Burnley Grammar School

For the removal of any doubt I can tell you that there was nothing regular about the frequency of entries in the school punishment book at Litherland for a school of that type at that period in time. At the start of my career schools did have a record of whoever was given corporal punishment and what for but in my experience the frequency of such things as using slippers, belts, canes or any other implement dropped off very dramatically as the 1970's progressed from one end of that decade to the other.

As an example, one of the schools I worked at in the 1970's with a roll of around about 700-800 would have probably had no more than maybe 100 or so names over a year in a book, many of the names repeated. By 1980 use of the cane was almost non existent and if it had been used 5-10 times in the year I'd have found that quite considerable. Other methods like a so called slipper or training shoe were diminishing very fast by then too. It was used only for serious truancy, antisocial behaviour, drug taking, foul language, bullying and physical assault on another member of staff or pupil to cite some examples.

What is worth adding here is that the use of the instant quick clip around the ear or flick across the head was actually more regular for things like answering back or being out of lesson when you shouldn't be. Most pupils would never feel this and it was often the usual suspects again and again. It was not painful or meant to be but a firm signal to behave.

Litherland was a dramatic outlier quite obviously,. Things appear like they must have run rather rapidly out of control for some reason to lead to close on 2,000 punishments in just four terms on only 400 boys. Nobody should seek to explain it away and normalise those numbers, and I had been teaching a fair while by 1981 myself and know and remember the ropes.

One of my much older colleagues in the 1970's was a hang 'em flog 'em type of character who taught woodwork and metalwork. It went all around the staff room at the time about how Mr Rodgers near to retirement age nearly got his entire class of boys one afternoon a dose of corporal punishment, either cane or belt it would have been. He had lost his wallet and keys from his jacket pocket left on a chair. When he went to find them they were gone. He accused the class and demanded someone own up. When nobody did so he demanded of the deputy head and the headmaster that everyone should be physically punished to make the culprit own up. At one point he was in the staff room making a bit of a scene about it but the deputy head thought it best to leave things overnight and see if it turned up first and he reluctantly agreed. It was a good job he did.

On the way out going home in the car park I was nearby at my car and he approached his red mini close to mine and couldn't get in it. Looking through the window all his keys, car keys included were on the front passenger seat and his wallet was tucked next to the handbrake between the seats. By this time a small collection of colleagues was stood around. Had it not been for the cooler heads of the deputy head and head our Mr Rodgers would have managed to get his entire class of about 20 boys a severe physical collective punishment for something none of them could own up to. Probably what annoyyed me the most was his lack of contrition and his failure to be apologetic after the discovery, and maintaining we should not have been surprised he thought the boys had taken his personal effects. I think we might have been in some serious hot water if he'd had his way.

I was never keen on teachers I worked with who were very quick to think the worst of those they taught and often wrong.

Allan Gyford on 23rd August 2022 at 20:23

Thank you sir for your response to my post.

As I said, at school we always had emphasis on looking smart and well presented regardless of what we were doing so in a lab coat or gym shorts we had to be exemplary and it sounds as though your son’s school has a similar ethos. On our sports kit list in addition to a towel was also a requirement for clean underpants if wearing them for sport because you simply wouldn’t do sport and put the same ones back on. The result of that was that as recounted in past times, most lads went commando because somehow when packing kit a spare pair was often overlooked, I certainly did and once you had, what was to be bothered about? Something else that has come full circle.

My parents also set store by smart appearance at all times. These values are important wherever you go and whatever you do in life. If I had turned up to my university or job interview looking anything less than smart and well scrubbed, I’m sure it would have counted against me so in addition for instance, a smart haircut is essential, I currently have mine cut every two weeks, it is a thick mop and it needs it to look smart. One of my rugby mates is an HR manager and he says he always awards a mark for well polished shoes and I must admit, since he told me that, I pay even more attention to my shoes and my rugby boots.

The key, I think is looking smart and appropriate for whatever situation you are in so I obviously take care when going to work but equally I take different but equally exacting care when I meet my mates at the pub, go to rugby training – even if I am going to strip as soon as I get there or going to our family Sunday evening meal at my parent’s house, something my mother sees as of critical importance in making sure her brood are fit and well and if at home you would only miss at your peril. Meeting the objective of being presented well is the key, the means of doing it are of much less consequence so if school or the rugby club or the gym provides communal showers you use them, you need to be clean, anything else is an insult to the people you are with and you let yourself down.

