To encourage you to share ridiculous school rules?

[malificent7]

As we are going back to school ( or rather our little ones are) I thought it would be fun to let off steam by citing ridiculous school rules and punishments.

My old school was private and therefore thecrules were particularly stupid. There was the 6" rule whereby a boy and girl were not supposed to be within 6 incges of each other. This was designed to stop sex and pregnancy but did nothing to stop horny teens screwing in bushes.
Now i gear it has banned all students from visiting a local town " in case they get into mischief. " What if mum and dad want to take them out for lunch there?

If you got in trouble girls had to weat skin coloured tights to school as part of being "gated. " all the cool people got gated... it was a badge of honour as it meant you did cool things like smoke, drink and snog boys.

Do share.

c) the local newsagent sold the same tickets...
That made me laugh

Not only did we stand up when a teacher/priest/headmaster entered the room, but the girls curtsied and the boys saluted. Primary school.

We used to be regularly told new places which were out of bounds. The bulletin list got longer and longer. I recall the park, the pub, the pub carpark, the tree, the graveyard, the various shops, etc etc all being declared out of bounds, there wasn't much point in leaving the premises really!

I started secondary school in 1969.

The school was a little out of town, let's call it Bakewell.

Indoor, slip on, and outdoor, lace ups, shoes for boys. The unworn ones to be kept in an open locker. Trouble if you were caught in the wrong ones. Must have driven parents nuts with 2x expense.

Full cricketing whites for the summer season - about 4-5 weeks.

No eating in town.

No ball point pens, fountain pens only. ( not all staff stuck to this)

Uniform list stated no trouser leg to be less than 6" across. (They'd had 'problems' with drainpipe trousers) we weren't bothered, it was the start of flares.

And more recently, as a teacher. SMT decided to have a one way system on corridors to stop congestion. Fine - but a quirk on the timetable meant that at one time a lot of pupils needed to turn, say, left. It was something like Maths followed Humanities.

They weren't allowed and so most of an entire year group was on a round the school tour to basically get next door. It didn't last long.

In my school (a mixed state comprehensive with just shy of 1000 pupils - I left in 2010) you had to stand up if any member of Senior Management entered the room, this included in assemblies, middle of lessons, the only exception was if you were in the middle of GCSE or ALevel exam but it had to be the real thing not just a mock. Anyone who didn't/couldn't stand got an automatic detention, I remember one poor guy in a wheelchair as he'd broken his back getting a detention for not standing for the horrible male deputy head in our french mock.

Also the Head of French would only speak to you in French, whether you did french GCSE or not, if you did Spanish or German you were allowed to reply in those languages but otherwise you replied in french. If you couldn't you'd get a letter home to you parent inviting you for french tuition with her, and if your parents ignored the letter they got called into school. Everyone was scared of her.

DS1 is at a sixth form where the dress code is suit, shirt & tie. V-neck plain knit jumpers are allowed. DS1 wore a round-neck plain knit jumper once last winter and was told not to wear it again, and that doing so was subversive. 😂

All of our rules were fairly reasonable ones but some were oddly specific. E.g. Girls could only wear gold, silver or pearl stud earrings, no diamonds. All rings except signet rings were banned. That kind of thing.

We weren't allowed on the never used outdoor tennis courts at any time. I took great delight in smoking a fag in front of the headteacher there on the last day, knowing he couldn't do anything!

All in the late 90's/early 00's.

No walking on the grass in the quadrangle.

Primary school girls (12 & under) had to wear their hair in either two plaits or bunches - single ponytails were a senior school privilege. A few years before I started, girls had to wear two plaits until they had finished the equivalent of O-Levels (so 15 years of age!).

Hair styles had to be finished with school regulation ribbons (primary) or scrunchie (secondary). A teacher would sit behind us in weekly assembly and note the name of girls without appropriate hair decorations.

Nude nylon tights were compulsory for A-level years with school uniform. Not mad until you realise I was schooled in a sub-tropical climate.

Boleros and hats at all times outside school in summer; blazers, berets and little nylon gloves outside school in winter. You could be dobbed in by a member of the public if seen without, and be disciplined by the head of students. Again, refer to that sub-tropical climate when thinking about those berets & gloves.

No eating in public unless with a parent and seated in a cafe or restaurant.

