Burnley Grammar School

Comment by: Chris on 30th May 2025 at 22:51

....."There is nothing sexual about naked children and anybody who sees this interaction in a sexual light like Alan can't stop doing is the one with the problem. There is no need for the teacher to see a child naked in the school setting but if a teacher is present when children are getting dressed/changed/showering for PE some nudity is inevitable. This doesn't make it in any way, shape or form sexual........"

I think Chris is correct with his views .I don't Allan can't disassociate himself from his own experiences.

Comment by: Chris on 30th May 2025 at 22:51

....."There is nothing sexual about naked children and anybody who sees this interaction in a sexual light like Alan can't stop doing is the one with the problem. There is no need for the teacher to see a child naked in the school setting but if a teacher is present when children are getting dressed/changed/showering for PE some nudity is inevitable. This doesn't make it in any way, shape or form sexual........"

Chris you are being truly ingenuous. What about paedophile teachers, and if you don't believe there are any, I can point you to several court cases where this is the motive, and the culprit has been found guilty as charged. In other cases, though it was known at the time by pupils and other teachers alike, they were brushed under the carpet to save getting the school a bad name. It has only been in more recent years where teachers have been prosecuted, probably because parents were apparently as jejune as you seem to be.

Oh dear - someone has woken Dando up. Zzzzzzzz!

I found it embarrassing when we had an audience when we were participating at PE,especially as I didn't consider that we had appropriate kit.Of course we were topless and just wore our shorts to which we had become accustomed as even older boys were dressed accordingly.As we were all dressed the same for our usual activities and weren't seen by anyone except the teachers who took us I didn't find it embarrassing.
Same as at home ,as I was expected to strip off in front of my parents.

There are 2 completely different issues being discussed here.

1) Humiliation/embarrassment that a child feels having to shower with their classmates. This is a valid debate.

and

2) There is something terribly wrong with a teacher seeing a child naked.

There is nothing sexual about naked children and anybody who sees this interaction in a sexual light like Alan can't stop doing is the one with the problem. There is no need for the teacher to see a child naked in the school setting but if a teacher is present when children are getting dressed/changed/showering for PE some nudity is inevitable. This doesn't make it in any way, shape or form sexual.

So every kid has a get out clause.. if they're asked to do something they don't feel comfortable with they can be excluded? Would a child ever learn anything in life with that approach?

I know I'm making a bit of a jump here but sometimes it's the uncomfortable things we're made to do as children that teach us sometimes things aren't as bad as they seem in our heads.

I preferred doing a lot of PE without a top on and being bare chested. I was always quite keen to take a shower afterwards too. I was completely comfortable with the whole arrangement which all seemed sensible.

I don't see the problem with the audience participation events either. If you were someone who already did gym at school without a top on all year long wouldn't it seem odd that the teacher might change tack and suddenly require shirts or vests on boys upper bodies just because of an audience which is only their family anyway. You have an audience in PE anyway, the others in class and the teachers. Nobody was bothered to strip off in front of their own family were they, removing their top, surely? In most cases they are probably admiring how good you all look.

I always thought myself and the boys in PE looked great doing it all shirtless baring our upper bodies and getting them some fresh air, both in or out. I often chose to run cross country without my top on and either carried it in my hand or tucked it in my shorts. Some boys copied me, although nobody was forced to do so but our teachers didn't mind one bit.

Hi Deborah,

'the method in the PE kit for the boys at our primary school was that it was what most boys liked and it was also unfussy and easy to deal with, and so we took the boys into PE indoors without tops on almost always'

It amazes me how many former teachers on here have decided that the correct method for determining PE kit was to decide based on their own personal presumption or that the boys all looked nice and smart with their tops off or whatever, instead of actually, y'know . . . asking the kids themselves what they preferred?

