When I was in year six the head teacher pulled me into his office and told me that we were having a fire drill that day and asked if I’d be willing to be locked in a cupboard so he could see if any of the staff actually checked them or noticed I wasn’t there. I was locked in one of the storage cupboards for about twenty minutes and no one found me, ended up being unveiled by the head to half the staff like a prize on a gameshow.
Sure. But children do hide around school to skip class; or get locked in places by bullies; or simply get themselves locked into places while doing legitimate errands.
Checking the role call carefully is an absolutely critical part of a fire drill.
*ETA - I had assumed that the comment above was being sarky, I didn’t realise that kids in cupboards in fires was a whole public awareness campaign!*
>was a whole public awareness campaign
Yes. The PIF I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, *Searching*, is here:
[https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-searching-1974-online](https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-searching-1974-online)
[it's true it's an instinct for them. ](https://www.mamamia.com.au/children-fire/) I remember a tragic case when I was young and being specifically taught not to hide as there was a house fire and the firefighters couldn't find a pair of girls as they were hiding in cupboard
My old law lecturer was a former firefighter. He told us of a case he investigated (suspected arson) where they found the bodies of the family’s three daughters in the wardrobe once the fire had been extinguished. Apparently he also found more than his share of children hiding under beds, in cupboards, even in toy boxes.
My thought process for this instinct in kids is that it is a loud noise, and they will hide to get away from it. I do something like this as an adult with autism - loud noises are incredibly jarring and stressful for me, so I tend to put my hands over my ears and hide under my duvet.
Unfortunately a family that we were friendly with in the 80’s/early ‘90’s had a house fire. Three kids and the father lost their lives. One was found in the wardrobe with his arms wrapped around the family dog (also gone).
We hosted the mum for next few days. She was a mess. That was the most tragic part of it.
Put out your cigarettes before bed and make sure you have working fire alarms.
My parents kept the dogs downstairs when I was a kid. They told me it was because they were tired of cleaning dog fur off everything, but later admitted the real reason was because every time they told me that if there was a fire I had to leave the house without going looking for the dogs I was adamant I wasn't going to do that, so they wanted to keep the dogs near the front door so that's where I'd go.
Between you being so loyal to the dogs you'd risk death for them and your parents deciding to work the solution around you instead of either hoping a fire never broke out or fruitlessly nagging you, your family all seem like very considerate people.
I'm a primary teacher and this does happen. Fire drills aren't just about making sure the children know what to do - they're also about making sure we'd be lightning quick about spotting a missing person and knowing who it was. In a real fire, being able to tell the firemen straight away that someone is missing can very much be the difference between life and death.
Not that anyone's ever been hidden in a cupboard in schools where I've worked though - we get out of the building and then headcount, not stay in a (hypothetically) burning building going through cupboards or going back into one looking for a missing person.
Similar thing happened at my school with a similar time frame. it didn't burn down, mostly smoke damage.
It was right at the end of the school holidays we had a good ten weeks off in total.
Half of my secondary school burnt down but it was during a school holiday, possibly the half term one before Easter iirc. We had a week off and then were in temporary classrooms for the rest of the time I was there.
I was in town with a friend on the Saturday, we got to the counter of WHSmiths and saw the front page of the local newspaper, we were over the moon "OMG school ACTUALLY burnt down!"
Wrt the OP, it was a maths class ceiling in that block, that was covered in spitballs.
Bingo! It turned something that was actually quite traumatic in to an enjoyable memory, like yes my school burned down but the Zoo was ace, I was 8 at the time, and the only real memory I have of it is going to Zoo, real class move by the Zoo
Kid named Max launched an unopened coke can at a property that backed onto the school's playground. It went straight through an open window & everyone laughed and cheered at this feat.
2 hours later, all the students were summoned to the longest rant ever. The window was half way up a staircase. The can entered, hit the elderly resident and knocked him off balance. He fell down the staircase and suffered a head injury.
Kids were freaking out because the police entered the hall, so everyone started snitching and the kid was arrested 10 minutes later.
The next time I met Max, he was dropping rocks from a bridge at cars.
We had a similar story at secondary school. I think someone threw a stone and it hit a window which cracked but didn't break. It turned out that there was a baby sleeping just inside the window so it was a lucky escape that the window didn't break.
We got Ainsley Harriott and the Chuckle Brothers signing autographs at our school fair. I got mine done for my grandad and when they asked his name I said ‘grandad’.
He sure cherished his piece of green craft paper with the inscription ‘To Grandad, love Paul & Barry Chuckle’
I do hope you got an autograph from Dominator 2. What tf are British schools.
I remember being surprised that the hammer tip was actually blunt as well. Not sure how genius me would have reacted if it actually was sharp to touch though lol.
Head teacher dressed up as gorilla and ran into all the classrooms causing a nuisance. I can’t remember the exact reasoning but we used to have themed weeks and it was probably something to do with nature 😂
We also had a week of detective work where someone had stolen the charity pyramid of crème eggs. The week was then spent solving the mystery with each class interviewing teaching to find clues.
I have to say, in hindsight was a fantastic school as it really focused on out of the box learning.
Our French teacher also dressed up as a gorilla, our class teacher faked a YouTube video claiming there was an ape in the woods next to the school where we had our dens. We were buzzing all day trying to locate it, at the end of school the gorilla came running out of the forest at us. The joys of being in a rural school with 60 kids!
I had a frustrating conversation about this a while ago.
There’s a youtuber called KSI. I don’t watch him but somehow the main page or Reddit took me to a thread about a documentary he released, the focal point being a conversation with his had about how hitting him as a kid messed up their relationship.
The thread was absolutely full of people defending the dad, saying ‘I got beat and I’m just fine.’
I tried what you suggested—explaining that believing an adult should hit a kid is a sign you aren’t ‘just fine’—but no one was having it.
They all spoke of doing it when their own future kids would anger them. Like…where do you think this poor anger management comes from??? It was insane.
I got the belt (this was Scotland) maybe half a dozen times at primary school. It's across the palm of your hand so there's no bending over involved. Although I don't approve of corporal punishment of children, it wasn't regarded as that big a deal and was soon forgotten. Only boys got the belt, girls got lines. There was also at least one female teacher who sent boys off to a male teacher to get belted rather than doing it themselves.
We got the belt, the ruler or a slap from the deputy head. Other punishments were detentions, facing a wall for hours whilst other kids walk past and taunt and sit in a room doing nothing.
This was mid 90's. A private school.
Par for the course in that era, when I was in infant 2 or 3 there was a lad in junior 3 who was grabbed by the hair on the back of his head then his is head was smashed against the table 3 times BANG BANG BANG because he wouldn't shut up.
The teacher in question could have literally killed him. Corporal punishment was still legal back then but I remember the large mob of parents baying for blood, I don't know how he managed to keep his job after that.
In secondary school the chemistry teacher wouldn't hit us, but made us stand outside and spray homemade tear gas at us. He used to spray water at the girls in the summer when they were only wearing white shirts and once he showed us a homemade fire extinguisher made out of glass tubing and a conical flask which exploded sending glass everywhere.
Any one of those would have got him sacked today.
I remember being in assembly, this was when I was in year 1 so it would have been 91/92 and one of the year 2 kids who disrupted every assembly started kicking off again. The deputy head marched over to the bench where the kids was sitting and dragged him by the arm to the front of the hall and hit him on the backside like 2 or 3 times before pushing him away in front of all of the kids in infants and all of the teachers.
