Burnley Grammar School

Robert Coulson - Teacher 1967-2009 on 13th May 2022 at 21:03

Thank you for all that info, it helps to develop understanding of what was normal back then and it was these men (with the exception of the classic 'French mistress') who educated me during the 1960s and early 70s.

Richard, as well as the shock of having to remove your p e top, were you allowed to wear anything under your shorts? or did you wear underwear for pe at your previous school?

I'm someone who also changed schools while at secondary age and I found a lot about Rich's post relevant to me too, strikingly so.

We never did proper warm ups in p.e. We were always expected to get stuck straight into things. This often left my muscles aching like hell, especially my biceps and arms a lot and the aches could take days to ease away, just in time for the next lesson which would send me right back aching again. Looking at the b & w '59 photo words that spring mind immediatley are 'aching' 'cold' 'miserable' and 'echoey'. We needed proper warm ups, those gyms could be on a par with a fridge at certain times of the year.

I'll chalk another primary maypole up here as well. We always made merry around that thing, must have done it half a dozen times when it was taken out onto the tarmac playground. We just wore normal clothes I think, possibly with black 70s style plimsolls, if anyone knows the type I mean that everyone seemd to own. A shame we can't submit our own photo memories on here isn't it.

A story about my school change.

Thirty five years ago my workaholic father's job meant I had to move school when I was halfway through my third year in school when I was thirteen and a half. The school I was at and loved I had to leave behind with all my friends, most who I never saw again until I found some online a few years back and said hello. This school was fairly good but had a fairly laid back attitude especially to PE and I was allowed to do many things I actually enjoy like sprinting, squash and long jump for example and could avoid some things quite easily without much fuss being made about it. We had a designated rough outline of a PE kit we should bring and often we wore our own stuff. We always wore tops, t-shirts etc and trainers inside and out. There were showers and they got used sometimes but were a bit hit and miss. Some days you'd be asked to use them which I did, other days they were never even turned on and even if they were you'd easily walk out without using them and nobody much minded, which I also did. It worked well for me and I had no problems.

During the February half term we moved from Sussex right up to the North East of England near Sunderland and I started at my new school more or less immediatley. This was probably one of the most traumatic upheavals of my life and the move really upset me a lot generally both before it and afterwards for ages. I knew it would prove hard to fit in all over again and it did for many months before settling down.

The new school felt far less tolerant of the individual to me in all aspects. Things I could get away with back in Sussex I couldn't anymore. The very worst was PE. I liked PE at the school I'd left but became completely disillusioned at my new school. They had set lessons and everyone did much the same, and too much of it kept revolving around team games such as football outdoors or basketball inside. Neither gave me much enthusiasm. Before arriving I knew all about my actual school uniform and what I had to wear but knew absolutely nothing about how I'd be expected to turn out for various PE classes. It never even crossed my mind actually and I naively assumed I would turn out much the same as I had done so at my old Sussex school. It's pathetic how under prepared I was looking back on it.

My first PE lesson was on my third day at my new school, just after lunch and inside in a windowless and very brightly lit sporting complex. I'd come to school with my exact same PE kit I wore at my old school and expected to just slip it on and get out there doing whatever. The facilities were all very nice and somewhat better than my other old school, and it looked like a place that meant business and was almost intimidating I'd say. I felt like a complete fish out of water and it was just about to get a whole lot worse. I hadn't been worried about PE classes in the new school and was quite interested to know what I'd be doing in my first one. Until I set foot in the changing room I had not seen the face of any of the teachers but I don't remember feeling apprehensive about it. I found myself a place to stick my schoolbag and sat down to get changed into my usual PE kit, the one from my old school. Nice white tennis shoe style trainers, white socks, some mainly white coloured shorts and a white and blue t-shirt. Two completely seperate classes of boys had joined together to make up one PE class and shared the changing area. I felt quite lonely and had so far only befriended two others in a meaningful way and one of those had been assigned deliberately by my main class teacher to nursemaid me in my first few days in the place, although he was friendly and we got on.

As I changed I could see everyone else doing the same and thought nothing of it. School shirts and ties were coming off and so did mine and on went my t-shirt and at that point I suddenly became aware that a large number of the boys around me had not reached into their bags for a t-shirt to put on. There was still no PE teacher in the changing room either. It suddenly hit me like a ten ton brick that they were not going to be putting a top on, they were going to stay like that and I was sitting there thinking shall I still keep my t-shirt on or not. Then a couple of smirks and a dozen faces looking at me and some laughter. I really didn't fancy it but I thought I better get the t-shirt off a bit quickly and as I did this the boy who was my being my new boy mentor told me they did PE like that inside nearly every time. All I can remember was this sense of stomach churn and a light headed other worldliness and I began internalising all this rather unexpected developement very rapidly indeed. I had never done a PE lesson like that at school ever and didn't want to very much either.

There was no teacher in the changing room at the start of the lesson, we all went to the class location and he met us there and he noticed me as new boy and was perfectly nice, more than I expected actually. He kept me aside and asked me some questions where I'd come from and what I did in my old school PE and I told him how different it seemed and that I was very nervous not having a t-shirt. He laughed reassuring me that he'd soon give me plenty of confidence to forget about myself and off I went into my first ever new school PE lesson without a top and we did trampoline, high bars, bench presses, and trapeze. It felt a very strange thing to do at the time.

I was horrifically shy in those first few days and weeks and some of the boys knew it and gave me a ribbing about it but as time wore on that PE teacher's words slowly came true and I forgot myself but doing PE like that I also took a lot more interest in how I looked.

Unlike my old school we all had to take a shower together rather than choose if we wanted to. But on balance and when I look back from a safe distance I think I got more benefits from going to the new school back then which made me do things I'd not done before and made me do them and pushed me even in directions out of my own private comfort zone than being in my old Sussex school that let us just get on with it much of the time and do so many things on our own terms.

Detailed well documented read Robert Coulson. What did you teach? We need more like that. This that I highlighted below from someone else here was rubbish wasn't it Robert, you seemed too agree, yes?

Comment by: Christy on 30th April 2022
I've looked at those posts Ambrose. I'm sceptical. Very sceptical.

One bit got me in particular. Sixties training college advising/encouraging PE staff to jump into the school showers with pupils just to supervise. Come on, really? Any proof out there I can read that corroborates this teacher training advice from back then? Keen to read it if so.

That was a mighty good read Robert, thanks for posting/pasting it. It took me as long as one of my entire double periods to wade through but that's not a criticism.

Robert & Pat.

I found what both of you put on here quite interesting but I think the school training one ought to have been edited somewhat. I always think it's better if things get said in ones own words rather than simply pasting them from elsewhere although I can fully understand why it was done in both cases. It's no big deal though and if anyone has a short attention span they can easily scroll by.

At least it is genuine history.

Phew! I need a lie-down after getting through that little thesis (well, half of it anyway!) I do hope we're not going to be tested on it....... ;)

Blimey, what a long read that was. Very interesting as well.

A few rogues may have tried it on but PE teachers were NEVER, I repeat NEVER encouraged to behave like Ambrose suggested. I should know, I was there at the time. For anyone with a genuine interest in teacher training going back over the past 60 years feel free to read.