As you say that rule was established before your time and as a school employee it was your duty to observe the rules and not to question them. But how did you know the boys preferred PE that way? Did any member of the teaching staff actually ask them? It is important not to mistake lack of dissent as assent. Children learn as they go through the school system that certain things are inescapable (just look back at some of the recent anecdotes on here concerning boys who found the idea of communal showering abhorrent and the fates that befell them). I was badly bullied at secondary school but rarely told any of it to my parents. This emphatically did not mean I was happy. It concerns me how many times here I have now read the argument, "Oh well, the boys never complained so they must have been okay with it." advanced by present or former teachers, who of all people, should know better than that.

There is also the fact that people, even primary school age children, are different. It is a mistake to generalise. Most boys, then as now, seemed deliriously happy chasing a ball up and down the field at breaktimes. I hated it, finding it mind-numbing at best and at worst, when I was made to play it, nothing short of tyranny. I refused to join in with the breaktime kickabouts and at home would leave the room if football came on the TV. People are different. You can't extrapolate from a few happy individuals that everyone else is fine with it too.

As for being unfussy and easy to deal with, well, up to the age of puberty the same rule would have been just as appropriate for the girls, would it not, especially if as you say younger children are less likely to suffer inhibitions? Let me guess, though . . .

My primary school had no changing rooms, we changed in our classrooms. There were two classes in each school year and the girls went off into the other classroom while we boys stayed in ours. I honestly can't remember whether our class teachers stayed to supervise us changing or not, so it can't have been a big deal even to me. I think they used to exit and leave us to it (health and safety violation?) but honestly I can't now remember, which suggests I didn't find it too unpleasant.

It was no big deal, you stripped down to underwear then put on your t-shirt and shorts. Generally we were allowed to wear plimsolls too, even indoors.

Our primary school had swimming classes in third-year juniors, which I was dreading. On the last day of term in second year before we broke up for the summer it was announced that the swimming lessons had been scrapped due to funding cuts - this was the early 80s after all. There was a chorus of groans from other disappointed boys but I was quietly relieved. Until reading your post it never occurred to me in my life to speculate whether we would have been supervised changing by a woman teacher.

Mark,going shirtless for PE and games was not optional,but mandatory.It always amazed me how it could be achieved and to make hundreds of boys that attended our school from the ages 11 to 16 go shirtless for their games.When I mentioned it to my parents they told me not to be silly and said that I looked good just wearing my shorts.

Appreciated reading your honest post Deborah. You are the second primary school female teacher in recent months on here to say something along these lines.

Alex and James, I'm pleased I was never placed in that situation, especially yours Alex. It was bad enough running briefly down a suburban street in cross country with my shirt off and that was only for a few moments until we reached 'safety' of the course area our school used to do such things, although it was still fully public but with not many people around. What gives with these kind of expectations, I mean would you expect to go on holiday to Great Yarmouth and be told by the council there that you had to go shirtless on the beach whether you wanted to or not, and have council enforcement officers coming at you for non compliance!

Alright so PE teachers wanted shirtless in their gyms, but doing things for an audience should surely have given a bit more leeway about sensitivities. Many boys like you say would have been anxious about just doing gym with people watching them without the added shirtless angle thrown in too. This isn't a new point though, it's been made before.

I've been one of those teachers back in time who made these kind of asks of children Alex in primary school I taught at in the 1980s and 90s. I'm not a dedicated PE teacher as primary teachers take all subjects but the method in the PE kit for the boys at our primary school was that it was what most boys liked and it was also unfussy and easy to deal with, and so we took the boys into PE indoors without tops on almost always. Sometimes the children did little performances for their parents and the boys did not have tops on. I have mixed feeling about that now. These were laid down primary school rules in place long before my arrival and still in place when I left.

Would I be right in asserting that younger children, those in primary school are less self conscious about themselves than the older children of secondary age? I do not remember many boys responding badly to being top free in PE class, but I do remember a couple of children who responded unfavourably to being in bare feet, which was obviously a common choice for primary school PE lessons and how we generally took it in those days.


Our primary school wasn't large, we had 200 pupils in eight classes,but had proper PE changing rooms for boys and girls and there was a notice beside both doors that I remember saying: private - no unauthorised admittance. I remember having a chat about this and was told it didn't relate to any of the adult teaching staff at school who had automatic admittance when necessary at all times and was instead aimed at the children keeping out when they shouldn't be in them, like at lunchtime.