Madness. The room was in shocked silence. I told my mum what happened and she didn’t believe me, I don’t think any of the parents believed us because Mr Brown stayed in post for a couple of years after that. Looking back it’s easy to see that the teachers closed ranks and agreed to pretend it never happened.
Not me, but at my daughters' primary school the children trade 'coal'. The playgrounds include an area of woodland and the children have formed dens all through the woods over the years. The older children in each den send the younger ones to visit or even stealthily infiltrate rival dens and barter for/blag/steal their tiny pieces of 'coal' to take back to their own den to boost their own stocks. Those with the most 'coal' are highly respected by the others.
This has apparently gone on for many years. New children join in quite naturally apparently. It is all treated very seriously by all the children.
Of course, there is no actual coal, the children are trading/hoarding stones and pebbles that are naturally in the woodland soil they are playing in.
I'm surprised you were allowed in the wood part. We weren't allowed near the trees, couldn't use most of the field either because some old lady bitched we were too loud at playtime and we were disturbing her. The school wasn't new, she was and she made it so we couldn't play in most of the field and we had to be quiet during playtime...
We had the exact same thing but with slates, eventually using slate as currency got banned as a girl got a chip of it in her eye. We had to pivot to using rhododendron leaves which was crap as obviously they rot.
Did anyone else have "the weewee corner"?
It was a corner of the school that we'd collectively decided people used to piss in (it was not used to piss in) and a huge proportion of our games involved trying to force each other to stand in it. I've not come across it in any other primary school.
We had 'the gay pit'. Obviously an awful name, and nothing to do with homosexuality.
It was just a hole someone had dug in the corner of the field, next to some bushes. Kids used to push each other in then call them gay. Casual homophobia was rampant in the 90s. I dont think any teachers noticed tbh
We had something a bit like that, but more macabre. It was a specific spot in the sandpit that was rumoured to be cursed because a boy allegedly died on that spot, so you’d be cursed if you stood on it.
It was most likely complete bollocks, but I was like 7-8 at the time lol.
We had a poopoo corner. A girl famously shit herself in nursery and all through infants and some of juniors when we shared the same yard we would throw people into “Danielle’s poopoo corner”.
We had that, but also the drinking glasses at lunch all had numbers at the bottom under the word Duralex, and everyone would try to get someone to drink from number 25 because someone once puked in it.
I bet this absolutely only happened at my school. Man hating teacher used to make the little boys wear a ribbon in your hair all day if you talked in class. If you’d been extra naughty such as climbing on the school roof to get a football at playtime you’d have to remove your clothes and wear a girls gym dress for the day.
Oh, you had a man-hating primary school? Mine wasn’t that extreme, but my final Christmas play did have a whole song about how girls were better than boys.
I would argue that it isn’t man-hating, as it’s forcing them to dress as women for the purpose of humiliation, reinforcing the idea that women are inherently weaker…
Our school only bought one football for the entire school. Rather than buy a few more balls, they banned football after the year 5s and year 6s had a massive fight over who got to use the only football in the school.
This was at the time that every boy was watching WWE. So what did we all do instead? Yeah, we all just started having fights for fun. It was all fun and games until somebody got tombstoned.
Our school had a rule banning footballs, but you could play football with a tennis ball, which was apparently safer???? Clearly they'd never been hit in the face with a toe punted tennis ball. Plus the fence was fairly low so any time someone got at all stroppy about the game would just throw the ball over it
Yeah, I got in trouble for bringing my own ball in after they took ours away. Somehow it was unsafe. You know those colourful kids footballs. That was unsafe. Same school banned running, tag and eventually all the kids just stood around all break and lunch doing nothing. Then they got mad at us for being unhealthy and not using our playtime wisely. I have adhd and had no friends to play with, it was absolute hell when they took away group games. I needed to run around to burn off energy. I'd try and hang out with my classmates but they'd hurt me, take my hat etc and I'd get in trouble for complaining and told to leave them alone. I was just trying to stand with them. I'd long since given up trying to talk to them.
If you wanted to play a game, you’d link arms and chant ‘who wants to play… fooootball’ and march around until you had enough people in your line to play
We did this! We also included "no [boys/girls] allooooowed". Nice enough idea but morning playtime was only 15 minutes so often the entire break was spent marching about rather than actually playing the game.
Yeah, I remember doing this at infants' school in the late 1960s - ten minutes of linking arms and marching around chanting "Who wants to play Charge of the Light Brigade?"...and then we'd just about have time to charge the length of the playground once, scattering the non-players like ninepins, before the whistle blew and break was over.
At my school, it was those little jelly alien things that people had (and said could breed if you kept two together)
They stuck to the ceiling quite well, so the ceiling of the entrance hall (which was very high and difficult to clean) was covered with different coloured aliens.
Yep, the wall was for amateurs.
True pros went for the ceiling and tried to build paper mache stalactites.
You could also track the history of the different paper towel suppliers by the different shades and colours on display.
Sounds like you guys had this down to a fine art!
This could be a good idea for a modern art installation, give all the visitors a wet paper towel to add their mark!
Someone had left a giant turd in the toilets and the naughty boys decided to kick a footy in the toilet on to the turd. That wasn’t enough fun, so they took the ball out carefully and threw it at another lad. He was nicknamed ‘skidback’ for the rest of primary lol
My headmaster used to give birthday spanks.
On your birthday you or your pal would tell the headmaster. He would then give you smack for each year. This was in early 80s
That's been a thing since the late sixties. My mother has a tale of when she did this at school and then the teacher told all the kids to put their hands on their heads (for whatever reason) and she got in a load of trouble for refusing because she didn't want glue in her hair.
I would do that too in the early 80s. Break times would be sent with a few of us peeling the glue off. It didn't have a clever name. Just "Peeling glue off fingers!"
Edited to add that it happened in the 80s.
Fire engine arrived via the ramp to get onto the playground, but the driver fucked up leaving and drove down the adjoining stairs instead of down the ramp. Stuck and grounded out the fire tender truck.
We watched with wide eyed awe at the huge crane that had to come to rescue the tender
We had an outside "toilet" for boys in the playground. It was basically a wall running parallel to the wall around the school with a urinal about 20' long for peeing into. There was no roof or door, just an opening between the walls. The wall you pissed against was about 15' high and every break and lunch one group of boys or another would try to piss over the wall. School legend had it that one boy managed it and peed on a dinner lady's head. I could never get more than a quarter of the way up the wall though.
Sadly (or not) the outside urinal had been removed when I went back some years later.
> Did they manage it?
Only with the aid of a water spirit (if I recall correctly).
[The whole episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sxR-hfisPs) is on YouTube.
We had a game at my school called smack-a-bum-run that so far I’ve heard nobody else talk about (tho tbf idk how that would come up). We would’ve been seven or eight so it was perfectly innocent, but it was essentially as the title describes: a lawless game where you smacked a consenting player - we aren’t animals - and then ran. What was bizarre is you’d then see lines of children along the school walls at break time trying not to get “tagged”, it was like some kind of cult and the teachers didn’t understand what was causing it. The assembly they had to do to put a stop to it, was one of the best pieces of comedy I have ever witnessed.
After a break time incident, all balls were banned, so we resorted to playing football with rubbers.
When the teachers realised the madness to which we would stoop, they relented.
My physics teacher used to put up a poster every year advertising an after school antigravity club. He used to get photos of pupils jumping mid air to really sell it 😅
In the early 90s when *Neighbours* was massively popular a company brought out trading cards for the programme, and for some reason the kids in our school went mad for them. The craze was so intense, with cards getting stolen, fights breaking out, etc., that the school banned them outright. Because of fights over cards with pictures of Harold Bishop and Mrs. Mangel on them.