Notes on Teacher Training 1960s to present day

Teacher Training in the 1940s and ‘50s
1.Forecasts of shortages of teachers after the Second World War led to the formation of a number of Emergency Training Colleges in addition to those existing ones, which were able to expand to accommodate post-war expectations. The ETCs ran one-year training courses which were very popular. The scheme ended in 1951 having produced more than 23,000 male and nearly 12,000 female teachers – the highest proportion of these were in the secondary modern schools (Gosden, pp.285-9).
2.The McNair Report of 1944 recommended that all teacher training should be under the supervision of universities, whether in their own education departments or in training colleges. Most of them set up university ‘institutes’ of education within 14 geographical divisions called ‘Area Training Organisations’ – by 1948, these were operational across the country (Gosden, pp.291-2).
3.The Institute of Education had traditionally collaborated with the other London colleges to provide an undergraduate training course which consisted of a major subject (pursued as a separate undergraduate course) plus education (taken in the Institute) for a Teaching Certificate (2 years). They also offered a one-year course for graduates, usually those entering grammar school teaching (now called a PGCE – postgraduate certificate in education). From the late 1940s, all professors and readers at the IoE were also required to pursue research and cultivate higher degree students which contributed to the growth of education as an academic research focus.
4.The immediate post-war period saw a big expansion of teacher training – for instance, Leicester University was permitted to re-open its Education Department during the 1945-6 session with central funding from the Ministry of Education. They recruited students for both 1-year (postgraduate) and 4-year courses (undergraduate). Many of the first students after the War were ex-service personnel who had already graduated – Leicester and Bristol were the only universities to assess the 1-year course without using a written examination.
5.Leicester therefore built up a reputation as a ‘progressive’ institution. J.W. Tibble, the Professor of Education, had pioneered the use of ‘unstructured group teaching’ at University College, Exeter. Although Tibble appointed mainly people who agreed with progressive ideas about child psychology (including Brian Simon), he also appointed Geoffrey Bantock, who had a traditionalist and right-wing view.
6.The course at Leicester focused on ‘subject method’ with a whole term in teaching practice and 2 days a week in school in the other terms. Subject disciplines were sidelined in favour of ‘history of education’, ‘educational philosophy’ and child development. ‘They held “self-discovery groups” … encouraging students to criticise the education course and the methods of teaching employed by the staff.’ (School of Education, p.8)
7.The development of history teacher training at the IoE was associated from 1948 to the 1960s with W. Hedley Burston, described by Richard Aldrich as ‘a traditionalist with experience in independent schools and a background in philosophy and economics’. Peter Lee speaks affectionately about Burston, who recruited him from his first teaching post in a boys’ grammar school to join the IoE.
Extract from Lee’s interview:
Now at the Institute I bumped into Burston of course, and Burston was a very difficult character to get on with, I mean he was hated by a lot of people and indeed by a lot of the students, though it was never a straightforward hatred, it was always also … there was also a degree of respect and uncomfortableness in what they were complaining about because he made them do things which they thought were of no relevance to teaching whatsoever. He worked through WH Walsh’s ‘Introduction to the Philosophy of History’. That was what you got before you entered a school and of course they couldn’t, most of them, a lot of them could see absolutely no sense in this, whereas I just thoroughly enjoyed it because I thought this was going to be a nonsense, a nonsense course with hints and tips and I was really pleased to discover that there was some real bite to it and it all seemed to be very important. Though Burston, I mean the problem was that he hadn’t really found a sensible way of relating it to teaching in ways that most students could see the point of. That was always the problem. (p.3).
8.In progressive departments, such as Leicester and the IoE, students could feel frustrated at the lack of structure and practical advice on teaching history (School of Education pp.10-11) Patricia Dawson was extremely critical of her training at the IoE in 1963-4 because it was focused on philosophy rather than practical advice.
Extract from Patricia Dawson’s interview:
I knew you got more money if you’d done a postgraduate certificate, and I suppose that was the big influence because you knew you were better qualified and it was extra money at the end of the day…. I just felt it was all lectures all the time and I really wanted to be out there in the classroom, learning on the job. And we used to beg the lecturer to maybe do a demonstration lesson for us, but we never got a demonstration lesson, if it’s possible for that to happen, because you all teach differently anyway. And I remember a Friday morning, we had three consecutive hours of lectures; history of education from 9 – 10, philosophy of education from half-past ten say to half-eleven, and I can’t remember what the third lecture was. But people were bored to tears; they were leaving and walking out (p.4).

Michael Hinton reacted negatively to his postgraduate course at the IoE in 1948-9, but then adopted many of the ideas:
They were a sort of cutting edge for history teaching in those days with ideas about projects and visual aids and history activities and I got myself quite unpopular by opposing all that while I was there…. but as soon as I went into teaching I borrowed the ideas wholesale and did everything that they’d suggested one should do. (pp.2-3)

9.The Institute was not the only place where students found the training not as they expected.
Extract from David Burrell’s interview:
The other point that I remembered vividly …was the abysmal nature of my PGCE course. I did that at Cambridge as well—1958 to `59. And, I wouldn’t say that it came near to dissuading me from going into teaching, but it didn’t do much to encourage me to do so…I think there was a two-fold problem. One…the PGCE course was boring, to say the least. The lectures for the most part were boring …We spent long, long sessions thinking about how rats learned, and that sort of thing. I remember vividly one morning, a little woman lecturer came in and gave us an almost hour-long lecture on how to open the windows in a classroom in order to have the best…airflow and things. A lot of it seemed irrelevant. We did have some sessions on teaching history, which I think were conducted by a man called Dr. Harris—…they were quite good, because they were very focused. …They reflected the quite limited view that existed at the time, and the limited materials that existed. …But the rest of the course, which was three terms—first term in Cambridge, second term in school and third term teaching practice. Teaching practice was good, helpful, but very strenuous and very stressful. I did it at Owen’s Boys’ Grammar School in Islington. I was amazed to find when I got to Cambridge that you had to find your own placement for the second term, which in one way was good, because you could do it at home…. I got to Owen’s School Islington through my brother who was a curate in Islington at the time. The university also seemed to be opting out because during the term I was in Islington, not a single person from the university visited me. I had no support from the university whatever, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but the man who was supposed to be my supervisor in the school, …was ill most of the year…. I simply took over his timetable…. nobody ever observed me, there was nobody ever commented on what I was doing. The only indication I had at the end of the year was … that I’d got a C in the teaching practice, which was difficult to understand because nobody ever looked at me, so how would they know? (pp.7-8)

10.Those attending undergraduate teacher training seem to have had a better experience than the post-graduate student teachers. Eric Houlder entered the City of Leeds Training College in 1959, having had two terms helping out in a local primary school as a sixth former.
Extract from Eric Houlder’s interview:
It was very good, I think.… there were probably about a third of us that had some experience and 90 percent of us, the men, had been in the forces…. It was excellent training, in a way. We did history in some depth. We did secondary subjects and everybody did English. What I didn’t like, we did P.E. and games as well. I was never thrilled with that. …School [teaching] practices, a lot of people dropped out after the first one…. two people who I knew who dropped out both went and joined the police in Kenya who were fighting the Mau Mau because they reckoned it would be easier than teaching. I think they may have had a shock about that. …We had fieldwork, we went out on expeditions, and we were taught by some very nice people. (p.3)

Similarly, Evelyn Hinde spoke enthusiastically about her 3-year course:
I went to Stockwell. And when I got there I was still thinking about doing English, but I took one look at the lecturers and changed my mind [laughs] and did history instead. …And I actually had decided that I loved English literature particularly, I was reasonably good on the language side, but I particularly loved literature and I decided I didn’t actually want to teach it, I would be happier teaching history. Well you got a very basic first six weeks of training where you were – I thought it was a waste of time – but you were encouraged to have a little go at different things before you decided what you wanted to specialise in. And you were then expected to choose a main and two subsidiary subjects, basically. And easy for me, in the end I chose history and I had English as a subsid. …I suppose for me it brought together more European history than I’d known previously, although I’d done a certain amount of course, doing history O level and A level, but …certainly more American history than I’d done before. We happened to have a very good lecturer and she was also an extremely good teacher and so then, course, she would do demonstration lessons and obviously keep an eye on you when you went out on teaching practice. Talk. A certain amount of illustration: books, pictures, postcards. Wasn’t … when she did a demonstration lesson it wasn’t usually filmstrips or things like that, so it was … she was a very lively person and very much able to take a group of children and say, now what do you think about that. Oh I went for secondary. Now that was unusual. There had been … nearly all teacher training colleges trained for infant or junior, but… they discovered that there was a great shortage of teachers, particularly for certain subjects in secondary schools and English and history, French, maths, so a number of training colleges were encouraged to set up a secondary group. I think we were only about the second secondary group in 1955 that Stockwell had and it was pretty much a high-powered group. (pp.2-3)