What you say about grades for PE and marks for being well presented is interesting, I’m not aware that happened to me but you are correct, marks are an incentive to do the correct thing because all of this information will be scrutinised as you leave school and seek either a university place of to enter the world of work. I doubt any employer is interested in people who don’t take care of their appearance and also demonstrate hard work to date, some universities desperate to fill places might be more lax but places are ever harder to come by so you must do your all to present yourself well.

Team games and fitness are still key to PE. At school we had a choice of rugby or football in the autumn and spring terms with no coercion but obviously lads chose the one they were naturally better at so I chose rugby where I showed talent that I was helped to develop, other lads were better at other things and chose them. Cross country was compulsory for everyone, for almost anything you do, you need to run and anyway, it’s great for overall fitness, I run a couple of times each week with my neighbour who is in his mid 30s and he says I keep him fit but he’s a real challenge too and certainly keeps me moving.

In summer we had choices too, cricket, softball and athletics for example and all year round there was gym. The only thing we missed out on was swimming but I swam two evenings a week with my dad and brother which I enjoyed but the body that makes me a good rugby player isn’t so fast in the water.

I was always comfortable going to the pool with my dad and brother too, dad was at championship level in his younger days so he was a good task master in the water. Changing with them was quite normal. If I digress a moment, my dad is a Finn, sauna is part of his culture and so as long as I can remember we had a sauna at home which he still uses almost every day. When we visited my grandparents in Finland, who live in a small village between Helsinki and Tampere, my Grandma led my mother and sisters off to the village sauna almost every afternoon and after they got back my Grandad or ‘ukki’ as we call him (Finnish word) assembled the men and off we went, that might include my uncles and cousins too though on my dad’s side of the family, they all live in Finland. Finnish saunas at least public ones are never mixed. If you’ve never been to a Finnish sauna, they are hot and naked, no man takes in so much as a towel.

When I go to Finland these days and I’m off there for a few days on Saturday, that’s still how it is and I wouldn’t think of not joining ukki. Like grandparents everywhere, he is immensely proud of his grandchildren and having us there and talking us up and highlighting our achievements is important to him and now I’m an adult he buys me a beer on the way home too so what’s not to like? Sometimes you will find yourself sitting next to or taking a shower with another grandson and you can compare notes on who is being talked up the most.

Saunas you find in the UK are a cold joke in comparison and I wouldn’t waste my time at one. The sauna in the village where my grandparents live is probably a fifty seater and day by day it’s busy and an important social space. I remember dad offering to pay for the installation of a sauna in my grandparents house and ukki wouldn’t hear of it, where would they go to meet their friends and hear village news was the response. Fibre and 5G internet connectivity doesn’t compete with the sauna.

At home, my dad never pressured us to join him in the sauna but very often my brother and I did and even now when we have our family Sunday evening meal my dad has the sauna ready from half past five and most weeks, my brother and also my sister’s boyfriends join him. Presumably for the boyfriends the benefits they get from the sauna far outweigh the idea of sitting naked in a hot box with four other men because just as in Finland, there’s not so much as a towel present and the benches feel hot enough to sear the skin on your arse. Having been with them often enough, stripping naked, sitting in the sauna and showering, I get no sense of awkwardness, they are guys a little older than me aged twenty five and twenty seven. Sometimes we chat, sometimes we compare sports injuries from recent days, sometimes we sit in silence and it’s just a great way of de-stressing before Monday morning and I always sleep very soundly afterwards with no thought of the office tomorrow kicking in, it’s good for my health both physical and mental.

I wouldn’t say our PE teachers ran the ‘kingdoms’ you experienced. Now they have a fairly tight curriculum to follow and guidance on how to do it so there is no more room for deviation than there might be in maths of geography.

It sounds like your boy is lucky and is living in a very safe, stable and caring home, good for him. Not everyone is so lucky.

Hugh on 23rd August 2022 at 19:15

Thank you sir for your response to my post.

I think you are correct, the experience of rugby other than some of the rule changes that have taken place over the years have changed little from your day to mine or indeed for much longer and it will stay that way into the future, rugby has a life of its own.
It is a great game and while very physically demanding it’s also tremendous relaxation and a way of switching off from everything else that is going on. The camaraderie and teamwork required to succeed is second to none and it’s also a great leveller just like the communal showers we share afterwards. For instance, on my team there is me, the city guy and I’m not the only one, the HR manager I mentioned above, there are also three junior doctors so some ambitious professionals and there is also a man who works in a coffee shop and a binman, your success is only determined by your ability to play rugby and that is what teamwork and respect is based on. Among our group there is no awkwardness about anything and to touch again on the subject, I don’t know why we would want shower cubicles, the communal ones have a lot of chat obviously about the game but a whole host of other things to and cubicles would lose all that and we would gain nothing and that’s how I found post sport showers everywhere.