Our primary school did not use showering but female staff such as me did supervise the boys changing room properly while changing was taking place, and when they were taken for swimming I had to supervise boys changing for that too, simply because there were not many male staff around who did these jobs, in our school the most we had at one point was four and much of the time just two, one of which was a deputy head teacher who didn't have his own permanent class to take anyway. We often wondered what he spent much of the day doing.

I think younger boys are much more accepting of these things though. I always enjoyed teaching this age group up to the age of twelve.

I had one child, a son, who grew up and went to school in those years too, and am happy with all the arrangement that were made for him at his own primary and secondary school where he would have often been top free for PE and told to shower when older, and although we spoke of many things school related and I took a keen interest because of my own job, he rarely complained about his lot in PE lessons and we did speak about showering in his secondary school I remember that.

Johnny,I wore shorts for school,so my mother thought it was appropriate to wear shorts at home.

@ James, did you mean to say that your mother kept you in shorts only and shirtless at home?

Following on, with this long running debate,

I have just been listening to a programme on Radio 4 called Gap Finders (tx 1204-1230 29 May 2025), in which they were talking to a dermatologist about skin cancer and sun creams, and he was saying that people should not go out of doors between 11 and 2 in the afternoon without a shirt on. P.E teachers who still insist on doing that should take a listen:

https:bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002cqql

Comment by: James on 29th May 2025 at 08:23

I sometimes think parents, especially mothers, forget just how much bullying and unpleasantness goes on in schools. I can't find any excuse for it. I think where women are concerned it is sometimes due to vanity. To allow their little boys to group up into adults is to admit they are getting older themselves.


Comment by: Alex on 29th May 2025 at 02:20



....."I know what this feels like James. I had to perform to an audience in comprehensive school doing gym once when I was twelve and did so shirtless just like many of our PE lessons were in the school gym. Our PE teacher at the time thought all the boys would look better and more presentable if we all did it in our bare chests and flat out refused to let anyone perform in front of our school family audience and teachers any other way......."


You honestly have to question the motives of teachers like that. If I had been a parent I would have questioned it.

No male should ever be forced to take a pe lesson shirtless or with barefeet. Even today there are still schools who force pupils to submit to a mandatory school shower. It is time for Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson to end this barbaric practice or risk the ire of voters in the 2029 general election. Here is an offending institution. https://www.castlehill.stockport.sch.uk/Information/Uniforms/ Students are required to shower after PE and should bring a towel. On Wednesdays, at certain times of the year, Year 7 students will need to bring a swimming kit for swimming lessons.

Alex,thank you for your reply,yes,it was rather daunting to take our PE lessons when shirtless and bare foot especially in front of a large audience when my parents attended.
At the secondary school that I attended being bare without tops was part of the uniform requirement and was compulsory for boys from 11 to 16. Of course we had to comply with this statutory requirement and my parents thought it was quite sensible and that I looked quite attractive being bare chested.This prompted my mother to to keep me dressed entirely in shorts at home,which I strongly objected to,but to no avail.

Comment by: James on 27th May 2025 at 13:33
We often had open days at the secondary school that I attended and I was shy and found it particularly daunting to perform our activities with a large audience.
My mother approved of me just wearing shorts and took the opportunity to keep me in shorts at home.





I know what this feels like James. I had to perform to an audience in comprehensive school doing gym once when I was twelve and did so shirtless just like many of our PE lessons were in the school gym. Our PE teacher at the time thought all the boys would look better and more presentable if we all did it in our bare chests and flat out refused to let anyone perform in front of our school family audience and teachers any other way. I was a big deal already to show off a gym routine in school with people watching without the insistence we went skins for it too. I was a bag of nerves about it. I was also very shy about such things but it never made much difference to anyone. They treated us like this right under the noses of our own parents looking on and none of them seemed to make a thing of it.

