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?

I remember the school knickers for when you wet yourself. They were bright orangey pink with yellow and blue lines on them. I still remember two boys laughing at me when I had to wear them.

Then the teacher would smack naughty boys. If they were especially naughty she’d put them over a chair, pull down their trousers (not pants though) and spank them with a slipper.

We had proper old school school dinners - cheese pie and chips on a Monday, spam fritters and chips on a Tuesday, roast beef, potatoes and cabbage on a Wednesday. I don’t remember the other dishes expect sometimes it was fishcakes. The puddings were amazing - different sponge (jam sponge, ginger sponge, chocolate sponge) puddings and custard. The worst pudding was Eccles cakes.

You weren’t allowed to talk too much at lunchtime, once I did and had to stand in the corner of the dining hall in front of the whole school. Other punishments were sitting under the teacher’s desk.

In the mornings the headmaster would ring the school bell (which was in a bell tower on top of the roof) by pulling a huge rope and it was a great privilege to be allowed to help him.

The windows were massive and really high up and there was a special wooden pole with metal hooks on the end that you could open them with.

Handwriting was massively important and we had fountain pens when we were in second year juniors (so aged 8.)

The smell of the freshly mown grass on the field in the summer, it was brilliant when they opened the door to let you out and we all ran up the field. There were lots of speedwells in the field as well.

We had a metal hobby horse, fastened to a frame with large springs that we could bounce up and down on. It would be a health hazard these days!

Started school in ‘75. When we started learning to write we had little chalk boards.

I started school in 1980. I remember these really cool maths sets that were given to pupils who needed extra help. Does anyone remember them? I desperately wanted one but I wasn't eligible.

Other memories are:

• a bucket of sand in every classroom that was used to cover up sick.
• Lumpy milk in winter

Being smacked occasionally -the headmaster having a big jar of sweets in his office. I used to draw pictures for him so I could have one!

Do you mean Cuisenaire rods? We had them - they helped with visualising numbers.

I remember on rainy days when it was too wet to play outside, the dinner ladies would get everyone in the hall and encourage children to perform on the stage in groups and individually. Anyone who wanted could "do a turn", When they ran out of willing performers, they'd hold a singsong themselves! 😂

I started school in September ‘62, in a “temporary” prefabricated school which had been quickly built in the early1940s for the children of aircraft and munitions workers. Nobody seemed to care that it was made mostly of asbestos sheets- it just wasn’t on anybody’s radar in those days.

The classroom was heated by a large coke stove in the corner with a couple of fireguards round it, and yes, the milk crate was put next to it to thaw out in the winter.

I remember freezing cold toilets, Izal toilet paper (Please Wash Your Hands on every sheet), standing on duckboards to wash my hands (I was an obedient child) with carbolic soap in cold water.

Classroom equipment was kept in a separate room, along with tea chests of toys (I remember coveting the stuffed elephant), bean bags, hoops, coloured balls and the like. There was no formal PE as such, but I remember throwing the bean bags around and practising catch and the like. Just being allowed to let off steam, I suppose.

I don’t remember any corporal punishment - just the threat of being sent to see the (terrifying) headmistress was enough!

When the headmaster came into the room, we all choruses, "Good morning Mr X". The boys saluted and the girls curtsey.

We did that - I hated it, and we also did a lot of country dancing, which I much preferred. 'Strip the Willow' and 'The Gay Gordons' would probably have entirely different connotations these days though.😂

I remember I once overheard a dinner lady threatening to smack a child! No idea if she had the authority to do so, but if teachers did, I guess it's possible. Thank goodness times have changed.

1960s village primary school memories:
Grazed knees etc being bathed with warm water and iodine, bumped head required application of a wet paper towel.
Outside climbing frame with horizontal ladder 6-7ft above the ground with a drop onto hard tarmac.
A big cast-iron stove thing which only the oldest boys were allowed to stoke.
Those third pint bottles of milk and we used to collect the silver tops, wash them all, and save them for 'Guide Dogs for the Blind'.
Really nice school dinners prepared in the school's canteen by two lovely smiling cooks.
Drawing patterns with a pencil in a compass and then colouring them in.
Embroidery done on Aida 12 count (?), lots of cross-stitch.
A Nature table and Nature walks when the weather was nice.
Outside toilet block with that awful Izal shiny toilet paper.
Music and singing radio programmes, learning popular songs and sea shanties.
Traditional Christmas nativity play.

Oh God, forgot about the slippy, tracing paper type toilet roll. It was scratchy and just moved everything from one place to another.

And saying grace at break time. Our P4 teacher, bizarrely, taught us a very short song in Dutch which we sang as grace every morning. She wasn’t Dutch. I can’t remember any context at all but I remember the wee song😅

80’s primary school here. The headmaster used to wear a cape and stride around banging a ruler on his hand. Naughty kids would have to put their hands on his desk and he’d hit them with the ruler.

Not many kids misbehaved

The blackboards, the purple copied pages off the Gestetner (pre-photocopier), the piano in the hall for assembly, singing and dance lessons, the foul school milk (the only good thing Thatcher did was getting rid of that) and a big TV on wheeled stilts, which was brought in to watch the BBC series on 'birth' (prequel to SRE).

I also have no idea how they taught us to read because there was definitely no phonics and my school didn't do ITA.