I do find myself wondering if we have met, let me have more of a think in the coming days, there is some bell ringing about a GP and team doc who was in the navy. May I ask sir, were you still in practice three years ago? I’m on holiday this week so plenty of time to do think.

William on 24th August 2022 at 11:24

I think you make many interesting points sir.

I haven’t yet found the post you refer to but I do agree with the point you make about other European countries being more relaxed about nudity is accurate. As I hope I’ve recounted above, Finland is extremely relaxed about same sex nudity but mixed would not be acceptable in a public place, the Scandinavian and other Nordic countries are similar. I was very surprised a few weeks ago on a business trip with a colleague to Germany to go to the hotel sauna. In the changing room was a sign saying the sauna was a ‘textile free’ area so we stripped and made our way in. I was then slightly surprised in spite of my Finland experience to find that the sauna was mixed sex and there were also naked women present. After a moment or two, it didn’t matter, we all sat and enjoyed the heat at a proper ‘Finnish’ temperature. Even in a mixed sex environment there was no sense of anything sexual about the experience.

I would also say that homosexual is not a word in my vocabulary. I don’t remember lads being teased about being gay or any other word to describe it at school and nor was there any wariness about it. I am of the view that who someone has sex with with does not influence their performance in the office, at a restaurant, in a pub (well maybe if they’ve drunk too much) on the rugby field, out for a run or in the gym and I certainly wouldn’t think for a moment that anyone was about to want to have sex with me in a communal shower and nothing remotely like it has ever happened. If a man or woman wants to admire my body no matter how clothed or unclothed it is, I think I should be pleased about that and not in any way intimidated. I certainly didn’t look at any of the women in the sauna in Berlin and think that I would like to have sex with her, they were there for a sauna, not to be any sort of sex object.

Andy, When I wrote the long piece I had not seen the comments from Barney and Allan Gysford, both of which are encouraging but show the danger of generalisation. I suppose Giles Ames has to generalise for his hypothesis.
I doubt whether things have come full circle. Too much has changed. But I do suspect that young towel dancers in their late teens/early 20s may abandon the practice as they mature and realise that the older men they see in the showers are benign, have no interest in them, and are just getting themselves clean. Certainly I've seen milennials aged about 30 behaving no differently from the older men.

William on 24th August 2022 at 11:24

Thank you for your thoughtful comment and you sum up the situation pretty well - though we do now have Barney posting about being far more relaxed regarding changing and showering.

Have things come full circle? I wonder.

for Giles Ames on 15th August.
I'm sorry to have been slow to comment but I look at this conversation less since it became ill-tempered. I thought your contribution really thought-provoking. I have not studied the subject but the differences between generations in their attitudes towards male non-sexual nudity are complex, as are the reasons why attitudes in different countries vary so much. Your spelling suggests that you might be American and by all accounts the changes in the US during the past 50 years have been more extreme than in Britain although the trend is the same.
In general I think your analysis of the "towel dance" is accurate. I have seen it in male changing rooms at gyms and swimming pools. As a baby boomer I have wondered why younger men appear so keen to hide behind the towel. For us it was so different, as many of the contributions on this website testify, but I'd like to add a couple of points based on my experience as a boy at an English single sex grammar school in the 1960s. The regime has been described many times: minimal clothing for gym followed by compulsory communal nude showers. At some schools swimming was nude. We got used to seeing each other so we knew what a normal penis looked like and had no recourse to pornography.
I agree with you that the towel dance is not caused by anxiety abut penis size, but that anxiety about sexual orientation is more significant. It was not like that for us. When we called a boy a poof it was a general term of mild abuse rather than an accusation of homosexuality. We must have had gay boys at school but we spent very little time trying to work out who they were because homosexuality was really not something we thought much about. The liberation of attitudes towards homosexuality in the past 50 years has made young men much more aware than we were of what it meant to be gay.
Not only was sexual orientation of little concern to us, but social attitudes towards single sex nudity were completely different. At school it was the norm. There was no right to bodily privacy. Protest would have been pointless either at school or home. I was shy aged 11 but my parents would have said that we were all boys together and had no reason to fret about being naked. To have made a fuss would have been regarded as "cissy", ie girlish. Newspapers at that time regularly had photographs of professional footballers in the team bath after a match. The photographs were not explicit but none of us imagined that the players were wearing swimming trunks. The 1963 film This Sporting Life had a team bath scene in which rugby players were naked. Young men today might regard it as gay but my generation would have thought it normal and realistic.
Most of us quickly got used to nudity at school, and from what I've seen in male changing rooms nothing much has changed for my generation. If we've nothing on we certainly don't think it's gay and don't spend much time worrying what youngsters think. Their lives must be very different from ours. I assume that most young men from an early age are not seen in the nude outside one-to-one relationships. No wonder they appear shy in the changing room, avoiding showers and spraying their sweaty bodies with deodorant, sometimes with their gym vests still on. Privacy has become more important than cleanliness.
Of course the other factor which has made such a difference in attitudes towards nudity is heightened awareness of the risk of sexual abuse and the introduction of measures to prevent it. The school regime I have described was full of potential for the abuser: compliant boys used to having nothing on, getting on with things and not protesting. But like the majority I was never abused. I benefited from the regime; it made me less shy and reasonably confident about my skinny body but some boys will have thought differently.
I wish I knew whether a keener awareness of sexual orientation plus measures in schools to prevent abuse have changed attitudes to non-sexual male nudity in other countries to the same degree as they have in the UK and the US. I suspect not. Most of Europe is more relaxed about nudity than Britain, but you have to spend time in the countries to appreciate just how ingrained their more down to earth attitude is.
I have offered these comments in good faith to Giles Ames. In the past I've had a fair amount of hostile comment from Alan whose school was certainly different from mine. I hope this time that he might accept that our views are different because our experiences were different and leave it at that.