Expansion in the 1960s
11.In 1958, the Ministry of Education took the decision to add 12,000 teacher training places to supply the shortfall evident from the rising birth rate and because college training was to be increased from 2 to 3 years beginning in 1960. Of these new places, 3,000 were to be in new institutions (Bulmershe, p.2). Bulmershe was proposed as a new mixed gender college in Berkshire to provide for 450 students training for primary and junior secondary level. The first intake of students was 1964 - only 29% of them male.
12.In 1965, the DES sent a letter to colleges about the problem of over-sized classes – the existing 290,000 teacher workforce needed to rise to 340,000 to eliminate classes >30 pupils but with the projected rise in the school population for England and Wales from 7 m. to 9½m. by 1976, it would require a rise to 530,000 teachers. Bulmershe expanded from 500 to 800 students.
13.David Burrell taught at both Bulmershe (from 1966) and Sussex (from 1970):
And for the first time, I was working in an institution where the resources were available, the equipment was available…..At Bulmershe, most of the people—not all of them, some of them had been in teacher education before—but most of them were new. They’d come straight out of schools, and they were eager, committed, industrious, and they wanted to effect change. And it was a wonderful climate to be in. It was also the time when there was money. I look back now and I think, ‘How the hell did we manage to do all that?’ We could only do it because the local authority, not just in Berkshire but across the country, were putting a lot of money into it. So it was a wonderful place to be. I was recruited as a history specialist; the third in our department. (p. 19)
It was a concurrent course. So I had two responsibilities. One was to teach them history, …but the other thing was to prepare them for teaching history in school. I was also a supervisor of teaching practice, and even more challenging, was to be a supervisor of teaching practice of non-history students. Because they all had to do a second subject, so a lot of our…for some reason, history was very attractive to a lot of our PE students. Bulmershe had a big PE community, and a lot of them did history as the second subject. We had to design a college programme. John Fines designed it. I remember it well because it was called Leaping through History—leaping or jumping through history or something like that. What history do they know? What minimum history do they need to know in order to be able to teach in a primary school? That was fun, devising that programme. Then, of course, I had to go and supervise students teaching history in primary school, which was totally outside my experience. [Our Head of Department]…insisted that every member of staff taught in schools….So, for the first time in my career, I was challenged with teaching history to primary children, which was again a fascinating experience….Because I was only beginning to develop the skills of story telling, in particular, which I think you really need in the primary school…. One of the major principles … was, ‘You cannot expect trainees, or practising teachers, you cannot expect them to take on new ideas and introduce them into their own classroom unless you yourself have tested them out. (pp.22-23)

14.The Robbins Report of 1963 had proposed that by the mid-1970s a quarter of entrants to training colleges should take a 4-year Bachelor of Education honours degree. The Certificate was three years and the additional year would be ‘advanced’ work in education and in the main subject. The degrees from Bulmershe were controlled and awarded by the University of Reading and started in 1967 (Bulmershe, pp.11-14). The Bulmershe BEd. Degree course included 15 weeks of school experience and the 4th year took the student from an ordinary degree to honours level, but fewer than half of any intake stayed for the 4th year.
15.By 1969-70, there were 326,000 teachers in England and Wales. Of these, 52,268 (16%) were trained graduates, 20,898 (6.4%) untrained graduates, 159,548 (48.9%) non-graduates (1-2 yr training) and 79,771 (24.5%) non-graduates (3 yr training) (Coombe Lodge Report, p.528). The one-year course was at this time voluntary for graduates, but for those graduating from 1974 onwards, it became compulsory to have the postgraduate qualification to be able to teach in state schools. (Gosden, p.307)
16.Another reorganisation took place in 1972 following the James Committee Report Teacher Education and Training. This recommended that teacher training colleges be merged with polytechnics or further education colleges (School of Education p.40). The training colleges were to become ‘colleges of education’ – if they remained separate from a university they had to apply for CNAA accreditation for their degrees.
17.The James Committee criticised the teaching of theory in training colleges at the expense of practical experience in schools, concluding ‘the essential is sometimes sacrificed to the desirable’ (James Report, p.67). Students often found it difficult to understand educational theory because they had no practical experience in which to locate it. The Committee believed that only with experience could teachers properly experience any benefit (James Report, p.68). The Committee therefore recommended the provision of major programmes of in-service education for serving teachers, as well as the opportunity for teachers to ‘top up’ their teaching certificate to gain a degree. Colleges were also to be allowed to offer a wider range of courses, e.g. for youth and community leaders, health professionals, etc. (Bulmershe, p.25).
18.The sense of ‘ferment’ in the expanding colleges of education is palpable in Gareth Elwyn Jones’ recollection of his early career at Cardiff:
I …joined an expanding department of history which had jumped to eight by the time I started …It was responding to the 1960s bulge …and also to the fact that the teaching degree was coming in, of course the BEd, at that time, so they were expanding their staff. …I was in a group of relatively young, new history lecturers who were all interested in the theory of history teaching, because obviously we were now teaching teachers of history. …we were into things like the new ideas about history teaching that were circulating at the time. John Fines, for example, … we didn’t quite coincide because he left Cardiff College of Education just before I went there, but … his reputation there was phenomenal. But we were …now actively involved in supervising students in junior schools and actively involved in discussions all the time about children’s thinking and marrying really education theory of the time with ideas about history teaching. So that was a very stimulating environment indeed. (pp. 2-3)

19.The more progressive colleges and departments started to place more emphasis on school experience and even the involvement of school staff in supervising and mentoring trainees (School of Education, p.41). Sussex University Education Department developed a pioneering course with much more input from school staff than was usual.
Extract from Chris Culpin’s interview:
The Sussex PGCE was extremely good. I chose it not having been to Sussex, because of its system, which is very like the current system but was very unusual at that time, of teaching for three days a week and being in the university for two days a week. I was very lucky that the history PGCE tutor was Willy Lamont who helped to teach me to teach, and the monitoring system of a teacher tutor for those three days. It all … I was extremely lucky in all cases. I went to Thomas Bennett Comprehensive School in Crawley which was fantastic, I mean this was the cutting edge … it’s hard to imagine …just how adventurous a radical comprehensive school was at that time. That’s 1968/69…. A lovely guy called John Townsend was my teacher tutor and I, by being at that same school from, well actually November, but from the autumn through to June meant that you had a consistency and a support which the kind of block teaching practice, which was the norm at that time, didn’t really give me. (pp. 1-2)

20.Not only did teachers in Sussex get involved in tutoring trainee teachers, but the role of tutor was itself an opportunity for in-service training, as David Burrell makes clear:
I set up a seminar programme, which included things like, the nature of history, the aims of history teaching in the school, what are the current projects which are going on? Schools Council, Nuffield, and that sort of thing…. What about the controversy about chronology against themes or topics or whatever? What do we know about how children learn history? Assessment in history—all those sort of things. You know, it was a programme which was complementary to what they were doing in schools and hopefully, giving them some ideas which they could then try out in schools.
…we used to run the university seminars in the evening between half past 5 and half past 7…. in the evening so the teacher tutors could come from the school and take part in the discussions. So we were actually saying to the teachers, you know, ‘You should be learning on the job as well.’ …. I think being a teacher tutor for some people was quite an eye-opener, because they were being forced … through the ideas that some of their trainees were bringing in to them to think about what they were doing themselves…. And in fact, several of the teachers did in fact become encouraged to take up part-time MA work, and things like that later on. (p. 42)