The youngest boys at school always had to do PE in the gymnasium in bare chests and feet. It was only when you reached the fourth and fifth years that they relaxed this a lot and allowed tops to be worn. I don't know why they made it a rule that the lower school boys had to be shirtless in PE and the upper school boys did not past the age of 15.

The school rules were everyone must shower every time and this even applied after we did that performance to an audience. I remember a couple of the parents coming into our changing room afterwards and someone's father I knew actually said hello to me as I walked from the shower to my bench to change. Mortifying stuff.

Hi Alan,
We often had open days at the secondary school that I attended and I was shy and found it particularly daunting to perform our activities with a large audience.
My mother approved of me just wearing shorts and took the opportunity to keep me in shorts at home.

"Hi Alan,

Religion is for the weekend in my opinion. And it should be funded solely by the community in question, no state subsidies, not even for anglican. School should be for education not indoctrination......."


I couldn't agree with you more, YT. Organised religion, in my view, has caused far more problems than it has ever solved, and in my opinion would be better not being bought into education. This is yet another subject, not unlike P.E. where it is being forced on to everyone, when comparatively few will have any interest in the subject.

I honestly think schools should only exist to teach subjects that are relevant universally. Much as I enjoyed art, it was a subject that didn't interest a mass audience. Reading, writing, English grammar, Maths, some history, and geography should be the core subjects, and the rest available to those who want the subjects, not forced on unwilling pupils. A couple of the cleverest people I knew had been educated during the war years when there had been a very circumscribed range of subjects. Those who wanted to learn more did so through night schools and the like, taking the subjects that interested in them, and progressed their careers, and in those days they left school at FOURTEEN!.


Comment by: Jonathan on 27th May 2025 at 02:00


"Yes we had the same tortuous communal showers at my school. We all loathed it. The teacher would count us in in two groups of 10 boys. We were literally only in for 2 minutes. The second group waiting their turn would just stand there trying to cover ourselves by hand, no towels while waiting, till the 2 minutes was up. Soap didn't feature in the process. It wasn't really wasn't worth the effort much of the time so I can only assume it was our school's method of ritual humiliation just like it was everywhere else.

You can't tell me that fifty years ago, indeed a lot more recently even, that this wasn't appealing to men who had paedo tendancies, when this was a job that could give them a ready made constant supply of naked children all week in large numbers very close to them. It just must have attracted a nit insignificant number of people into the job because they could safely order children to do this on the pretext that their bodies must be so sweaty and stinky or filthy from outside that they absolutely had no choice but to get showered......"


How nice it is to be in full agreement with so many recent posts. I entirely agree with you Jonathan. Our P.E. teacher was a dirty old man of many years standing (and leaning against the wall, inspecting the lads showering with his hands in his track suit) - too cold for him but not for us. I am sure that many teachers then - and perhaps now - got their jollies from watching us. Of course, very few 11 year old boys perspire to any degree at all, but it is a way of controlling the boys to their will from the day they start senior school. It is too easy to intimidate young boys from day one. There are some very strange individuals teaching this subject. Which leads me to:


Comment by: James on 27th May 2025 at 04:46


"...James C,

I agree,I don't think it should be age related not wearing a vest for PE.
To allow boys to wear vests at a certain age would make younger boys feel self conscious...."

Again, full agreement, except that I would not make it compulsory at any age. Though teachers in the early years like to dominate from day one, what a boy or girl feels comfortable in (and it will vary from child to child) should be a matter for them. All that rubbish about "performing better" in minimal kit is just so much hokum - it will not turn everyone in to an Olympic athlete, and not that many kids want to be.

Hi Jonathan,

Ritual humiliation is right. Here is a group of eleven-year-old boys. Most of them don't know each other, they're all struggling to process a new and potentially hostile environment, they're having to process a great deal of new rules. teaching methods and customs, they've probably never been around hulking sixteen-year-old sixth-formers before. It's all a lot to take in.

How could we possibly make this time worse?

Strip them naked, that's how!