Tom F on 23rd August 2022 at 21:11

You've been fooled by the hysteria. In a school of 400 boys, imagine a class size of 30 so all day every day twelve consecutive classes going on and perhaps the odd 40 at PE of one sort or another.

A lesson probably lasted about 45 minutes, at my school they did.

So in one of more than twelve lesson sessions going on during the day, a lad got the slipper. Putting it into a more realistic perspective, you can see it's nothing sensational at all and suggesting anything else was just part of the STOPP sensationalist narrative.

A few taps of the slipper or for that matter six strokes of the cane never did any lad any harm and probably a lot of good.

In summer 1974 when I left school I didn't immediately find a job I wanted so my uncle who worked in the meat industry pulled a few strings and got me a job in an abbatoir doing general dogsbody stuff. I lasted just one week. The stench of the place was horrific and it lingered on you. On day one I got shown to my locker and then to a nearby shower room where the foreman told me after 8 hours here you'll need one. I thought he was joking and confidently thought I'd be giving that a miss. I'd spent the day handling waste products and offcuts and he was right. At shift end the other six or seven men who were all much older than me took to the works shower room with some industrial looking soap and although nobody was being forced to do it, I did reek a bit even though I'd worn an overall so I felt I had no choice but to join them. It was probably one of the worst weeks of my life actually, being in a place like that and then finding myself starkers, a fresh faced school leaver with a gang of older men in an abbatoir works shower barely a couple of months since I'd last been with my friends in the school one. Five days of that and I was off without any notice after collecting my wage packet for the grand sum of I think it was around about £15. I found something much better within a fortnight and my uncle was very understanding. It also made me a lifelong veggie.

Allan Gyford just wrote;

"One interesting point about the school is that the grades they give in PE don't just take into account the effort and attainment from the lesson itself but also how good the attendance to the lesson is, how well turned out in the proper PE kit they are and a hygiene element. I'm not entirely certain what that latter part means but I did read of a school elsewhere that docked grades for those who didn't shower which is an interesting take on things."


I quite like the idea of doing this.

Infact tayloring grades like this seems clever and could be cleverer still. Call it a kind of eureka moment but what would be the best option in schools nowadays would be to make showers at school entirely voluntary so nobody can cry on about the terrible mandatory nature of the things, but also dock grades if you fail to shower fully after PE and show good hygiene. I think that is quite fair and reeasonable actually. But would it work, or would those who hate PE and hate showers not care about their grades anyway?

So if proper communal or cubicle naked showers in school were entirely voluntary but using them would get a better grade or report what do we think the uptake might be?

I'd have taken them if voluntary and linked to a grade or if it meant getting marked down if I didn't. But like most on here I never got the choice, in you went like it or loathe it.

Thanks for something thought provoking and different there.

Mike on 23rd August 2022 at 18:46
"Paul J - Tell that to the headmaster Bill Pobjoy at the of that video who said it needed to stop immediately.
Clearly the man didn't know what he was talking about did he."