The rationale for the teacher-tutor role and the course as a whole was explained by Willie Lamont in a paper from the early 1970s (Postgraduate Training and the History Department). The Sussex partnership scheme and the Oxford internship model were both seen as cutting edge at the time due to the involvement of practising teachers in the training (Robinson, p.52)
21.Undergraduate training seems to have changed less. Roberta Wood experienced good undergraduate history teaching during her primary school training at Redland College, Bristol from 1962-5, though unlike Culpin, the school experience was mixed.
Extract from Roberta Wood:
When I was at training college, we had a very good history tutor who taught us as a history specialist to enjoy history for its own sake. We started off with the Beaker people and continued right up to the present day. She, the only aid she gave us on teaching history was to say, ‘If you want a day in London, I shall speak to the Principal but organise it yourselves. You will have to organise school trips when you become teachers’. And so we had several days in London. We then had education as a separate subject, and they were the ones that taught us how to go into schools and prepare our lessons, prepare our material and make wall displays and things like that. I must admit I enjoyed the history teaching more than education. …when you went on teaching practice you had to do what the teacher wanted you to do. …Some people were very lucky and got good schools and they could go to town on their displays and everything like that, and in two cases I got very remote country schools who just wanted you to teach the children, keep them quiet…imagine a very old Victorian Church school classroom and there’s no room for display in places like that. But you did the best you could, you went through it. (pp. 4-5)

Teacher Training from the 1970s to early-80s
22.The DES Circular 7/73 warned of dramatic cuts in the numbers of trainee teachers needed in the coming years, due to the then declining birth rate, although there would be expansion of other types of degrees.
23.During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the numbers of trainees fell – Bulmershe’s BEd. intake in 1974 was 322, but by 1980, it had fallen to 105. Postgraduate numbers were also capped by the DES – whereas in 1972, Bulmershe had 150 PGCE students, in 1983, it had only 69. The balance of students changed, with many more part-time students and mature students doing in-service training rather than full-time 18-24 year olds.
24.Another important aspect relating to the wider development of history in schools was the matrix of relationships between HMIs, LEAs, LEA Advisors and colleges of education. Bulmershe developed a close association also with the Schools Council, becoming one of 4 SC regional curriculum centres to support the teaching of the humanities. These centres were funded to promote and co-ordinate national development projects involving schools, LEAs and LEA Advisors (Bulmershe, p.134-5).

The expansion of in-service education was discussed by David Burrell. He joined Sussex University Education Department in 1970:
But I was appointed in the first place…to do in-service training. Including in-service training in history. I mean, my job was a co-ordinating job. It was to co-ordinate the work of people in the five colleges of education, and in the LEAs in the in-service field. Fascinating job. We also built up a resource centre for teachers in the university.
… Our most successful thing, because in a sense it was the easy thing to do, was to build up a resource centre and a laboratory for science teachers. We had the same notion of doing the same sort of thing in the arts areas, but we never quite had the resources to do that. We built up quite a good school of education library, which was later incorporated in the university library. We developed things like boxes of books to send out to schools if they were doing particular projects and that sort of thing. And the school of education library also supported our trainee teachers who were going into school. (p. 37).

25.History education departments within colleges of education and universities proved pivotal in the development of new history curricula and methods of teaching in schools in the 1970s and 80s – see notes on the development of the curriculum elsewhere.
26.Those learning to teach history in the 1970s and 80s recall a mix of experiences. For some, the training period was irrelevant, for others it was seminal.
John D. Clare recalled his training at Durham University in 1974:
I studied under a guy called Mel French, how to teach history, and Gordon Batho…. we fell out over dictated notes, because he was very hostile to dictated notes, and he once caught me in a lesson dictating some notes…. Mel French was obsessed, even in those days, with the fact that, ‘what’s the point of history, history is dying’. We were dealing, even in those days, with the fact that history was dying in the classroom, and children didn’t give it its proper importance, they didn’t reckon history, and how could we upgrade the subject? … And the idea of a graded worksheet as well, I remember that, we had to do our worksheets so that we started off with the easy questions but they got harder and harder as they went along. And then you were thrown into the classroom and left to cope. (pp. 2-3)

27.Ian Dawson went to Leeds University for his training in 1973 where staff were promoting ideas for reviving history teaching in the classroom:
I did PGCE [in Leeds} and … there was this wonderful man called Bob Unwin who wanted to make history interesting in the classroom. He’d got seventy-five ways of starting a lesson so that the children were enlivened and became drawn in. And he was just wonderful at the idea of making history interesting and that you didn’t create, you didn’t just tell them things. And he was actually one of the pioneers of the new range of history books that came out in the seventies. (p. 2)

28.The use of sources in history teaching was now included in some PGCE courses, as Andy Reid recalled from his course at Newcastle University in 1972:
The PGCE course was influential mainly in introducing me to local sources which had formed no part of what I’d done at Cambridge and that was just, you know, wasn’t a dimension at all. We hardly ever looked at any primary evidence and when we did it certainly wasn’t local. I found it utterly fascinating. (p. 2)

29.Chris McGovern recalled his awareness of new ideas about history teaching on his PGCE course at Birmingham in 1974:
But when I went to Birmingham University, Postgraduate Certificate in Education, I think that the people who ran that course were themselves slightly confused about the direction they should take teacher training in, …because there was discussion in those days about taking history in new directions and the Schools Council History Project was just coming, just being trialled. (p. 2)

30.The impact of comprehensive schooling and response of ‘new history’ are clearly linked in this extract from Chris Hinton. Chris did his training year at Goldsmiths College, London in 1975:
Most of the written projects I did at Goldsmiths were around new teaching ideas linked to comprehensivisation, such as mixed ability teaching and integrated humanities. And also I became interested during my course at Goldsmith, under my tutors Martin Booth and David Killingray, in Bloom’s Taxonomy and Bruner’s thinking on breaking down concepts for young minds. So that’s sort of how I got into teaching the initial ideas I had to underpin my teaching. (p. 2).

31.In most colleges, teaching practice was more prominent as a feature of the training, which meant student teachers were called upon to reflect on the practical side of history teaching, but experiences could differ greatly depending on the school placement and the staff there. Scott Harrison did his PGCE in 1971 at C.F. Mott College, in Prescott near Liverpool:
Quite a lot of the courses seemed to be on the philosophy of this or that, but the most important things were the teaching experiences. Those I remember vividly teaching in a school—in two schools—in deprived parts of Liverpool, and encouraging the first young people I’d met in this context to be interested in history, when often there were other things on their minds…. the first school I was in … was Enfield Comprehensive at the time. It was a very strict school. It was an all boys school, and I don’t recall classroom management being a problem at all. The issues are really around making the sort of history that I was familiar with and interested in, accessible and interesting to these boys. I was, of course, helped, and I was teaching a curriculum that was provided for me. But one thing that the college did was urge us to spend ever such a lot of time on planning and preparation, far more that we could in the real world of teaching, and to try those resources out. I suppose that gave me an advantage in thinking about access, and…asking the sorts of questions that these children could handle. (pp.3-4)

32.John Simkin went to Sussex to do his PGCE in 1974:
I would estimate about half the people on the course… were training, because they didn’t want to leave Sussex University, they didn’t want to leave Brighton. They had such a great social life in Brighton … and so they could get another year by doing the PGCE. And a lot of them did drop out by the end of the … you know, they never had the intention to become teachers. And … one of the things they did at Sussex which I think was a really good idea, is … you spent the …first two weeks observing teachers teach, which was eye-opening for me. I remember the first ever lesson I watched there was riots going on in the lesson. It was an English teacher and she just had no control over these children and I thought, ‘couldn’t cope with this’. It was like the education I’d received in Dagenham, you know, the behaviour of the children were no better, in fact… probably as bad. But I went into the next lesson, it was also an English teacher and as it turned out, was actually the boyfriend of the first teacher. And he had long flowing red hair, long red beard, wearing jeans, and he sat on the desk and he just talked to them and got their attention and then they had this debate about … I can’t remember what it was, it was a short story I think they were discussing. And I realised that, you know, it was possible to do that and it was the contrast between these two lessons, that one person who couldn’t do it, had no idea, and she would never … be a successful teacher, and this chap had this magic. And he is probably one of the best teachers I’ve ever seen teach and he was only the second teacher who I ever saw teach. But you saw a wide variety of different styles then, in that period, so you got some sort of idea about, you know, how do you teach? (pp. 9-10)