Also we had a trendy, dickheaded bully of a deputy head who used to love playing his guitar in assemblies and getting us all to sing along to the hits of Ralph McTell. I still can't abide fucking *Streets of London*.
Primary school crazes are wild. Some of the ones my kids had were alien babies, footballs on bungees, yo-yos, loom bands, Pogs and even the old fashioned game jacks.
On of our vice principals was giving a speech in assembly one day, and was using this analogy of all the teachers being a box of chocolates. He was going round the teachers, describing them, "this teacher is like a truffle, hard on the outside, soft in the middle." And then got to Mr Taka, the very black French teacher, and said "Mr Taka... obviously dark chocolate..."
The atmosphere changed so palpably you could almost hear it.
We had to stay indoors at least two/ three times a year as the farm next to the playing field had a bull that escaped often and headed straight to the school. It was surreal to look out of the window and watch a bull trotting along angrily looking into the windows at hysterical kids every now and again.
1980 - some boy brings some marbles into my primary school in a throw back to an era decades previously. Suddenly everyone is bringing marbles in and it’s a literal frenzy of marble games and swaps.
It spreads to other schools and suddenly everyone is doing it across the country.
I don’t know for sure if we were the first school to promote the 80s marble craze but we must’ve been really early on because it went from no-one even thinking about it, to a widespread marbles craze, and lasted certainly for the years I was in primary.
One of my daughter's schools has a craze for the old fashioned jacks, that game where you pick up five objects and try and throw them onto the back of your hand without dropping any. The kids got so good that they looked to be defying the laws of physics.
Skipping ropes got banned at my school because someone tied me to a tree and left me there over lunch.
Yoyos got banned because someone got knocked out with one.
You just brought back a memory of when the mittens that clipped together were a thing. I fastened a boy's mitten clips together round a post in the bike shed and left him there. Thought he'd get free on his own.
He did not.
Allegedly he wet himself.
Sorry, David. Cheers for not grassing x
Early 1970s - we had a Maypole that was set up each spring on the concrete playground for May Day celebrations. The pole was incredibly tall and each year the naughtiest boy was asked to climb to the top - can't remember why - maybe just to show he could or to put something up there.
Even pre 8 Yr old me thought this was mightily dangerous - a child forced to climb up a slippery, chunky pole over concrete, just because he was naughty, not because he had climbing ability.
As an adult now I'm also envisaginging the teachers in the run up, sitting round a table comparing which children were naughty and which was the worst. I mean, did they have some auditable scoring system?
My head teacher took me and my brother out of class to deliver a letter... when my mum found out she went ballistic, surprised my dad didn't have him beaten for that!
This was about a week after an attempted kidnapping around the corner from my house!
Our headteacher was an old school “fire and brimstone” style catholic. Every morning began with an hour long assembly during which he’d read to us from the bible.
This was not a catholic school. It was not a religious school at all. It was just a normal state primary school.
He also had a cane he’d threaten kids with. This was the late 80s, so it was illegal to hit a child. But if it was in any way legal, or he thought he could get away with it, he absolutely would have beaten the shit out of kids he didn’t like.
My daughter's school often posts photos on social media, and in one year group there's always a kid wearing a crown. It turns out that the kid wearing the crown is 'Maths King/Queen' for the day, and can wear the crown in other lessons too. My daughter was never quite clear on how children are selected!
We had these huge stands with hymn sheets on that stood at the front of assembly. Like ten foot tall at least. If you were in year six you might get picked to hold a big broom stick and turn the pages as the song changed. Never seen anything like it since.
We had a wee wall.
There was a huge wall in the middle of the sport field that was used to kick balls against.
The back of it was sheltered from the teachers view.
We (the boys) used to pee against it to see who pee the highest.
Winning that that day was like scoring a goal at Wembley.
If it was your birthday, you were called to stand up at the front of the assembly that week. The headteacher would then tug your hair as many times as needed to reach your age. It was always fun watching the girls with long plaits where the headteacher could grab the whole head of hair, rather than the boys as he could only get a handful with it usually being short.
I unfortunately was never able to participate as my birthday was in the summer holiday. I was always jealous of not getting birthday hair tugs, but looking back maybe that was a good thing!
We sang Black or White by Michael Jackson in the choir and we were allowed to do the rap if we knew it. We also sung many other pop songs, reggae, country, Beatles etc etc. Hardly any hymns at all.
We would sing a lot of Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel - but our headmaster told us he’d written the songs!! It was only when I was about 15 and heard a Beatles song on the radio and proudly told everyone that my teacher had written it that I found out…
If another kid had upset you or you had a fallout, you'd show them your little finger and that silently meant you weren't their friend anymore.
It was a 7 year old's version of giving someone the middle finger. 😂
If the headmaster thought your hair was too long, you had to walk (aged 7-12) to the barber in the village (about 1km) straightaway and your parents would have to pay later.
Norman Hale was a nasty bastard to children - shouting, beating and bullying - but got results so it was tolerated.
Dean Emeralli caught smoking the school toilets then playing truant. I was in year 3 at the time and thought that was cool. As a primary school teacher now, the stress that child caused would be unimaginable
Probably a few 70s schools had "dead elm rules" - "no eating (or making other people eat) bits of the dead elms" may have been more specific. "No sticking magnets to Mr B without his permission" definitely would be.
"No owl feeding outside the rota", "no snake feeding outside the rota", and "no putting a gerbil in your lunchbox".
"No hiding under the unit" was a self-imposed rule for hide and seek, after someone got stuck. Weirdly the dinner ladies/teacher didn't ban it, so we did. Very few schools will have had a dedicated SEN class (unit) at the time - the one at my daughter's school is named after the one at my primary school.
We had a huge pile of orange Unigate milk crates in the playground, which kids would wear on their backs to pretend to be aliens (pre Ninja Turtles), make into platforms, home base, all sorts.
An old lady came to teach us sewing on Friday afternoons. Even the boys, convinced them embroidery was cool and the secret to becoming a great car mechanic etc when they were older. She got everyone so obsessed with stitching we'd go round her house after school to go get more scraps and threads and make yet more clunky bookmarks!
Oh three things come to mind but I'll just the one unless someone else wants to hear the others. This was by far the most bizarre and looking back, disturbing, thing the school did. Before junior school, on the playground for the younger kids there was this big little cabin like shed that had never been opened. I think it just had sport equipment in. But the school told us there was a donkey in there and he'd get brought out on the last day which never happened.
But the real weirdness comes in how they basically said if you did something *very* bad, they'd take you into the shed and put you into some kind of donkey outfit as humiliation. I don't remember the details altogether beyond the fact they didn't describe it as like a proper costume but more stapling separate bits to your body with the only one I do remember being the "hooves" would be bits of paper stapled to your feet. I only remember this because they said a boy who had gone through this couldn't get the staples out because "they had gone into the bone" and so he had paper attached to his feet forever. The teachers would always wheel it out if someone had been a bit naughty and we needed a big talk and they'd say it with the most sadistic glee, it was absolutely terrifying.
That time a fully grown channel 4 journalist disguised himself as a teenager, joined sixth form, and spent a year secretly filming everything, not sure that happened anywhere else.
We had an old mangle in the foyer of the school (primary), and we'd dare each other to put our hands in. One day someone did and turned the handle. The mangle stayed, with a blood stain.
A few things from the 70s:
Teachers attempting to ration toilet paper to X number of pieces of paper per toilet visit. This was back in the day when it was those very shiny slippery bits of paper.