School dinners at my primary were served by the year 5s and 6s, who collected the plates, cutlery, cups and water and a tray of food from the kitchen, which they dished out to the younger children. It was foul and the older children really bullied the little ones into eating.

I also remember weekly swimming all through juniors (not just for one year like now) and in the summer, the school filled a pool in the playground with cold water and we did our lessons there, changing behind curtains outside the dinner hall. It's no surprise I have absolutely no desire to go cold water swimming!

Upon reflection, I think it was sets to support pupils with reading not maths. I wish I could find an image online!

50’s/60’s here…
The nit nurse visiting the school every 6 months
Ruler across the knuckles for the smallest misdemeanour
Ink monitor - being allowed to fill the ink pot on each desk, writing with a nib pen wooden handle/separate nib, not fountain pen, using blotting paper.
Wooden Desks with lift up lid
School milk, froze solid in winter so the foil top lifted off, thawed by the stove that heated the classroom
Taking the register around the 4 classes was a ‘privilege’
Playing marbles, hula hoop, jacks.
Skipping with a long rope, several of us at a time, sometimes two ropes ( real knack to that!)
PE in your knickers
Swimming in unheated pool from after Easter holiday to October half term, regardless of weather, ice, thunderstorms etc. The teacher would have a long pole with a hoop on the end and non swimmers were forced to be out in the middle of the pool in it.
Caning for boys and girls by the headmaster - I was caned once and my mother caned me again when I got home ( I remember the weals across the back of my legs 65 years on, I literally couldn’t sit down for a week)
Izal? Loo paper, ghastly stuff.
No happy memories….😢

45 in my junior school class! The teachers had no trouble keeping order.
At infants' school, it was so small that we were all taught in the same room. If someone broke wind, the teacher would announce that there was a smell in the room and the bigger girls would get the little ones up and smell their bums. I swear this happened but nobody ever believes me! It always seemed to be one of the boys who'd done it!
I'm 65 and finished primary school in 1972.

Loving all of these! So many memories unlocked, especially the Scottish school ones.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned. I went to primary in ‘75 and a popular playtime pastime was swapping ‘scraps’ - paper pictures of all sorts of things that you collected. I vividly remember the angel ones. Anyone else?

Cambridge, 1978, my teacher’s retired husband used to come into school every day. He had a chair in the corner of her classroom, and would sit here all day reading the paper and smoking pipes. Occasionally he would read a story but the rest of the time he’d be there with a broadsheet, chuffing on a pipe and filling the classroom with tobacco fug and being rather grumpy.

I remember the thrill of going to the Headmasters office, to his book cupboard to get the next level Peter and Jane book! I can still smell that lovely cupboard! I didnt like getting his slipper across my bottom age 6 though,
because I purposely rocked someones chair!

Desk inspections. We had to hold up the lid of our little wooden desk grasping it with our hands, and the teacher whacked our knuckles with a ruler if the interior was untidy.
Chant8ng our times tables by rote. Some just chanted the tune.
40 kids per class, one teacher.
Spare Knickers, giant scratchy and beige, with stains, for when you wet yourself.
The 11+ exam segregating you for life.
Grey mince and greyer mash.

I started primary school in 79.
Our infants one teacher (equivalent of reception now) was awful, she would hit you across the back of the legs with a ruler if you'd been naughty. If you talked too loud in the lunch hall, she would start hammering out chords on the piano, never understood the point if that. All the other teachers would be eating lunch as well so it was just her that had a problem with children chatting. In fairness the rest of the teachers, apart from one, were nice. One thing that was super weird was us all having to go to a funeral. We were probably about 7 or 8 and one of the girls mums had died. All of us in the class had to go to the funeral, we were all in church and her coffin came past, she was obviously very upset and our class teacher stood with her and comforted her. Looking back i don't understand why she wasn't with her family, or why we had to go in the first place.

I was 5. (1965) I was made to sit outside the classroom with my congealing cabbage from lunch all afternoon. To this day I won’t eat greens. No one believed me but I was vindicated when read Alan Tichmarsh’s biography where he had the same but his nemesis was custard.

there were some bloody evil teachers in those days.

80s, Nz school..I loved my teacher she was lovely.
Tobacco tin for words than for some reason had a glue honey smell.
The projector was a exciting gadget making me fasinated how it worked.
We had a new classroom with steps to sit on...it was so fancy for the time.
I remember easter they painted rabbit foot prints on the path arpund the back of thr junior block...I was astounded the easter bunny had visited school.
Whole school assembly we sung Turn on the Sun" the child chosen got to stand up front of the assembly with a torch to highlight the sun..Another milestone to never want to reach as a shy kid.
Probably thr playground without all the softfall
Being called the the "Murder house" School dentist in the smallest building and that drill being terrifying on its warm robe you always seemed to touch.

A 70's kid in a tiny village primary - Yes! those little bottles of milk, always lukewarm and you were lucky if the birds hadn't pecked through the foil when it was handed to you, but you still drank it! The headteacher smoking at lunchtime by the outdoor toilets, but everyones parents smoked so no one took any notice.
Lovely puddings (most of the time) But being forced to eat cold tapioca pudding (frog spawn) and not being allowed to leave until you did
Kicking fallen leaves in the playground and not being told to stop, I recall that part was magical!

Chanting the times tables everyday