Teaching practice could be disillusioning, as is shown from this extract by John Hite of his experience on the Sussex University PGCE course in 1977:
I found the university experience very stimulating and the school experience pretty shocking in many ways, in terms of the way that history was taught. I mean, it varied – all the teachers were very pleasant – but one in particular was very sort of cynical. I always remember – because I was an idealistic teacher with all these new ideas, I wanted to be called John and open up opportunities for all children – and I remember being very bored in a lesson on social economic history and afterwards the teacher sort of said, “Well, you know, life is boring, so I’m preparing the children for life.” And that stuck in my memory as an appalling sort of justification for what he was doing. Other teachers were very inspiring, as individuals on the story telling, but the actual methods used in the school were very traditional, ‘talk and chalk’, sort of methods. (p. 3)

33.However, in some trainees’ eyes, the only value of the PGCE year was to gain practical experience in the classroom.
Alan Farmer went to City College, Sheffield to do his PGCE year in 1973. He already had two years’ teaching experience, one as a sixth former and the other as an ‘untrained’ graduate:
I’m not sure I learned a great deal from the teacher training because I think the teacher training [me] was a bit scared about me really because I don’t think he’d got any real experience in a comprehensive school or even a pretty tough school, whereas I’d obviously taught for the best part of a year and therefore had experiences that the poor chap who was supposed to be teaching me hadn’t got, so I think he was a bit in awe of me rather than me of him. But all teacher training is, I mean it’s valuable because you meet other folk, not necessarily the people who are doing the training, you meet other people in your position, so you learn a lot from sharing experiences with them about their experience in school and you learn a lot about teaching in different schools. (pp. 3-4)

34.John Edgar did a 4-year BEd. degree from 1981-5 at Cheltenham College of Education combining history and teacher training. For him there was a conflict between the style of the undergraduate history course and new ideas about thinking skills in education theory:
The history part of the degree was pretty much the standard fare that students who were doing a joint honours degree would have followed …, basically what we did was we did the history element…, and then the other side of our degree was education studies and so we studied the philosophy and sociology, psychology and so forth of education, did teaching practice,…. And part of that was a set of experiences that were supposed to be about teaching … our main field, which was sort of a cross-over really because it was where people who were actually really history lecturers but had some background perhaps themselves in teaching in the dim and distant past, and remember their dim and distant past was the 1950s, taught us I think… probably how they were taught history. …And so I had a lecturer who had been at Oxford and had a very traditional history background, his tutor had been Elton and his idea of history had been then forged in the 1950s in maybe his first grammar school teaching experience and I don’t think it had changed much beyond that. … Towards the end of my degree HMI were just starting to look at publishing …[History in the Primary and Secondary Years, 1985] it’s a blue booklet on basically broadening history out and looking at a more skills-based approach. And obviously SHP by that time was in its infancy. …. And SHP definitely seemed to provide the answer to that in the sense that it said, ‘well let’s start unpicking at what history is about’. But his [the Oxford-educated tutor’s] response was less than positive when I came along. I can remember presenting a paper to a tutorial…, and I think… Well being held up to ridicule was probably a fairly accurate description of how he responded to it…. I suppose because the other side of what I was doing at college was looking at education and obviously that was very different because we were starting to look at how do children think and learn? And I suppose at this time I was just on the cusp of people moving away from a more behaviourist to a more cognitive-based approach… that sort of transference of knowledge doesn’t really sit very easily when you’re being taught about those sorts of theories of learning. So also I suppose part of me was also looking for, how do you sort of marry up those two, how do I make more sense of what I’m beginning to understand about maybe how children think and learn and relating that to my subject. And again, things like SHP probably started to tick quite a few of those boxes. (pp. 4-5)

Teacher training in history since the late 1980s
35.The early 1980s saw cuts throughout the universities sector, including in the training of teachers, but most departments and colleges of education diversified into further degrees, part-time courses and courses for other professional groups working in related areas.
36.In 1983, the DES White Paper, Teaching Quality set out major changes in the pattern of teacher training, reflecting the Thatcher government’s view that schools should play a bigger role in the training of teachers. This could be seen as a move back towards the ‘apprenticeship’ model of the earlier twentieth century (Robinson, pp.52-3). All teacher trainers were now required to have ‘recent and relevant’ experience of successful teaching, amounting to one term’s experience in every 5 years (School of Education, p.50). This was supervised by the new Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE) from 1984. Colleges had to release staff so that they could update their teaching experience. Bulmershe did this by arranging for the secondment of 3 teachers each year to work in the College whilst their lecturers were in primary schools (by this stage, all of Bulmershe’s training was for the primary sector) (Bulmershe, p.142).
37.In April 1987, the funding for in-service education which allowed LEAs control over what training serving teachers did was replaced by GRIST (Grant Related In-Service Training) requiring LEAs to bid to the DES for funds for specific initiatives (School of Education, p.51). Following the Education Reform Act of 1988, funding was transferred to schools for them to decide what training their staff needed.
38.Colleges reorganised their courses, especially the one-year postgraduate courses, to focus more closely on strategies in the classroom than theoretical child psychology, sociology, philosophy of education and history of education, which had been the core disciplines in many education departments (School of Education, p.55).
39.During the 1990s, a major re-organisation of teacher education took place. The Conservative Government wanted to change teacher training but were also concerned to maintain a supply of well-qualified teachers and to create greater accountability for the content and quality of the training (Furlong et al. p.3). New Right critics like Sheila Lawlor pointed to the superfluity of theoretical education courses when what teachers needed was practical experience in the classroom (Lawlor).
40.DES Circular 9/92 required teacher training institutions to set up partnership schemes with schools with two-thirds of the students’ time spent in school rather than in college. On completion of training, student teachers were awarded the status of NQT (Newly Qualified Teacher); the new teacher had to complete one year of teaching in a state school in order to achieve QTS (Qualified Teacher Status). The probationary year in teaching had prior to this been overseen (in a very loose sense) by LEAs. Funds were transferred to schools to enable them to set aside staff time for mentoring and support of trainees and the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) was set up to oversee and approve initial teacher training (ITT) quality nationally (School of Education, p.56-7). This meant that ITT could be delivered by schools, LEAs and other organisations outside the HE sector. The diversification of routes into teaching (and for mature candidates) was accelerated by the Labour Government from 1997 onwards, partly in response to shortages of secondary school teachers, especially in sciences and maths.
41.From 2005, the TTA became the TDA (the Training and Development Agency for schools). It controls student teacher numbers and allocates them to training providers based on Ofsted inspection. The standards required of new teachers have been revised several times. ‘Never before has there been so much detailed prescription of what student teachers should be taught, should know, and should be able to demonstrate in terms of technical skills and competence.’ (Robinson, p.54). Many college education lecturers have criticised the ‘skills-based’ model as mechanistic and lacking in the reflective and creative approach good teachers should demonstrate, but Robinson defends the value of having explicit standards which provide a baseline on which newly qualified teachers can build. She also does not see why the development of ‘core technical teaching skills’ should preclude the use of creativity, imagination and personal influence in learning to teach (Robinson, p.55).
42.Reflecting this shift away from theoretical approaches to teacher training, Simon Bishop who trained in 2001 found the practical experience in school more valuable than the theory in college:
I trained at Canterbury, Christchurch….The history PGCE there was excellent. The amount of time that was given to you by the person who actually ran the course, always there at the end of a phone, e-mail or even you know a face to face visit. But that’s just very professionally well run course. …I personally feel there was too much theoretical. The practical side of it was enough; I had two main placements, but it would be nice to spend more time in school … I think the actual theory of teaching at that stage in the career – it was good to have grounding in it, but I think sometimes it went far too much into depth. It would have been much nicer to actually get more hands on experience in the classroom, at that stage within the career….And the person who mentored me at my first placement, he was an advanced skills teacher, so you know I had a lot of input from people on that….most of it I learnt from actually being in the school placements rather than being out of placement in the college….I think as teachers having that time to give to someone that you’re trying to train is difficult to give sometimes, so I was very appreciative of it. (pp. 3-4)