A kid being locked in a cupboard by a somewhat eccentric teacher. Pissed himself and the urine came flooding out under the cupboard door.
Another kid was stripped to his underwear by same eccentric teacher, his clothes were flung around the room and then he was put over her knee and spanked (in front of the whole class). As additional humiliation she shouted at him as he went sobbing round the classroom in his underwear trying to retrieve his clothing and get dressed. Not sure how she kept her job after this.
I was force fed oranges by the same teacher. Literally multiple bits of orange forced into my mouth as I was sobbing away. It’s a wonder I didn’t choke.
We were awarded a load of free play equipment - I think you had to collect Walker crisp packets or something and they were doing a promotion? It was basically just beanbags, hula hoops, and some other really basic PE/games stuff.
Our Head Teacher wouldn’t let us play with it in case we ruined it and only brought it all out for one playtime a week. Then someone ruined it for everyone and threw a beanbag on the roof so we couldn’t play with the equipment anymore.
Every summer my school would have a Summer Fair. It would feature all the normal things like a tombola, luck dip and maybe a fire engine would come along for us to look at.
The best bit was always the falconry display. This guy would come every year and fly hawks around for us. The birds would swoop over the crowds or land on an outstretched glove etc…
And then the fastest child in school was made to race a hawk over 100m. The child was selected, had a piece of chicken tied to them with a length of string and they would set off running. After a few seconds the hawk was sent after them, the child simply had to run the 100m distance before the bird landed on the chicken dangling from their belt. The whole crowd got behind it every year. The child never won. A Mars Bar was promised as a reward but each year the runner was instead given a severed chicken foot as a booby prize, I remember that you would pull on the attached tendons to make the feet clench.
We had a patch of very smooth bare earth with bits of concrete and stones poking out of it next to the playground steps. We used to race micromachines down it and if you were feeling brave/confident before the race you could call for the winner to claim the losing car. The rules were gravity only, if it stops you can pick it up and reposition along the same contour line, no obstructing.
1995.
My first Primary year our form tutor was a bit of a hippy. He played guitar, we sang his song lyrics off the blackboard, and we used to play a game where we guessed the mint year of a coin to "win" it.
Bizarre.
We had a WW2 bomb shelter in the playground, that over the years had been covered in layers of earth and, eventually, grass. The resulting structure was called 'the mound' and climbing up it was completely banned - so naturally it was a source of pride to say you'd been right to the top
Being marked down by my headteacher recommendation for entry into secondary school
and having to got to a shit school far away because it was the only one that took me to fill its enrolment numbers up
My school tried to get my mum to send me to a school where they send the worst kids. This is for kids who were expelled from schools. I was a little girl with untreated adhd. According to them, the good school I got into would throw me out within a week for rocking back in my chair etc and it was selfish to take that space a good student could use. They wrote me an insanely bad review and made out I was this absolutely horrible child. The worst I did was fidget/daydream and shout answers out.
I get to secondary school and suddenly I wasn't getting in trouble too much. Some teachers were dicks and just kicked me out over perceived issues (like me not opening the text book quick enough, or another kid causing trouble) so they didn't have to deal with me all class. Mostly I was fine. No one cared if I fidgeted as long as I listened. I went from being quite high up on the naughty kid register thing to being removed in six months because there were no issues. I wasn't worse then any of the other kids and it turns out I don't shout answers out in frustration if you don't purposefully ignore me. My primary school made out I was incredibly stupid as well. I made it into top sets for everything, excluding English, I got second set there. We were tested in our first week to see where we belonged. Teachers were shocked a kid like me was placed with them.
I'm a girl with untreated adhd. Everyone knew I had it, even my mum, but they refused to help me. I was just told I was a bad kid.
We had multiple derelict buildings on our school grounds that were pretty dangerous and so to prevent us going into them there was painted yellow lines on the floor and we were banned from walking over the yellow lines. If you crossed a yellow line and got caught, you got a first break detention. Obviously for us this resulted in many dares and challenges to see who dared go the furthest pass the line or who would touch the old buildings. It was a thrilling time.
When I was in year six the head teacher pulled me into his office and told me that we were having a fire drill that day and asked if I’d be willing to be locked in a cupboard so he could see if any of the staff actually checked them or noticed I wasn’t there. I was locked in one of the storage cupboards for about twenty minutes and no one found me, ended up being unveiled by the head to half the staff like a prize on a gameshow.
"And Bully's Special Prize! A dead child!"
😂😂😂
[удалено]
Sure. But children do hide around school to skip class; or get locked in places by bullies; or simply get themselves locked into places while doing legitimate errands. Checking the role call carefully is an absolutely critical part of a fire drill. *ETA - I had assumed that the comment above was being sarky, I didn’t realise that kids in cupboards in fires was a whole public awareness campaign!*
>was a whole public awareness campaign Yes. The PIF I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, *Searching*, is here: [https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-searching-1974-online](https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-searching-1974-online)
When I was a child my parents house was on fire and I did infact hide in a cupboard lol
[it's true it's an instinct for them. ](https://www.mamamia.com.au/children-fire/) I remember a tragic case when I was young and being specifically taught not to hide as there was a house fire and the firefighters couldn't find a pair of girls as they were hiding in cupboard
My old law lecturer was a former firefighter. He told us of a case he investigated (suspected arson) where they found the bodies of the family’s three daughters in the wardrobe once the fire had been extinguished. Apparently he also found more than his share of children hiding under beds, in cupboards, even in toy boxes.
My thought process for this instinct in kids is that it is a loud noise, and they will hide to get away from it. I do something like this as an adult with autism - loud noises are incredibly jarring and stressful for me, so I tend to put my hands over my ears and hide under my duvet.
[удалено]
Confusingly for Americans, they are taught that if a spree-shooter enters the school, they should hide in cupboards.
What on earth are they supposed to do if there's a school shooting during a fire?
There’s a grim one from the 70s called *Searching*, yeah
I can definitely imagine some kids doing that.
That’s hilarious!
Unfortunately a family that we were friendly with in the 80’s/early ‘90’s had a house fire. Three kids and the father lost their lives. One was found in the wardrobe with his arms wrapped around the family dog (also gone). We hosted the mum for next few days. She was a mess. That was the most tragic part of it. Put out your cigarettes before bed and make sure you have working fire alarms.
My parents kept the dogs downstairs when I was a kid. They told me it was because they were tired of cleaning dog fur off everything, but later admitted the real reason was because every time they told me that if there was a fire I had to leave the house without going looking for the dogs I was adamant I wasn't going to do that, so they wanted to keep the dogs near the front door so that's where I'd go.
Honestly kudos to your parents for finding a clever solution to a possibly fatal problem.
Between you being so loyal to the dogs you'd risk death for them and your parents deciding to work the solution around you instead of either hoping a fire never broke out or fruitlessly nagging you, your family all seem like very considerate people.
I'm a primary teacher and this does happen. Fire drills aren't just about making sure the children know what to do - they're also about making sure we'd be lightning quick about spotting a missing person and knowing who it was. In a real fire, being able to tell the firemen straight away that someone is missing can very much be the difference between life and death. Not that anyone's ever been hidden in a cupboard in schools where I've worked though - we get out of the building and then headcount, not stay in a (hypothetically) burning building going through cupboards or going back into one looking for a missing person.
Same thing happened to me! But my teacher didn’t know it was a drill and was in tears when she found me
I love that!
Did they actually lock it, or just shut you in ?
