. I never got hit by the flying board rubber, but those around me did. And it hurt!

I used to love the music lessons we tuned into on the radio. And the TV programmes we used to watch. Although I don’t remember what they were about! Just the countdown before the programme.

We didn’t have much sports equipment and were never taught how to play netball or hockey. When I went to secondary school this was a huge disadvantage as all the kids from other schools knew how to play. I was really embarrassed at getting it all wrong and consequently never got into sport.

I loved my school uniform but tights were always difficult to navigate!

Primary school in the 1970s - a small school with one class per year group
Lining up in the playground to go into class - you had to stop and line up when the bell (a handbell rung by the Head Master) sounded.
Doing PE in vest and knickers
Learning by rote - repeating things, with no great explanations for anything
Sitting cross-legged on the polished wooden floor in the hall for Assembly.
Prayers twice a day (It was a C of E church school)
Naughty boys got the cane, naughty girls got the slipper
The teacher was always right even when they were clearly wrong
Playing skipping games and ball games at break time
Little bottles of milk with straws
Tracing paper toilet paper
The turps-like smell of copied paper (it was purple ink - I think called a mimeograph)
In the summer the ice cream van would pull up outside. Parents would come and buy ice cream or lollies for their kids and pass them through the fence.
The excitement when a dog got into the school playground
If anyone wet themselves then there was an interrogation and the child was supposed to own up. It was a serious matter if they didn't because lying was a sin. But so was wetting yourself.
Kids being sick on the coach when we had a day out. No way of clearing up (or at least, no contingency plan for it happening)
Blackboards with chalk. I don't remember any being thrown at pupils. I do remember the walk of shame if the teacher asked you to come to the front and write on the board.
Head Teacher waxing lyrical about a former pupil who'd become a boxer, and another who'd become a missionary
My class teacher teaching us songs by the Beatles

Secondary school in the late 1970s/early 1980s - A huge secondary school with at least 150 children per year group
SO MANY KIDS
Not being able to 'play' at breaktime because it was childish
Navigating the labyrinth of buildings and corridors (there were several buildings on site)
Having to go to the 'late room' and sign in because the bus was late.
Horrible teacher in the late room who was both sexist and racist and made no attempt to hide it
Teachers losing their temper and throwing board rubbers at kids
When I started there, the cane was still used but they phased it out
Uniform checks. Being sent home because something was the wrong shade of the approved school colour.
Bunking off
Hateful cross-country in the winter
Kids with behavioural problems not getting the support they needed and turning violent
Theatre companies coming in to do plays for pupils that studied English Lit and/or Drama
School trips. Someone was always sick. Someone was always lost or missing and delaying us
PDAs from kids that were dating
Girls in year 10 dating lab techs
Teachers sending kids to the shop to buy two or three cigarettes (they sold them loose)
Teachers going to the pub at lunch time and coming back drunk
Ice in the playground in winter which was uncleared and people falling over
Hateful school disco
The ultra cool kids
As I went through school, realising that some of the strict teachers were really nice and it was all an act
Choices for school dinners - we had a canteen
Making some great friends who I'm still in touch with

So many memories.
The not good but accepted.
Dinner lady forcing me to eat jelly, as I gagged.

Choosing extra of ‘grapes’ only to find they were super sour gooseberries!

Being smacked hard on my bare legs by my class teacher.

Watching children caned by the headmaster in assembly.

Teachers being in the bus queue, ahead of us, as we all headed home.

Repeating the same learning, the Tudors, Guy Fawkes and Oliver Cromwell.

A teacher screaming so loudly at us and banged her hand so hard on one of the panes of glass in the classroom door, that her hand went right through.

Losing your dinner seat when you were absent. Being given any spare seat in any room on your return. Taking ages to be able to ask to move back, when a seat became available, next to your friends. (Great deterrent for absence, could be used to up attendance rates today…🤔😉😊)

The good.
Learning to knit and sew, in small groups, in the school annex. So relaxed.

Play time, games, singing, marbles into the playground holes, collecting and swapping marbles. Making up games, role playing families or babies.

‘How we used to live’ on TV.

That gorgeous pastry dessert with a layer of jam and sponge on top, served with custard, in fact many puddings. Also loved the mince and dumplings, the mash, the gravy.

Country dancing and team competitions.

Picking flowers from the garden to take to my teacher.

Topic work, self chosen theme, gave me a love of gymnastics and Holland!

"Nitty Nora" the nit nurse who would come and rummage through everyone's hair in turn looking for nits. She'd leave us girls with long hair looking like we'd been dragged through a hedge backwards 🤣

Someone has mentioned it earlier but I also remember watching The Boy From Space, when you saw the TV being wheeled into the classroom, you knew you were going to be scared out of your wits for the next 20 minutes

I remember making a little model scene out of plaster of paris. I made a 'lake' using a mirror.

There were about 40 children in the class. We took the 11+ and when the results were in, the teacher read out names and made us stand in 2 lines. One line was for children who had passed and the other line for those who had failed.

I remember this with horror at the insensitivity involved.

I remember most of these from the early 80s, other than the wetting yourself thing. I don't think schools changed much between the late 60s and early 80s until the advent of the national curriculum changed (ruined?) everything. I do remember the apparatus was often out in PE - I could never climb the rope. My favourite PE lesson was "music and movement" where the school put on a cassette and you followed instructions. I think on earlier days it was played directly from a radio and there were special school radio sessions.

I am the only person I know who loved school rice pudding.

Also the playground games - Bulldog, Red Rover and all the clapping games. Zero play equipment, just skipping ropes or French elastic which we brought from home.

Yes! First year secondary we were streamed. 1A, 1B - and 1R which stood for REMEDIAL. Did not help anyone’s self esteem at all!

(though apart from the name, the concept was pretty good, a small class, taught by a primary teacher, stayed in the same room, much more personal, good relationships, no moving across school, helped many catch up and be moved to other streams).

Teachers being categorised according to whether or not they "gave the belt". And getting the belt (or an over-the-knee spanking) for inappropriate things like failing to get enough marks in the mental arithmetic test we had to do every morning immediately after reciting The Lord's Prayer. My parents used corporal punishment liberally at home so I didn't think it odd that teachers had free rein to hit me for things I didn't even realise were "bad".

The milk and the toilet paper and doing PE in my vest and regulation navy blue knickers, oh yes.

I loved school. The good things massively outweighed the bad.

@prampushingdownthehighst
former ita survivor here!

Also the dental nurse who would visit and the class all use disclosure tablets to highlight the plaque. Remember I had to go on holiday with pink teeth straight afterwards!

Ohhh and school dentist...horrors!!