43.Whereas Sussex University struggled to find funding for its ‘teacher tutors’ in the 1960s and 70s, mentors in schools now receive money and time to allow them to support trainee teachers adequately. The following extracts are from an interview with trainee teachers just completing their PGCE courses at the Institute of Education. First they discussed the role of the Institute in their training and its value. One of the ‘problems’ is about when best for trainees to learn the theory of teaching – before or after their experience of a school….
Steve Loman: It’s so front-loaded, that you’re taught how to teach all at the beginning, pretty much. We have our continual sessions as we go along, but the majority of [his tutor’s] teaching to us is at the beginning, when it doesn’t make any sense because we’ve got little experience. So we’re being taught all the theory, but … we can’t use it as we’re learning it, so you don’t internalise it. And it’s all theory, as far as you’re concerned at the beginning…. You don’t really use what you learn here until you’re confident, I found. (p. 32)

Katherine Tunnadine: I picked to do a PGCE rather than a GTP [a school-based training] because I wanted to be confident as a history teacher…. But because I’d done two years of TEFL [Teaching English as a Foreign Language] teaching before I started, and I was at a good school and I was trained really well, when I came here [the Institute], lots of this clicked….I felt quite comfortable with lots of the teaching aspects, but the stuff that I was learning all about the history teaching was new….But, for me, I was starting at a different point to someone that never stepped into a classroom before. …I didn’t have to get over getting into a classroom and standing in front of a class of kids. The first time I did that, that was terrifying. But because I’d done that before, for me the course has been really useful. (p. 34)

Ben Turner: We all teach in different ways. So there isn’t one way that Alison or Arthur or Katharine [IoE tutors] can teach us that’s going to be successful for everyone. So where I may enjoy the theory side of things and then putting it into practice, Candice may not get the theory and be more of a practical learner, and everyone learns in different ways. (p. 35)

Dan Burke: I have had a massive problem with the theory and I think…I’m a far more practical learner. I do what I feel is natural and sensible in a classroom, as opposed to what I’ve learned here. Because, in all honesty, a lot of the time I’m not entirely sure what they’re saying. I’ve never really understood the theory. And that’s been a problem for me. … With my second placement, I’ve come on in leaps and bounds with the way that I’m teaching, the way that I’m interacting, and that I’m doing things that are based from theory, because I’ve had the support to do that. But especially in my first placement, I found it quite difficult. (pp. 35-6)

All of the trainees valued the support of the schools and none of them was placed in the position of filling a sick teacher’s shoes (as happened to one or two of the interviewees who trained in the 1960s and 70s). The use of two placements means that if one does not work too well, they still have another opportunity at a second school. The mentor takes a much more active role in training than in the 1960s-90s, with regular meetings and feedback on their lessons. However, the intensity and amount of support still varies, as does the way in which history departments in schools organise their work:

Ruth Blower: I have had two really, really excellent mentors [in schools], and especially my second mentor had been to the Institute herself, so had more of an understanding of what they were trying to get at…. So I always had the experience and the support there to revisit, implement, try again…. My first placement was very much the traditional, “We do the Tudors and we do the Stuarts …”, and nothing really had changed in terms of their topics. But it was quite a challenging school, and they used excellent strategies, in terms of teaching practice and different methods. So it was really good at learning things that we learned here. But the curriculum was nothing that I wanted to do. …My second placement, …I had the opportunity… to teach according to a theme. So I had to be thinking, “Okay, what kind of enquiry could I now put into a theme on conflict or where else could we develop it?” So I got the opportunity to develop things on the atomic bombs and we were doing Rwanda and topics that before I wouldn’t have a chance to experience. So it was two very different history departments, but in both of them, they gave me free access to all materials, all resources and gave me an open opportunity. (pp. 36 and 38)


Katherine Tunnadine: My mentor was really good at discussing my needs, but getting me to look for good practice around the school, not necessarily just in the history area but it could be in English, it could be in science…. my mentor from the beginning said, “Here’s my mobile number, here’s my email. If you need help, call me, ring me. I’ll stay after school, we can plan this lesson.” It was the first time he’d ever been a mentor, so he was really concerned about getting it right. …Both my mentors were very keen to being more like, “Try it. It’s your placement here, you can try it now and it can go disastrously wrong, and it really doesn’t matter. These are not your classes…. because if you mess it up next year, you’re going to have to spend weeks and weeks going back over it, whereas… I think … that’s why it was really good, because they didn’t make me stick to what they were teaching. They were like, “Just do it, and if it’s wrong, it doesn’t matter. It’s good.” And I think that’s how you learn.
(pp. 37-8 and 42)

Dan Burke: My first placement, my mentor was a man of few words, which was quite difficult because I’m quite chatty. So there was a bit of a connection that wasn’t really there. With my second placement, I’ve come on in leaps and bounds with the way that I’m teaching, the way that I’m interacting, and that I’m doing things that are based from theory, because I’ve had the support to do that. But especially in my first placement, I found it quite difficult. (p. 36)

Steve Loman: My first school, the materials were abysmal. They didn’t even have Powerpoints. They had Word documents that they’d just put on screen. It had a p. in a textbook and a list of questions, and that’s what the teachers used. And it was really uninspiring to work in, because you go there, you’re observed… on your first placement, you’re observed for three weeks or something. There was nothing to observe there. I couldn’t say, “Oh, brilliant idea. I’m going to nick that or use it.” There was nothing to steal, which left me quite uninspired there. (p. 39)

44.Since the start of the decade, routes into teacher as a career have diversified greatly. In addition to the PGCE course (the trainees above were all on the PGCE course), graduates can also qualify by working (paid or unpaid) in a school which is running initial teacher training (SCITT), usually within a consortium of schools. The Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP) provides a completely work-based route. The school employs the graduate on a salary as an unqualified teacher but training costs are met by the TDA (it has a limited number of places). The other major route for ‘top’ graduates, is Teach First. This two-year programme is focused on inner city schools and is designed to bring the best graduates into schools facing challenging circumstances and aims to groom the graduate in leadership skills with a view to their taking on promotion opportunities (e.g. head of department or headship at a young age). Teach First requires an additional training commitment from the graduate by attending week-end sessions and summer schools on top of the normal school hours.
45.Undergraduate training (for primary teaching) all now lead to degree status. The amount of teaching practice has been expanded to 2 terms (24 weeks) on the 3 year degree and 2½ terms (32 weeks) for the 4 year BEd course.

List of Sources (see file ‘Teacher Training’ for hard copies)
http://www.tda.gov.uk/get-into-teaching/teacher-training-options.aspx
Colleges of Education and Reorganisation, Study conference 74/19 in Coombe Lodge Reports, Vol.7, No.18 (published by the FE Staff College, 1974)
DES White Paper (1983) Teaching Quality
James Committee Report Teacher Education and Training (DES, 1972)

Richard Aldrich (2002) The Institute of Education 1902-2002: A Centenary History (Institute of Education: London)
John Furlong et al. eds (2000) Teacher Education in Transition: reforming professionalism? (Open University Press: Buckingham) – the education professionals’ viewpoint.
P.H.J.H. Gosden (1972) The Evolution of a Profession (Basil Blackwell: Oxford)
Donald Jones (2001) School of Education 1946-1996 (University of Leicester: Leicester)
Willie Lamont (1972) Post-graduate Training and the History Department (Paper prepared for Sussex University – given by David Burrell)
Sheila Lawlor (1990) Teachers Mistaught: training in theories or education in subjects?
Patrick J. Rooke (1992) Bulmershe, the Life of a College 1964-89 (University of Reading: Reading)
Wendy Robinson (2008) ‘England and Wales’ in Tom O’Donoghue and Clive Whitehead (eds), Teacher Education in the English-speaking World: Past, Present and Future (IAP Inc: Charlotte, NC)
F.T. Willey & R.E. Maddison (1971) An Enquiry into Teacher Training (University of London: London) – summary of an enquiry by MPs on the Select Cttee on Education and Science and submitted to the James Committee.