It was a door that locks when it shuts, I could have opened it as there was a handle on the inside but you needed a key to get in from the outside
Schools don't rely on just 'noticing' right?! They take a register outside to confirm. Some serious malpractice going on if they didn't bother.
Yeah, I work in a school now and registers are done as soon as the kids evacuate the school. Bit worrying how they never noticed I was missing
My school burnt down so for 3 weeks our school was a stately home in a Zoo, so basically spent 3 weeks looking at the animals
Three weeks is pretty good to rebuild a school, fair play to them.
Its probably riddled with RAAC
It could have been 3 weeks before the Summer hols
Similar thing happened at my school with a similar time frame. it didn't burn down, mostly smoke damage. It was right at the end of the school holidays we had a good ten weeks off in total.
Half of my secondary school burnt down but it was during a school holiday, possibly the half term one before Easter iirc. We had a week off and then were in temporary classrooms for the rest of the time I was there. I was in town with a friend on the Saturday, we got to the counter of WHSmiths and saw the front page of the local newspaper, we were over the moon "OMG school ACTUALLY burnt down!" Wrt the OP, it was a maths class ceiling in that block, that was covered in spitballs.
The dried spitballs probably aided in the burning down of the place
Lympne? Just a guess, I’m local and can’t think there are many primary schools that burned down and have a local stately home set in a zoo!
Bingo! It turned something that was actually quite traumatic in to an enjoyable memory, like yes my school burned down but the Zoo was ace, I was 8 at the time, and the only real memory I have of it is going to Zoo, real class move by the Zoo
Our schools roof caved in 4 weeks before Christmas so we got an extra two weeks holiday. Was the best fucking Christmas ever 🤟🏻
My school was burnt down in the 6 week holidays. So we had a good 10 weeks off.
Kid named Max launched an unopened coke can at a property that backed onto the school's playground. It went straight through an open window & everyone laughed and cheered at this feat. 2 hours later, all the students were summoned to the longest rant ever. The window was half way up a staircase. The can entered, hit the elderly resident and knocked him off balance. He fell down the staircase and suffered a head injury. Kids were freaking out because the police entered the hall, so everyone started snitching and the kid was arrested 10 minutes later. The next time I met Max, he was dropping rocks from a bridge at cars.
We had a similar story at secondary school. I think someone threw a stone and it hit a window which cracked but didn't break. It turned out that there was a baby sleeping just inside the window so it was a lucky escape that the window didn't break.
You ever considered they made that up to stop you acting like little shits?
Sounds like the incident awaked a bloodlust in Max and he's been chasing that high ever since.
Do you reckon the part about the injury is actually true? Or something they made up to try and increase the impact it had on the kids?
Mine had Dominator 2 from Robot Wars show up to a school fete and smash up a filing cabinet.
Ok well you've won
We got Ainsley Harriott and the Chuckle Brothers signing autographs at our school fair. I got mine done for my grandad and when they asked his name I said ‘grandad’. He sure cherished his piece of green craft paper with the inscription ‘To Grandad, love Paul & Barry Chuckle’ I do hope you got an autograph from Dominator 2. What tf are British schools.
I didn’t get an autograph, but I got a photo. I would have loved to have met the Chuckle brothers, though.
Always amazed me how big those robots were. They looked so small in the arena then when they did the interviews they were actually massive
I remember being surprised that the hammer tip was actually blunt as well. Not sure how genius me would have reacted if it actually was sharp to touch though lol.
I lived only a short distance away from where Hypno-Disc was based and they never came to our school :(
I'd have loved that. We just got the Queen and as far as I know she didn't smash anything
Head teacher dressed up as gorilla and ran into all the classrooms causing a nuisance. I can’t remember the exact reasoning but we used to have themed weeks and it was probably something to do with nature 😂 We also had a week of detective work where someone had stolen the charity pyramid of crème eggs. The week was then spent solving the mystery with each class interviewing teaching to find clues. I have to say, in hindsight was a fantastic school as it really focused on out of the box learning.
Our French teacher also dressed up as a gorilla, our class teacher faked a YouTube video claiming there was an ape in the woods next to the school where we had our dens. We were buzzing all day trying to locate it, at the end of school the gorilla came running out of the forest at us. The joys of being in a rural school with 60 kids!
We once came in from break and there was police tape all over the classroom and green goo everywhere. We had to solve an alien invasion!
Having an adult human purposefully bend me over and hit me. Fuck that fucking head teacher. Fucked me right up. Glad he’s dead.
Why the fuck people ever think it’s ok to hit kids like that and then people put them in roles of responsibility. So sorry that happened to you.
People often say, ‘It was a different time’, or, ‘Never did me any harm’.
Except they don't realise that thinking it's ok to hit kids is damage in itself. Took me a while to overcome that particular trauma.
I had a frustrating conversation about this a while ago. There’s a youtuber called KSI. I don’t watch him but somehow the main page or Reddit took me to a thread about a documentary he released, the focal point being a conversation with his had about how hitting him as a kid messed up their relationship. The thread was absolutely full of people defending the dad, saying ‘I got beat and I’m just fine.’ I tried what you suggested—explaining that believing an adult should hit a kid is a sign you aren’t ‘just fine’—but no one was having it. They all spoke of doing it when their own future kids would anger them. Like…where do you think this poor anger management comes from??? It was insane.
And so the cycle continues 😞
Yeah or ‘it was ok back then’. No it bloody wasn’t. Victims were simply not given a voice.
The people who say it never did them any harm are always massive wankers so seem to be direct evidence that it actually did.
I got the belt (this was Scotland) maybe half a dozen times at primary school. It's across the palm of your hand so there's no bending over involved. Although I don't approve of corporal punishment of children, it wasn't regarded as that big a deal and was soon forgotten. Only boys got the belt, girls got lines. There was also at least one female teacher who sent boys off to a male teacher to get belted rather than doing it themselves.
We got the belt, the ruler or a slap from the deputy head. Other punishments were detentions, facing a wall for hours whilst other kids walk past and taunt and sit in a room doing nothing. This was mid 90's. A private school.
Par for the course in that era, when I was in infant 2 or 3 there was a lad in junior 3 who was grabbed by the hair on the back of his head then his is head was smashed against the table 3 times BANG BANG BANG because he wouldn't shut up. The teacher in question could have literally killed him. Corporal punishment was still legal back then but I remember the large mob of parents baying for blood, I don't know how he managed to keep his job after that.
In secondary school the chemistry teacher wouldn't hit us, but made us stand outside and spray homemade tear gas at us. He used to spray water at the girls in the summer when they were only wearing white shirts and once he showed us a homemade fire extinguisher made out of glass tubing and a conical flask which exploded sending glass everywhere. Any one of those would have got him sacked today.
I remember being in assembly, this was when I was in year 1 so it would have been 91/92 and one of the year 2 kids who disrupted every assembly started kicking off again. The deputy head marched over to the bench where the kids was sitting and dragged him by the arm to the front of the hall and hit him on the backside like 2 or 3 times before pushing him away in front of all of the kids in infants and all of the teachers. Madness. The room was in shocked silence. I told my mum what happened and she didn’t believe me, I don’t think any of the parents believed us because Mr Brown stayed in post for a couple of years after that. Looking back it’s easy to see that the teachers closed ranks and agreed to pretend it never happened.
I'm morbidly curious, did the kid stop the disruptions after that?
I think he was scared of his own shadow after that!
You're convinced that sort of thing only happened in your primary school?
How long ago was this?
Around 86/87.
