to think stripping naked to shower after PE at school was horrific? **title edited by MNHQ**

[Flowersinyourhair]

Recent conversations with my daughter about PE at school (she loves it, I hated it) have got me thinking about why I disliked it so much.

I was reminded of the hideous shower experience. After PE, the girls would be obliged to have a naked shower, all in together. We would then have to go to the teacher, totally starkers and dripping wet, and bit ticked off on a register to say we'd had a shower.

I can't to this day understand why it mattered so much. It's a safeguarding nightmare really and I'm so glad it doesn't work like that anymore.

AIBU to think it's no reason I hated PE and to ask whether my school was particularly weird??

Luckily my year and upwards never had compulsory showers, but a new teacher made the new start girls have compulsory showers - they had to walk outside draped in towels, through a muddy vestibule (hockey changing area), into showers, then into the gym changing room, in a loop. I remember a new first year being berated in next morning's assembly as she had taken a wrong turn and wandered through the school in only her towel, trying to find the changing room as she was lost. The whole school including teachers sniggered at her - she must have been devastated .

I've already stated that it can't have been

But in the nicest possible way, your experience is not the definitive. It's so widespread and searches indicate that it was policy. Perhaps it varied by local authority but I don't think at this point it's clear so it's worth asking to clarify.

As a non brit I find these testimonies quite horrific.
We had nothing of the sort where I come from.
Ok, no showers mostly but when we had them it was a private affair and the only embarassing moments were chaging in front of new classmates.
We also used our periods as an excuse not to do PE when we didn't feel like it but nobody had a registered.
And yes some PE teachers were frustrated sleazy men who flirted with the more glam girls (creepy) but nothing more, ime.

Not even my mum (in her late 60s) has experienced any of this (her worse body related memory was of being checked for nits) but I'll ask.

I am not from a scandi country but I suspect the easiness there is not so much of the children but of the adults, that they would not be so desperate to see or unconfortable being around naked bodies.

On a slight different tangent, I for example find weird that my 8yo is told off for doing cartwheels when wearing her skirt and is told she is not allowed unless she wears shorts underneath. I wonder who is unconfortable, and what messages that teaches her.

I seem to remember the policy for mandatory showers was stopped around the same time as the boy's cough and drop inspections, were ditched in our area.

As I said earlier, in my all girls school it was known to have stopped a few years before I started (late 80s). I remember my brother (who was older than me,) and his friends dreading going up to their boys school and doing the cough and drop. But they were reassured it was going to happen and it wasn't policy anymore.

Again how can they justify making someone walk through a couple of showers as being clean? You're not clean, just wet. Pointless

*wasn't going to happen

"But in the nicest possible way, your experience is not the definitive."

Not just my personal experience, but the experience of nine people, attending eight schools, state and private, in three different regions in the UK, over seven decades. If there were a nationwide mandate, then all those schools were defying it. I find that rather hard to believe - that all eight schools were "breaking the rules". I'm making such a point of this because it tells me that it didn't have to happen, which makes it all the more galling for those who had to go through it. It was clear that many schools did enforce their own mandatory showering policy, but it seems extremely unlikely, even impossible, based on the above evidence, that those schools were forced to do so by government, either local or national.

God, I hated the compulsory naked shower after PE. Early 90s and it was still happening at my school. Although I think only for the first couple of years then it stopped. The teacher used to stand and watch to make sure we'd all definitely showered.

It was horrific, I was quite often 'ill' on PE days just to get out of it .

I remember the showers after PE, was 2005 ish and the showers were separated via a very poor shower curtain that had gaps so the curtains never met so everyone could see.

The teacher used to make us shower and she would walk in and out of the changing rooms to check our towels were wet , our hair was wet and the floor around us was wet, was awful! When she would leave the changing room we would rush to the showers to stuck our feet in and dampen our hair and towel!

Once the teacher walked in on some girls doing the trick and got a huge telling off and detentions every day for a week.. PE was the last lesson of the day!

I used to dread PE , I just hope it isn't like that now as it ruined a lot of children's confidence!

Sorry, make that ten schools - listing all the different schools attended by us all. No forced showering in any of them, at any time. Until this thread I honestly thought it only happened in posh boys' boarding schools.

Mine was a state school, not boarding, and definitely not posh.

Exactly, Tequila. As I said earlier, I really have had my eyes opened by this thread.

I had to shower naked after PE too. I was a very well behaved pupil at school and my only ever detentions were for missing PE due to being on my period for 'too many' weeks in a row!
So we had a period register too.
I went to a catholic school and started in 1995, still forced to shower naked until 1997 when I then gave up PE at the first opportunity.
Its awful to think that so many of us had to put up with this sort of treatment. So messed up.

Sadly it's still a schools individual choice, going by this thread I've found. Dated 2012 Yahoo answers

uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120907102159AAy4XkU

Some of the replies are fucking awful.

Also some schools may feel under pressure to bring mandatory showers back, after a study last year states children who don't shower after pe are less fit. It's not as straight forward as that but the BBC, and newspapers ran with it, sadly.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30796304

That fucking thread...

It's ok for the well developed pretty boys. And no, most people don't get used to it, it isn't a bit of a laugh, it doesn't make you more accepting of your body.

The big boys all laugh and you have to laugh along or you catch shit for it. You'd be crying, if that were in any way permitted, but you know that the teachers are just bigger bullies with the same twisted sense of humour.

Speaking from the male perspective, the only way to pass through that misery without being traumatised is by being one of the bullies.

Did it at my school too, absolutely hated it too. Always the same teacher "happened" to volunteer for the duty of watching us.

Suppressed memory alert! Once they were showing a pair of prospective parents around the school and brought them into the fucking changing room while we were getting changed!

It was a minor public school and it only happened until we were about 13, they seemed to trust us not to need watching after that. The same teacher still "monitored" the younger pupils though.

Kids were being expected to have communal naked showers under the eye of teachers in the 1980/90s? Not in state schools, presumably?

bertrand some pp throughout the thread, have said even the 2000s and yes state schools.

89-96 here and we had monitored naked showers, although there were a couple of cubicles. Bloody awful. Hated it. State school.

Another one who was forced to have showers. Hated it. I loved some spots bu this meant I dreaded PE and I believe contributed to issues with my body for many years. We also had a teacher who checked to see if our bras fitted properly

We also had to walk through our school in regulation PE knickers right up to lower six when we are allowed a PE skirt.

This was a state grammar in northern Ireland, 1980s.

Yep, naked showers at my state comprehensive too - Yorkshire '82-89 - including a gym teacher who would make you remove your towel and stroke your arm to check for dampness on the way out the shower. I dreaded Games, unbelievably humiliating.

BertrandRussell Yep, bog standard state comprehensive in SE England.

Iratelaundryperson period-related detentions. Words fail me.

Yes Bertrand comprehensive state school in England in the 80s. Seems to have been a common experience.