Some rather charming reading here makes a change. I knew that maypole dancing had non-English origins because we got taught the history of it as well as used it once or twice. My primary years being 1972-76. Wouldn't it have been nice if some of these ex-children here who used it were actually told about the custom and where it came from rather than just doing it in ignorance of what it was about and actually meant. I now teach modern history myself.

"Tom F - Real PE teachers don't overdo it and obsess about nudity on internet forums."

Loudly says it - SO AGREE!

The maypole dance is a spring ritual long known to Western Europeans. Usually performed on May 1 (May Day), the folk custom is done around a pole garnished with flowers and ribbon to symbolize a tree. Practiced for generations in countries such as Germany and England, the maypole tradition dates back to the dances ancient people used to do around actual trees in hopes of harvesting a large crop.


Today, the dance is still practiced and holds special significance to pagans, including Wiccans, who have made a point to take part in the same customs their ancestors did. But people both new and old to the tradition may not know the complicated roots of this simple ritual. The history of the maypole dance reveals that a variety of events gave rise to the custom.


A Tradition in Germany, Britain, and Rome
Historians have suggested that maypole dancing originated in Germany and traveled to the British Isles courtesy of invading forces. In Great Britain, the dance became part of a fertility ritual held every spring in some areas. By the Middle Ages, most villages had an annual maypole celebration. In rural areas, the maypole was typically erected on the village green, but a few places, including some urban neighborhoods in London, had a permanent maypole that stayed up year round.

The ritual was also popular in ancient Rome, however. The late Oxford professor and anthropologist E.O. James discusses the Maypole's connection to Roman traditions in his 1962 article "The Influence of Folklore on the History of Religion." James suggests that trees were stripped of their leaves and limbs, and then decorated with garlands of ivy, vines, and flowers as part of the Roman spring celebration. This may have been part of the festival of Floralia, which began on April 28. Other theories include that the trees, or poles, were wrapped in violets as an homage to the mythological couple Attis and Cybele.


The Puritan Effect on the Maypole
In the British Isles, the maypole celebration usually took place the morning after Beltane, a celebration to welcome spring that included a big bonfire. When couples performed the maypole dance, they had usually come staggering in from the fields, clothes in disarray, and straw in their hair after a night of lovemaking. This led 17th-century Puritans to frown upon the use of the Maypole in celebration; after all, it was a giant phallic symbol in the middle of the village green.

The Maypole in the United States
When the British settled in the U.S., they brought the maypole tradition with them. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1627, a man named Thomas Morton erected a giant maypole in his field, brewed a batch of hearty mead, and invited village lasses to come frolic with him. His neighbors were appalled, and Plymouth leader Myles Standish himself came along to break up the sinful festivities. Morton later shared the bawdy song that accompanied his Maypole revelry, which included the lines,

"Drink and be merry, merry, merry, boys,
Let all your delight be in Hymen's joys.
Lo to Hymen now the day is come,
about the merry Maypole take a room.
Make green garlons, bring bottles out,
and fill sweet Nectar, freely about.
Uncover thy head, and fear no harm,
for here's good liquor to keep it warm.
Then drink and be merry, merry, merry, boys,
Let all your delight be in Hymen's joys."
A Revival of the Tradition
In England and the U.S., the Puritans managed to quash the maypole celebration for roughly two centuries. But by the late 19th century, the custom regained popularity as the British people took an interest in their country’s rural traditions. This time around the poles appeared as part of church May Day celebrations, which included dancing but were more structured than the wild maypole dances of centuries past. The maypole dancing practiced today is likely connected to the dance's revival in the 1800s and not to the ancient version of the custom.

The Pagan Approach
Today, many pagans include a maypole dance as part of their Beltane festivities. Most lack the space for a full-fledged maypole but still manage to incorporate the dance into their celebrations. They use the fertility symbolism of the maypole by making a small tabletop version to include on their Beltane altar, and then, they dance nearby.

One of the first things I ever remember doing at school from the moment I started was holding ribbon and playing around a Maypole when I started full time schooling just after Easter for the first time. I have a barely legible exercise book with a badly drawn picture of me doing it in coloured pencils and crayons from the year after I began. School did this every year without fail and I think I was eleven when I last did it so it must have been seven consecutive years of Maypole, surely nobody can beat that for longevity can they.

I definitely think Maypole suited the under tens best and by the time I last did it I felt it lost the appeal and I was too old - at eleven!

We wore a wide variety of clothing doing it, boys wore bow ties one time with white shirts. Later when I was a bit older we just got our gym shoes and shorts on. Many times early on we would dance and sing ourselves as we went around, although I cannot make out what we sang. Later it was proper music and sometimes, certainly if we practised we did it to no music at all at first.

Like one or two others here have said, although the thing predominently came out during springtime in May I also feel sure we did it more often than just this narrow time of year we are in now.

Perhaps one of the not so nice things from this that happened was an early childhood example of false accusation. A girl in class accused me of deliberately winding ribbon around her head and trying to strangle her. It was a complete fabrication of course and I'd done no such thing or come close to doing it, just random tangle and a mistake, but my teacher surprised me by believing her and I got sent back into class to sit by myself for the rest of that session. She came back in smirking at me later and I feel this was an early lesson in human nature even at that terribly young age of about nine.

We also did proper country dancing which I preferred as I found the Maypole was rather limiting in what we could do, but by the sound of it here and my own young life schools seemed to love the things a few years ago.

I also thought this was a very British tradition but looked it up and see there are schools in the USA that do Maypole in this day and age with the younger ones so the tradittion lives on in the young today.

Real PE teachers don't overdo it and obsess about nudity on internet forums.

That's quite a tender and sweet memory Duncan. Even going back to the start in my first school the lady teachers didn't do that. I must have been about seven when the dreaded rope climb got inflicted on me for the first time and I managed to get not very far up. Later on we were expected to go right to the top and told to get on with it, yet if we fell it would have been a long way down and a slim mat was hardly going to save us from a nasty bump. I saw someone cry in fear of rope climbing once. I wonder if it is still a thing or if health and safety stops it now.

Rope climbing was as pointless to most of us as algebra.

Still waitingAmbrose! I agree with Jim and Christy here and I hope we get a take on this from Graham soon.


Comment by: Ambrose on 29th April 2022 at 19:34
To Graham Butterfield.
You obviously weren't trained in the same way as myself and George. (Read: Ambrose @19/2/2013, 5/3/2013 and George 20/2/2013 onwards.)
I would agree that to disport yourself naked in front of a single pupil could have been seen as somewhat dubious. However, 50 years ago it was not unknown for younger teachers to be naked with a group of pupils for a legitamate reason. We weren't showing off or being voyeuristic, and the pupils learnt something about what physical development to expect as they grew older; all while being supervised.


Comment by: Christy on 30th April 2022 at 04:14
I've looked at those posts Ambrose. I'm sceptical. Very sceptical.

One bit got me in particular. Sixties training college advising/encouraging PE staff to jump into the school showers with pupils just to supervise. Come on, really? Any proof out there I can read that corroborates this teacher training advice from back then? Keen to read it if so.


Comment by: Jim on 4th May 2022 at 13:35
The recent post by Ambrose doesn't bear up to serious scrutiny does it.

There are no legitimate reasons and don't use the past as cover to pretend otherwise.