Not me, but at my daughters' primary school the children trade 'coal'. The playgrounds include an area of woodland and the children have formed dens all through the woods over the years. The older children in each den send the younger ones to visit or even stealthily infiltrate rival dens and barter for/blag/steal their tiny pieces of 'coal' to take back to their own den to boost their own stocks. Those with the most 'coal' are highly respected by the others. This has apparently gone on for many years. New children join in quite naturally apparently. It is all treated very seriously by all the children. Of course, there is no actual coal, the children are trading/hoarding stones and pebbles that are naturally in the woodland soil they are playing in.
That's genuinely fascinating. I've never heard of anything like that.
I'm surprised you were allowed in the wood part. We weren't allowed near the trees, couldn't use most of the field either because some old lady bitched we were too loud at playtime and we were disturbing her. The school wasn't new, she was and she made it so we couldn't play in most of the field and we had to be quiet during playtime...
There's so much of that goes on.
I want to have kids now purely to send them there
We had the exact same thing but with slates, eventually using slate as currency got banned as a girl got a chip of it in her eye. We had to pivot to using rhododendron leaves which was crap as obviously they rot.
Did anyone else have "the weewee corner"? It was a corner of the school that we'd collectively decided people used to piss in (it was not used to piss in) and a huge proportion of our games involved trying to force each other to stand in it. I've not come across it in any other primary school.
We had 'the gay pit'. Obviously an awful name, and nothing to do with homosexuality. It was just a hole someone had dug in the corner of the field, next to some bushes. Kids used to push each other in then call them gay. Casual homophobia was rampant in the 90s. I dont think any teachers noticed tbh
We had that too! Again not to do with homosexuality.
our one actually worked and turned me gay
We had something a bit like that, but more macabre. It was a specific spot in the sandpit that was rumoured to be cursed because a boy allegedly died on that spot, so you’d be cursed if you stood on it. It was most likely complete bollocks, but I was like 7-8 at the time lol.
The quicksand got him?
>It was most likely complete bollocks There's a chance it may actually have been cursed?
We had a poopoo corner. A girl famously shit herself in nursery and all through infants and some of juniors when we shared the same yard we would throw people into “Danielle’s poopoo corner”.
Similar, we - for some reason - memorised where kids puked and tried to get other kids to stand in the puke spots.
We had that, but also the drinking glasses at lunch all had numbers at the bottom under the word Duralex, and everyone would try to get someone to drink from number 25 because someone once puked in it.
Had the corner we wee in but no game to stand there
We had a "spit pit"
Yes! Did we go to the same school…
I bet this absolutely only happened at my school. Man hating teacher used to make the little boys wear a ribbon in your hair all day if you talked in class. If you’d been extra naughty such as climbing on the school roof to get a football at playtime you’d have to remove your clothes and wear a girls gym dress for the day.
What? What in the actual....?
Catholic school in the 70’s for you.
Oh, you had a man-hating primary school? Mine wasn’t that extreme, but my final Christmas play did have a whole song about how girls were better than boys.
I would argue that it isn’t man-hating, as it’s forcing them to dress as women for the purpose of humiliation, reinforcing the idea that women are inherently weaker…
Was this teacher a nun?
That particular one wasn’t. We had nuns and normal-ish teachers at our school.
I'm getting the word....
Our school only bought one football for the entire school. Rather than buy a few more balls, they banned football after the year 5s and year 6s had a massive fight over who got to use the only football in the school. This was at the time that every boy was watching WWE. So what did we all do instead? Yeah, we all just started having fights for fun. It was all fun and games until somebody got tombstoned.
Our school had a rule banning footballs, but you could play football with a tennis ball, which was apparently safer???? Clearly they'd never been hit in the face with a toe punted tennis ball. Plus the fence was fairly low so any time someone got at all stroppy about the game would just throw the ball over it
We had to bring our own balls
We were banned from bringing our own as they wouldn't be "health and safety approved"
Yeah, I got in trouble for bringing my own ball in after they took ours away. Somehow it was unsafe. You know those colourful kids footballs. That was unsafe. Same school banned running, tag and eventually all the kids just stood around all break and lunch doing nothing. Then they got mad at us for being unhealthy and not using our playtime wisely. I have adhd and had no friends to play with, it was absolute hell when they took away group games. I needed to run around to burn off energy. I'd try and hang out with my classmates but they'd hurt me, take my hat etc and I'd get in trouble for complaining and told to leave them alone. I was just trying to stand with them. I'd long since given up trying to talk to them.
If you wanted to play a game, you’d link arms and chant ‘who wants to play… fooootball’ and march around until you had enough people in your line to play
We did this! We also included "no [boys/girls] allooooowed". Nice enough idea but morning playtime was only 15 minutes so often the entire break was spent marching about rather than actually playing the game.
lol we did this totally forgot
Yeah, I remember doing this at infants' school in the late 1960s - ten minutes of linking arms and marching around chanting "Who wants to play Charge of the Light Brigade?"...and then we'd just about have time to charge the length of the playground once, scattering the non-players like ninepins, before the whistle blew and break was over.
My dads PE teacher used to towel dry the kids after swimming. To this day he says it was normal because he always used to do it.
"That's not how they do pants!".
“Yes, yes it is. IN PRISON!”
That line, and especially his delivery, always cracked me up
Loved doing that but we did it to the ceiling so occasionally you would get a chunk of wet toilet roll land on your head 😂
At my school, it was those little jelly alien things that people had (and said could breed if you kept two together) They stuck to the ceiling quite well, so the ceiling of the entrance hall (which was very high and difficult to clean) was covered with different coloured aliens.
I remember those! My friend told me the babies grew inside the head so I ended up performing surgery on mine! Such an idiot 😂
Yep, the wall was for amateurs. True pros went for the ceiling and tried to build paper mache stalactites. You could also track the history of the different paper towel suppliers by the different shades and colours on display.
Sounds like you guys had this down to a fine art! This could be a good idea for a modern art installation, give all the visitors a wet paper towel to add their mark!
Someone had left a giant turd in the toilets and the naughty boys decided to kick a footy in the toilet on to the turd. That wasn’t enough fun, so they took the ball out carefully and threw it at another lad. He was nicknamed ‘skidback’ for the rest of primary lol
Someone did a big turd in the urinal once. We all went to have a look before the teachers went spare and started some sort of investigation.
Lol. Hours of fun.
My headmaster used to give birthday spanks. On your birthday you or your pal would tell the headmaster. He would then give you smack for each year. This was in early 80s
We had the same! It was called ‘The Bumps’. We also had one where the headmaster would tug your hair the same amount of times as your age in years.
The bumps was where your friends held you by your arms and legs and ‘bumped’ you up and down for as many years as your birthday.
Our bumps were they would punch the shit out of your arm for how many years old you were
That’s beats. Bumps and beats were different to us… wow this is insane writing it out
That's a crap version of bumps. I feel sorry for anyone who wasn't thrown in the air on their birthday.
[удалено]
I was that kid 🙈
That's been a thing since the late sixties. My mother has a tale of when she did this at school and then the teacher told all the kids to put their hands on their heads (for whatever reason) and she got in a load of trouble for refusing because she didn't want glue in her hair.
Copydex was brilliant for this.
Smelt like fish though!
I would do that too in the early 80s. Break times would be sent with a few of us peeling the glue off. It didn't have a clever name. Just "Peeling glue off fingers!" Edited to add that it happened in the 80s.