I had two full medical exams in primary school and they are still bitter memories. It turned out that at secondary school I was to undergo a similarly invasive experience every week in term-time. We could just have gone and bathed/ showered at home, Games was the last lesson on Monday afternoons and you might have thought that a typically cash-strapped, underfunded state school in maggie's Britain might have been glad of the chance to shave a few crucial pennies off their energy bills by waiving the showering thing, but no way Jose. We were getting in them showers or else. When you are eleven years old and faced with a fifty-something man with a barely concealed anger problem you don't feel like arguing.

I still fail to see why it was necessary. As an adult I have never had to get balls-naked in front of other men. Communal showering was not an essential life skill. And the onset of adolescence is entirely the wrong time to inflict this ritual on young people.

None of those patronising cliches that our parents' generation were so fond of trotting out turned out to be true. It didn't make a man of me. It didn't toughen me up, I just carried on being the same shy, introverted kid I was anyway. It didn't teach me discipline - if by discipline you mean getting children to do as they're told - I had already learned that in primary school.

What it did was make me unnecessarily unhappy. Games was the last lesson on Monday afternoons and the knowledge of what was coming would hang over my head all day. A lifetime later I am still utterly unsporty and still struggle to see what's so captivating about chasing a ball up and down a field and going apeshit when your team wins, so it was all a grand waste of time that made me unhappy for no reason.

I was never aware that any deviant stuff was going on. Our teachers made a point of turning on the showers and immediately disappearing which seems to have been very much the exception to the rule.

James C,

I agree,I don't think it should be age related not wearing a vest for PE.
To allow boys to wear vests at a certain age would make younger boys feel self conscious.
Boys at both my primary school and secondary school boys were promoted to wearing long trousers at a certain age and I continued to wear short trousers through secondary school as my parents considered it unnecessary and inappropriate to be promoted to wearing long trousers at a certain age.

Yes we had the same tortuous communal showers at my school. We all loathed it. The teacher would count us in in two groups of 10 boys. We were literally only in for 2 minutes. The second group waiting their turn would just stand there trying to cover ourselves by hand, no towels while waiting, till the 2 minutes was up. Soap didn't feature in the process. It wasn't really wasn't worth the effort much of the time so I can only assume it was our school's method of ritual humiliation just like it was everywhere else.

You can't tell me that fifty years ago, indeed a lot more recently even, that this wasn't appealing to men who had paedo tendancies, when this was a job that could give them a ready made constant supply of naked children all week in large numbers very close to them. It just must have attracted a nit insignificant number of people into the job because they could safely order children to do this on the pretext that their bodies must be so sweaty and stinky or filthy from outside that they absolutely had no choice but to get showered.

It was a ritual, and a rite of passage. It was also a right old con job on most of us, but the teachers loved inflicting it on us over and over.

Getting older I started thinking about this and it suddenly all hit me as wrong to force.

Hi Christine Sanderson,

'Most school sixth forms are perfectly happy if their students wish to continue on with PE in some form, but it's a very different kind of PE and sometimes the sixth former will help out.'

Just so long as it is through their own free choice! My old school forced sixth-formers to carry on doing PE, which is an indignity and overstepping the mark in my opinion. Over-sixteen-year-olds are young adults and should be granted a certain measure of dignity. (At least at my school they were allowed to wear clothes, unlike at Danny C's).I have said in a previous post how my late sister, who was otherwise completely straitlaced and conformist, consistently dodged the PE requirement in sixth form because she considered it an indignity,. I have also told of two sixth-form girls getting wolf-whistled in their PE kit, which as young adults they should never have been exposed to. Schools and their power trips.

As regards sixth-formers helping out? I still remember my first ever games lesson, which was taken not by any teacher but by two sixteen-year-old boys. I was getting mocked and shouted at by the other boys in my year for lack of performance. These two boys just found it funny. You seem quite oblivious.


Hi Alan,

My school used the local catholic communities to buoy up its intake numbers, from groups who were more concerned with the religious element and less critical of the school's track record than they should have been.