Home was right beside my junior school and two of the bedrooms overlooked the playground with a decent view. So even at school my parents could keep an eye on me from the house. One day getting home from school all my dad could say to me was - 'you haven't been going around that flippin' Maypole again have you?' having seen me doing it while he was home on time off.

Some super times brought back here to me about going around the school maypole. I did this every May under tuition directly from our headmistress at the time who not only taught us what to do with the maypole but also played the music that we danced around it to on her school piano. It was a really big deal each year to make a big event of maypole dancing in front of our mums and dads and probably a few grandparents too. I also remember that in 1977 we did a special silver jubilee maypole dance a month later all over again on a rather cool and cloudy early June day.

We also had a school break in while I was there and the thieves took a number of large school items including the maypole which was found dumped just outside the school gates. Rumour had it that it was one or two former pupils but they were never caught.

At the time of my P.E. lessons at junior school (1992 - 96), I was not very capable physically (I had mild dyspraxia) and was nervous.

I am enormously grateful to the member of staff, Mrs Nixon, who worked with me one-to-one at the same time as the rest of the class had their weekly lesson with the teacher. She was so kind and patient, gently coaxing me to climb higher up the wall-bars, dare a little more. She held the rope ladder steady for me as I timidly ascended and delicately guided my body, up and over, through the forward roll.

She also taught me to swim - what fun, what pride - and helped in many other ways. I was very lucky.

Someone wrote about going into their school to vote and seeing all the old PE equipment in one of the Maypole anecdotes here. We never did Maypole at mine sad to say as it sounds so much fun from what I've been reading here. But they do use my old primary school as a polling station and have done ever since the days I went there over 45 years ago. Infact on polling days in the past we used to get the whole day off school because of it whcih doesn't happen anymore. Despite all the changes in education over the years and the quite long period of time there are still the same PE apparatrus frames on the wall that I used way back in time and incase I was in any doubt a couple of years ago after I went in to vote I walked up to one of them and saw the two tiny initials that one of my friends scratched into it back in what must have been sometime 1974/5/6. There are also the same movable PE benches that we used to balance on and I've not so long ago even seen some tatty old green mats that look identical to ones I roled about on. I went in last week and these climbing frame things still remain, the ones that would pull out from the wall and lock into place. About eight to ten years back I saw what looked to me to be the very same horse sitting nearby too. All this stuff was almost brand new when we used it. They don't buy new PE gear very often in some of our state primaries quite obviously. They probably don't use it as much as we used to, which was two or sometimes three afternoon each week.

To Aaron, I was just reading your very personal injury comments while having late night coffee and biscuits. Thanks for making me choke out my drink over the laptop keyboard laughing when I then got to that throwaway line about your old 'Chopper' bike after a story like that.

I had 4 primary teachers and we had a May Pole. The first year teacher loved us using it and often took us outside with it in nice weather. My second year primary teacher clearly didn't like May Pole and in that year we never used it at all. Then in my third year at primary I had another teacher who seemed to like it and we began using it again and in my final primary year the teacher went back to being one who wasn't interested and we never touched it. I agreed with my two teachers who never took us for May Pole. I feel sure we also used it inside in the autumn. The headmaster was a big fan of having the May Pole and I remember he would sometimes leave his office and simply stand there with a smile watching us under instruction of our teacher before leaving again, saying nothing. We changed into t-shirts and shorts, no shoes.

I was born in 1966. My primary junior school from 8 to 11 did music & movement class all year round and we had a maypole come out at this time of year too.

Music and movement class was just what it said, we moved, exercised and danced to music of all varieties. Boys like me did this in whatever random style & colour of shorts we brought into school, our bare feet and our bare chests. The girls were also in shorts and had a vest or top on. This is how we did all our music & movement classes including with the maypole inside.

Our primary junior didn't have a separate gym so we used to go in the school hall for it, and I think that might be like many other primaries were and perhaps still are. I'm talking of the years here of 1974 - 77.

During my time at primary junior there was just one single male member of teaching staff in the entire school and at one point for a year none.
Looking back that seems so unhealthy to me. Music & movement was definitely not a P.E lesson which was very different and nearly always outside anyway.

One thing that seems different and may be of interest is my boys primary changing room had an open showering area in it all along one side that worked and could be switched on but because all the staff bar one were female none of the boys were allowed or told to use it whilst the girls at my school did do so sometimes because I could hear the running water and my best friend Emma told me about it. Now that's a bit unusual to say the least and a bit topsy turvy to the norm.

To let other know here who have been wondering about it, I went to the local Syresham Primary (close to Silverstone in Northamptonshire) school May Day fete only this past bank holiday Monday which had the kids going around the Maypole. So it still goes on. I never did it at school myself though. They all had smiles on their faces and seemed to love it.

My middle school took delivery of its brand new Maypole while I was there as an eight year old back in 1978 and when I think of this childhood tradition I instantly think of this particular late 70's year. I remember it being shown off for the first time and the explanation of what it was, which did seem a weird thing to a young child who'd never heard of them. The school had never had a Maypole previously so it proved of great interest to us all, teachers and pupils alike. It was certainly very different and we kept bringing it out on a regular basis, it wasn't just in the month of May, although I do have some snaps of myself using the Maypole on the playground with parents watching on a rather nice bright 4th May early afternoon day dated 1979. I reckon it was the very day and to the hour Thatcher became PM that I was actually dancing around the Maypole! We are wearing white tops, black shorts/skirts, a variety of footwear. It was an even split of boys and girls dancing around it together. Many others have said they did this in their p.e kits and that's also what I know we did many other times.

Another thing was that all our teachers danced the Maypole together in front of us all which was good fun to watch. That was at the outdoor event that I have the snaps of, but unfortunately nobody thought to take a photo of that at the time. It's possible the parents of some of the others I went to school with took one though.

We really worked well together when learning how to do the various Maypole ribbon dances and to this day it remains a very memorable and happy school memory. Once or twice I had the choice of going outside to do Rounders or Maypole and I always chose the Maypole because I was more comfortable doing it.

It's already been said in an earlier post this week but I concur that it's quite something to see so many familiar sounding Maypole thoughts popping up on here in the past week, I would not have expected to see it attract such fond interest. Happy to add my bit too.

I wouldn't hesitate to take a time machine back to 1978. One of those memories that makes me feel both happy and sad at the same time.

I have my own fond recollection of our class of eight- to nine-year-olds dancing round the maypole on May Day 1994, teacher looking benignly on. The maypole was set up in the junior school playground, the sun was warm and we held on to the ribbons and danced around in white T-shirts, white shorts and plimsolls (outdoor PE kit). That was the only time I remember it happening at school. Delightful.

I have my own school maypole recollections too. I've got some yellowing old newsletters from my primary days of the 73-76 period that mention the Mayday gala I took part in on Saturday 1st May 1976 at 1.30pm that day. Just before the legendary big hot dry summer took hold. All ages got a chance on the maypole at some point and it happened every year I was at primary on the first Saturday in May while I was there. My younger sister who followed me started there the year after I left and did maypole too for a few years after me. The maypole also came out at other times after May on regular weekday afternoons, at about the longest day in June for some reason and again in the last week of the school year in July before we broke up. Maypole was part of the "music, movement and mime" classes we did which seemed like a weird hybrid of music and PE lessons combined with each other, as it was definitely not our proper music lesson but it was neither a PE lesson either even though we did sometimes wear our PE kits to do it if we already had them with us on the same day. I think it kept going for quite a while at my old primary into the 1990s.

Permission to laugh like your mates Aaron Meech. How mortifying though.

How I'd like to see sight of a doc at my bedroom door if I was hurt or ill nowadays. Now that would be dying of a heart attack on the spot levels of shock if that happened. How times have changed. Now we can't even show up at our own surgery with our knocks and bumps.

A good story that. We men will understand, the ladies can only imagine it.

Yikes Aaron. I came out in sympathetic pain while reading that cricket injury story. Ouch. We used to play and do net practice a lot and didn't even have the shin pads.