It all made sense at the time but by god it must have been tough for teaching staff to keep on top of the sartorial stuff.

At infant school parent's weren't allowed in the playground, everyone ignored this rule unless one certain teacher was on duty. Mum said she could tell by all the parents stood at the gate. Everyone was scared of her. She had been my Mum's teacher too.

We weren't allowed on the quad either at secondary.

I am quite disappointed dd1 has a clip on tie for her new school. We thought we were such rebels with all the different way we wore ties. I imagine a blind eye was turned becsiuse after all what harm were we really doing by having the thin end on show. At one point we weren't allowed pleated skirts. I remember girls getting in quite a lot of trouble for doing so, but it was changed at some point.

At my prep school we used to have to wear baggy grey gym knickers over our usual knickers ALL THE TIME. It was like wearing a nappy! I remember my Mum telling the school outfitters to just "Give her the biggest you've got" when asked what size we needed. Thanks Mum!
We weren't allowed to walk down the front staircase unless it was the first or last day of term. The school was in an old huge mansion so think of a Downton type sweeping staircase. I did manage to sneak in a slide down the bannister one Christmas, sweeping all the way round an enormous Christmas tree!
At my secondary boarding school we weren't allowed to wear denim. Ever. Even when it was non uniform time. Apparently it was "evil". I couldn't wait to own a pair of jeans! Not sure what I actually thought might happen. I had a very, very sheltered childhood and didn't know any boys I wasn't related to until I left for Uni. Now that was an education!

We weren't allowed to wear coats at Secondary school even in the middle of winter. Apparently the Head decided we looked untidy but hadn't yet thought to introduce blazers. Anyway we all froze walking around our rather large school.

We had to wear black shoes indoors and brown shoes outdoors - just into the habit of changing them every single time we entered or left the building. Brown shoes were mostly left at school but woe betide anyone caught going home in black shoes or wearing brown ones to lessons!

At my school, girls and boys had to use different doors to enter and exit the school. The rules were enforced strictly. But everything else in school except PE was mixed

Wonder if we went to the same school? Identical rules.

We also had different stairs for going up and coming down. And on the (silent) walk down to assembly every morning, prefects lined the corridors checking everyone's socks were pulled up to their knees

I went to a really shitty secondary modern. I don't think they bothered with rules. Apart from things like, the LEA deciding we must be so thick it didn't bother to fund 'O' levels in certain subjects such as English Lit so we had to do it as CSE. Smoking behind the sports hall was frowned upon though and from the time I arrived to the time I left ('87), numbers had reduced from the hundreds to the odd furtive smoker looking out for a teacher.

No 'pop' music on Sundays, we were only allowed to listen to things like the king and I or classical music. Led Zeppelin was for weekdays only (60's obviously). No card games allowed Sundays either, not even snap.
Weren't allowed to wash our own hair, ladies came in especially to do it over a washbasin. We had to towel it dry as there were no hairdriers.
And we had to spend so much time in silence and praying, especially on Sundays. This was C of E not Catholic. Funnily enough I was agnostic when I went, but I have since always been an atheist. It was a public school and it scarred me. The unhappiest time of my life and I still have nightmares about it.

"Now two boys have been found rubbing linseed oil into the school cormorant. Now some of you may feel that the cormorant does not play an important part in the life of the school, but I would remind you that it was presented to us by the corporation of the Town of Sudbury to commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British. So from now on, the cormorant is strictly OUT OF BOUNDS."

The best I remember was when we were in 6th form we went over the road to a little river and we'd smoke there other kids would do it too but being 6th formers we legally could smoke (back when you could buy fags at 16) the amount of time the teachers would ring our parents was ridiculous.

I went to a good comprehensive in the north of England. I genuinely don't remember any stringent rules apart from "don't smoke behind the 6the form common room". No uniform ever during my whole school career, we could wear what the hell we liked. Seems quite strange now.

And they regularly sent 5 or so students each year to oxbridge and not as a result ofor being particularly middle class.

Uniform and other petty rules are batshit in my opinion.

We had to stand up whenever an adult entered the classroom (except during exams) - do secondary schools still do that?

Oh I love the cormorant one :) That is genius.

Only allowed to play with a ball in the playground on Wednesdays.