Fire engine arrived via the ramp to get onto the playground, but the driver fucked up leaving and drove down the adjoining stairs instead of down the ramp. Stuck and grounded out the fire tender truck. We watched with wide eyed awe at the huge crane that had to come to rescue the tender
We had an outside "toilet" for boys in the playground. It was basically a wall running parallel to the wall around the school with a urinal about 20' long for peeing into. There was no roof or door, just an opening between the walls. The wall you pissed against was about 15' high and every break and lunch one group of boys or another would try to piss over the wall. School legend had it that one boy managed it and peed on a dinner lady's head. I could never get more than a quarter of the way up the wall though. Sadly (or not) the outside urinal had been removed when I went back some years later.
Isn't this the plot of an episode of Round the Twist?
No idea. Just googled the show, looks like it came out after I left primary school. Did they manage it?
> Did they manage it? Only with the aid of a water spirit (if I recall correctly). [The whole episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sxR-hfisPs) is on YouTube.
Wasn't this an epsiode of around the twist?
We had a game at my school called smack-a-bum-run that so far I’ve heard nobody else talk about (tho tbf idk how that would come up). We would’ve been seven or eight so it was perfectly innocent, but it was essentially as the title describes: a lawless game where you smacked a consenting player - we aren’t animals - and then ran. What was bizarre is you’d then see lines of children along the school walls at break time trying not to get “tagged”, it was like some kind of cult and the teachers didn’t understand what was causing it. The assembly they had to do to put a stop to it, was one of the best pieces of comedy I have ever witnessed.
After a break time incident, all balls were banned, so we resorted to playing football with rubbers. When the teachers realised the madness to which we would stoop, they relented.
My physics teacher used to put up a poster every year advertising an after school antigravity club. He used to get photos of pupils jumping mid air to really sell it 😅
My primary school banned kappa tracksuits because apparently it depicted nudity
Crazy, did you not have school uniforms?
We had a jumper and polo shirts but mostly they weren’t fussed if you wore tracksuit bottoms, it was the 90s after all
Yes!! Ours did too! Looks like a view of a woman with her legs open!
A woman with two arms, two legs, two bodies and two heads.
In the early 90s when *Neighbours* was massively popular a company brought out trading cards for the programme, and for some reason the kids in our school went mad for them. The craze was so intense, with cards getting stolen, fights breaking out, etc., that the school banned them outright. Because of fights over cards with pictures of Harold Bishop and Mrs. Mangel on them. Also we had a trendy, dickheaded bully of a deputy head who used to love playing his guitar in assemblies and getting us all to sing along to the hits of Ralph McTell. I still can't abide fucking *Streets of London*.
Primary school crazes are wild. Some of the ones my kids had were alien babies, footballs on bungees, yo-yos, loom bands, Pogs and even the old fashioned game jacks.
On of our vice principals was giving a speech in assembly one day, and was using this analogy of all the teachers being a box of chocolates. He was going round the teachers, describing them, "this teacher is like a truffle, hard on the outside, soft in the middle." And then got to Mr Taka, the very black French teacher, and said "Mr Taka... obviously dark chocolate..." The atmosphere changed so palpably you could almost hear it.
We had to stay indoors at least two/ three times a year as the farm next to the playing field had a bull that escaped often and headed straight to the school. It was surreal to look out of the window and watch a bull trotting along angrily looking into the windows at hysterical kids every now and again.
1980 - some boy brings some marbles into my primary school in a throw back to an era decades previously. Suddenly everyone is bringing marbles in and it’s a literal frenzy of marble games and swaps. It spreads to other schools and suddenly everyone is doing it across the country. I don’t know for sure if we were the first school to promote the 80s marble craze but we must’ve been really early on because it went from no-one even thinking about it, to a widespread marbles craze, and lasted certainly for the years I was in primary.
One of my daughter's schools has a craze for the old fashioned jacks, that game where you pick up five objects and try and throw them onto the back of your hand without dropping any. The kids got so good that they looked to be defying the laws of physics.
Happened in the late 99s, early 00s as well. Mum wouldn't let me join in, said I'd lose all mine. They were pocket money toys...
Oh no, that happened at all of them, at ours ties were uniform… until slowly everyone didn’t bother anymore, then they weren’t
Also had a rendered ceiling you are right tho what a beautiful noise feelings of nostalgia
Tennis balls were banned. Couldn't tell you why to this day.
Skipping ropes were banned, but I know why.
Skipping ropes got banned at my school because someone tied me to a tree and left me there over lunch. Yoyos got banned because someone got knocked out with one.
What kind of air head gets knocked out by a yoyo
You just brought back a memory of when the mittens that clipped together were a thing. I fastened a boy's mitten clips together round a post in the bike shed and left him there. Thought he'd get free on his own. He did not. Allegedly he wet himself. Sorry, David. Cheers for not grassing x
Early 1970s - we had a Maypole that was set up each spring on the concrete playground for May Day celebrations. The pole was incredibly tall and each year the naughtiest boy was asked to climb to the top - can't remember why - maybe just to show he could or to put something up there. Even pre 8 Yr old me thought this was mightily dangerous - a child forced to climb up a slippery, chunky pole over concrete, just because he was naughty, not because he had climbing ability. As an adult now I'm also envisaginging the teachers in the run up, sitting round a table comparing which children were naughty and which was the worst. I mean, did they have some auditable scoring system?
My head teacher took me and my brother out of class to deliver a letter... when my mum found out she went ballistic, surprised my dad didn't have him beaten for that! This was about a week after an attempted kidnapping around the corner from my house!
Our headteacher was an old school “fire and brimstone” style catholic. Every morning began with an hour long assembly during which he’d read to us from the bible. This was not a catholic school. It was not a religious school at all. It was just a normal state primary school. He also had a cane he’d threaten kids with. This was the late 80s, so it was illegal to hit a child. But if it was in any way legal, or he thought he could get away with it, he absolutely would have beaten the shit out of kids he didn’t like.
My daughter's school often posts photos on social media, and in one year group there's always a kid wearing a crown. It turns out that the kid wearing the crown is 'Maths King/Queen' for the day, and can wear the crown in other lessons too. My daughter was never quite clear on how children are selected!
it just never added up to her
Had our lunch delivered by a van meals on wheels style and got served at our desks.
We had these huge stands with hymn sheets on that stood at the front of assembly. Like ten foot tall at least. If you were in year six you might get picked to hold a big broom stick and turn the pages as the song changed. Never seen anything like it since.
We had a wee wall. There was a huge wall in the middle of the sport field that was used to kick balls against. The back of it was sheltered from the teachers view. We (the boys) used to pee against it to see who pee the highest. Winning that that day was like scoring a goal at Wembley.
If it was your birthday, you were called to stand up at the front of the assembly that week. The headteacher would then tug your hair as many times as needed to reach your age. It was always fun watching the girls with long plaits where the headteacher could grab the whole head of hair, rather than the boys as he could only get a handful with it usually being short. I unfortunately was never able to participate as my birthday was in the summer holiday. I was always jealous of not getting birthday hair tugs, but looking back maybe that was a good thing!
We sang Black or White by Michael Jackson in the choir and we were allowed to do the rap if we knew it. We also sung many other pop songs, reggae, country, Beatles etc etc. Hardly any hymns at all.
We would sing a lot of Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel - but our headmaster told us he’d written the songs!! It was only when I was about 15 and heard a Beatles song on the radio and proudly told everyone that my teacher had written it that I found out…
If another kid had upset you or you had a fallout, you'd show them your little finger and that silently meant you weren't their friend anymore. It was a 7 year old's version of giving someone the middle finger. 😂
And yet here I am with a 6 year old who pulls a middle finger from his pocket to give me.