Religion is for the weekend in my opinion. And it should be funded solely by the community in question, no state subsidies, not even for anglican. School should be for education not indoctrination.

There was one kid who got into the local grammar school. He was far and away the cleverest child in my year at primary school. Apparently the school had to wage a campaign to get this boy into the grammar, as if they were prejudiced against my primary school. When he was accepted at the local grammar school the whole class was told, as if we should all have been m ore concerned with Brains from Thunderbirds' education than our own, as if he was more important than the rest of us or something.

Comment by: James C on 26th May 2025 at 18:01


Because by the time you are in sixth form you are an adult - other lads and girls your age will be in work and treated like colleagues, not children.

All that semi-militaristic nonsense should have gone by the board decades ago. Teachers - and some students - take themselves far too seriously

Alan,
Going barechested in 6th form wasn't a surprise. We were expected to set an example the younger lads and the females to the younger girls. Stripping off our vests in the gym at the start of a PE lesson was doing what every lad.did. Why should we have went been treated any differently?

Comment by: Tony on 26th May 2025 at 02:15



Hi Tony - rereading JW's message, after reading yours, I concede you might well be right. It was the fact that he mentioned 11-18 that I took to mean he made his "request/requirement" to them. Mind you, he sounded so old-fashioned, who knows? - he might try to instill his rules on them as well. I remember not so long ago Danny C mentioned that it had been a requirement on sixth formers at his school that they were made to do P.E with the same restrictions.

Gary,
When we did inter house running and games we were allowed to use the girls'changing room,but we were supervised by the female teacher who took the girls.

Greg quote/answer - "I don’t resent having had to shower while at school. I did just become resigned to it, as I expect we all did, but it was my very first shower that remained in my memory with the most vividness, plus a few other times when we visited other schools following school football. All the rest became routine and so now just a blur. It's the differences to our routines that we remember the most, which is hardly surprising."


So you played on the school football team like me Greg. Going back to a two year period 1976-78 I was the goalie on our team of under 15s at school. One of the worst parts of this for me was having to visit other schools and play them like you have said in your own comment. This meant sharing the changing room with the home boys when we were the away school visitors. We'd have one half of their changing room, they'd be the other half, each with our teachers. No real mingling, until afterwards when both school teams had to use the showers together, not a thing on, being watched by two teachers, their teacher and ours and I never enjoyed being thrown into showers with boys I didn't know from the other school and using their own showers. I felt much the same when our school was the home venue for a game and we had to share our changing room and showers with the away visitors to us. Most of this happened after school hours of course but it made no difference and there was never any chance the PE teacher in charge of us would let us off the obligatory school team shower even when sharing with other boys from other schools.

In proper adult football games the away team often have their own separate area and changing room, but school didn't have that luxury of course and not many had multiple boys changing rooms.

I never understood why our school or any of the schools we played against wouldn't let the other boys team use the girls changing rooms during this kind of after school football, it would have made things a lot less awkward, but it never happened anywhere we went or at ours, and all the schools were mixed.

No Alan you've misunderstood what Wootton said in his first comment and I don't see how you haven't understood it. Christine and Nicholas are right.

Look, from what you picked out;

'Our school, an Essex academy catering for 11 to 18's regularly requests/requires (take your pick) that those who take PE through all the key stages in years 7 to 11 (boys) leave their tops off (bare chest) during indoor PE lessons, sometimes outside.'



Years 7 to 11 are the ages of 11 to 16 years old in school. They are not sixth form above the age of 16. Wootton has only said this applied to that age range and not 16 to 18, and by saying regularly obviously this does not mean always either, just sometimes. But in terms of the ages, he spelt that out quite clearly for me to understand. I don't know in what context these boys are being asked or told to do PE shirtless but it could just be the old skins and shirts set up couldn't it. That is still a very common thing it seems.

I always found it fascinating last year when the other PE teacher was around commenting here from time to time and did his little survey of a couple of classes and came out with his 75 percent in class being alright with him asking them at his school to do PE in their bare chests when he asked an opinion on it.