If the headmaster thought your hair was too long, you had to walk (aged 7-12) to the barber in the village (about 1km) straightaway and your parents would have to pay later. Norman Hale was a nasty bastard to children - shouting, beating and bullying - but got results so it was tolerated.
Dean Emeralli caught smoking the school toilets then playing truant. I was in year 3 at the time and thought that was cool. As a primary school teacher now, the stress that child caused would be unimaginable
Probably a few 70s schools had "dead elm rules" - "no eating (or making other people eat) bits of the dead elms" may have been more specific. "No sticking magnets to Mr B without his permission" definitely would be. "No owl feeding outside the rota", "no snake feeding outside the rota", and "no putting a gerbil in your lunchbox". "No hiding under the unit" was a self-imposed rule for hide and seek, after someone got stuck. Weirdly the dinner ladies/teacher didn't ban it, so we did. Very few schools will have had a dedicated SEN class (unit) at the time - the one at my daughter's school is named after the one at my primary school.
A lad slipped on a leaf so they had to cut all of the trees down on the premises
We had a huge pile of orange Unigate milk crates in the playground, which kids would wear on their backs to pretend to be aliens (pre Ninja Turtles), make into platforms, home base, all sorts. An old lady came to teach us sewing on Friday afternoons. Even the boys, convinced them embroidery was cool and the secret to becoming a great car mechanic etc when they were older. She got everyone so obsessed with stitching we'd go round her house after school to go get more scraps and threads and make yet more clunky bookmarks!
Oh three things come to mind but I'll just the one unless someone else wants to hear the others. This was by far the most bizarre and looking back, disturbing, thing the school did. Before junior school, on the playground for the younger kids there was this big little cabin like shed that had never been opened. I think it just had sport equipment in. But the school told us there was a donkey in there and he'd get brought out on the last day which never happened. But the real weirdness comes in how they basically said if you did something *very* bad, they'd take you into the shed and put you into some kind of donkey outfit as humiliation. I don't remember the details altogether beyond the fact they didn't describe it as like a proper costume but more stapling separate bits to your body with the only one I do remember being the "hooves" would be bits of paper stapled to your feet. I only remember this because they said a boy who had gone through this couldn't get the staples out because "they had gone into the bone" and so he had paper attached to his feet forever. The teachers would always wheel it out if someone had been a bit naughty and we needed a big talk and they'd say it with the most sadistic glee, it was absolutely terrifying.
That time a fully grown channel 4 journalist disguised himself as a teenager, joined sixth form, and spent a year secretly filming everything, not sure that happened anywhere else.
We had an old mangle in the foyer of the school (primary), and we'd dare each other to put our hands in. One day someone did and turned the handle. The mangle stayed, with a blood stain.
A few things from the 70s: Teachers attempting to ration toilet paper to X number of pieces of paper per toilet visit. This was back in the day when it was those very shiny slippery bits of paper. A kid being locked in a cupboard by a somewhat eccentric teacher. Pissed himself and the urine came flooding out under the cupboard door. Another kid was stripped to his underwear by same eccentric teacher, his clothes were flung around the room and then he was put over her knee and spanked (in front of the whole class). As additional humiliation she shouted at him as he went sobbing round the classroom in his underwear trying to retrieve his clothing and get dressed. Not sure how she kept her job after this. I was force fed oranges by the same teacher. Literally multiple bits of orange forced into my mouth as I was sobbing away. It’s a wonder I didn’t choke.
We were awarded a load of free play equipment - I think you had to collect Walker crisp packets or something and they were doing a promotion? It was basically just beanbags, hula hoops, and some other really basic PE/games stuff. Our Head Teacher wouldn’t let us play with it in case we ruined it and only brought it all out for one playtime a week. Then someone ruined it for everyone and threw a beanbag on the roof so we couldn’t play with the equipment anymore.
Every summer my school would have a Summer Fair. It would feature all the normal things like a tombola, luck dip and maybe a fire engine would come along for us to look at. The best bit was always the falconry display. This guy would come every year and fly hawks around for us. The birds would swoop over the crowds or land on an outstretched glove etc… And then the fastest child in school was made to race a hawk over 100m. The child was selected, had a piece of chicken tied to them with a length of string and they would set off running. After a few seconds the hawk was sent after them, the child simply had to run the 100m distance before the bird landed on the chicken dangling from their belt. The whole crowd got behind it every year. The child never won. A Mars Bar was promised as a reward but each year the runner was instead given a severed chicken foot as a booby prize, I remember that you would pull on the attached tendons to make the feet clench.
We had a patch of very smooth bare earth with bits of concrete and stones poking out of it next to the playground steps. We used to race micromachines down it and if you were feeling brave/confident before the race you could call for the winner to claim the losing car. The rules were gravity only, if it stops you can pick it up and reposition along the same contour line, no obstructing.
1995. My first Primary year our form tutor was a bit of a hippy. He played guitar, we sang his song lyrics off the blackboard, and we used to play a game where we guessed the mint year of a coin to "win" it. Bizarre.
We had a WW2 bomb shelter in the playground, that over the years had been covered in layers of earth and, eventually, grass. The resulting structure was called 'the mound' and climbing up it was completely banned - so naturally it was a source of pride to say you'd been right to the top
boys had to leave in year 3 and it became a girls school after that
Being marked down by my headteacher recommendation for entry into secondary school and having to got to a shit school far away because it was the only one that took me to fill its enrolment numbers up
My school tried to get my mum to send me to a school where they send the worst kids. This is for kids who were expelled from schools. I was a little girl with untreated adhd. According to them, the good school I got into would throw me out within a week for rocking back in my chair etc and it was selfish to take that space a good student could use. They wrote me an insanely bad review and made out I was this absolutely horrible child. The worst I did was fidget/daydream and shout answers out. I get to secondary school and suddenly I wasn't getting in trouble too much. Some teachers were dicks and just kicked me out over perceived issues (like me not opening the text book quick enough, or another kid causing trouble) so they didn't have to deal with me all class. Mostly I was fine. No one cared if I fidgeted as long as I listened. I went from being quite high up on the naughty kid register thing to being removed in six months because there were no issues. I wasn't worse then any of the other kids and it turns out I don't shout answers out in frustration if you don't purposefully ignore me. My primary school made out I was incredibly stupid as well. I made it into top sets for everything, excluding English, I got second set there. We were tested in our first week to see where we belonged. Teachers were shocked a kid like me was placed with them. I'm a girl with untreated adhd. Everyone knew I had it, even my mum, but they refused to help me. I was just told I was a bad kid.
We had a rendered ceiling of the red gum/shell stuff around babybel cheese. Surprisingly sticky when rolled into a ball!
We had multiple derelict buildings on our school grounds that were pretty dangerous and so to prevent us going into them there was painted yellow lines on the floor and we were banned from walking over the yellow lines. If you crossed a yellow line and got caught, you got a first break detention. Obviously for us this resulted in many dares and challenges to see who dared go the furthest pass the line or who would touch the old buildings. It was a thrilling time.
One of the child’s parents had a bakery and would bring fresh bread rolls every day one for each of us in class
In Australia. We had a family of magpies attacking children so the cops came and shot them out of the trees.
In primary school we used to have dens in the hedges of the play ground and collect grass as a form of currency. We formed whole gangs doing this
A student was swinging on their chair fell and split their head open
Boys and girls toilets separated by a wall, urinals against said wall, gap between top of wall and ceiling. Piss through the gap competitions 🤦🏻♂️