I couldn't agree with you more, he sounded like the ultimate liberal wet to me and I certainly wouldn't have wanted him educating my boys. I'm glad you agree with me.

How can anyone come on here, defend and genuinely think there is nothing to see here about a school that is slippering its males rear ends at a rate of one every 45 minutes all year round?

That is not normal, and neither were some of the excuses for giving it out remotely normal either.

Since when is physically beating someone the very first call option as a punishment for such petty minor infractions, like was said in the film?

Very interesting comment from you Barney and you sound so well grounded and sensible with a good head on your young shoulders and for somebody only in their early 20's to add something here is very worthwhile because for some reason a lot of people seem to think the ways of old have completely vanished in school and I'm also here, as an older father in my late 50's to a 15 year old son to say they haven't.

My son has been getting packed off to school on PE days with a towel for the past three or four years now and his school gives them all showers. Not modern day privacy type cubicles but just what some people think of as old fashioned open plan showering, the kind like I did more than 45 years ago.

I remember four years ago being quite surprised when we got his uniform and PE kit list and it stated 'towel for showering' the exact same words that I recall seeing on my own list all those years ago in the 1970's. When we got a chance to go and meet some of the staff ahead of his entry I even mentioned it to a teacher who then went and grabbed one of the PE teachers who was lingering nearby who told me communal showers very much still existed. I remember asking if they were voluntary nowadays and the answer was no, with him adding there is no point in having the expense of showers in school and not using them or making them voluntary, so they are told they must use the showers same as I did. I remember not long after he started asking if there was that modern phenomenon of showering with briefs on but it was good old fashioned all in the raw together style stuff.

I kind of found it all strangely reassuring to know things like this still exist like I did them but when I brought the subject up four years ago I was asked if I had any problems with it as I was raising the issue. I said none whatsoever. I was then asked if my son was likely to have any problems and to be honest I was not sure and he was not with us as it was parents only. If he does have any problems with it then he has never mentioned it other than telling me some of the matter of fact goings on.

One interesting point about the school is that the grades they give in PE don't just take into account the effort and attainment from the lesson itself but also how good the attendance to the lesson is, how well turned out in the proper PE kit they are and a hygiene element. I'm not entirely certain what that latter part means but I did read of a school elsewhere that docked grades for those who didn't shower which is an interesting take on things.

The PE kit is quite extensive, quite nice and cost a lot, but despite that he has told me they do some lessons without their tops on, often during the summer outside more than inside but he has done both just randomly whenever his PE teachers decide it for them.

I remember my own school and we had three different PE teachers for three different types of PE class and if you got one particular man in the gym he would never let any of us set foot in the gym with so much as a vest on our backs. I do remember a handful of boys in our class protesting about no vests and bare chests because one of the other teachers if he took us in the gym always made sure we wore our PE vests, and the other man was a bit of both, but mostly vests unless it was basketball skins.

That's the thing about PE teachers that I always remember, that they each seemed to be able to run their own little Kingdoms just as they personally saw fit and some clearly liked doing that more than others and showed it.

I never much liked PE but I never hated it either, it was just PE to get on with and do. My grades weren't too bad but I'd have liked to do things that I was good at rather than forced into the same old stuff like everyone had to. Modern PE still seems to be like that for the most part, the football and cross country runs are still the mainstay of it.

Barney on 22nd August 2022 at 15:56

Thanks Barney, what an interesting post detailing a time that is not in the experience of, I think anyone currently posting here. I'm certainly now past retirement age so I may even be old enough to be your grandfather!

Very interesting what you say about shirt wearing at school, for my generation, no shirts was compulsory and we didn't even have them for gym, athletics or running. Your generation had them but after a few short sessions, chose not to wear them. Some things must just be good for us and the right thing to do. Perhaps our teachers of old were a bit wiser than they were given credit for.

Your experience of rugby is similar to mine and how it was playing both when I was in the navy and also afterwards when I played with a south west London club - who knows, maybe even the same one, clearly not much has changed there but it's a great game so enjoy it for as long as it's safe for you to do so.

After I stopped playing, I covered a team as doc for many years but since I retired, it's not worth my while to remain on the GMC register or pay my insurances just to cover a rugby team and I do miss the team involvement even if I haven't been out on a pitch for quite a few years.

Paul J - Tell that to the headmaster Bill Pobjoy at the of that video who said it needed to stop immediately.

Clearly the man didn't know what he was talking about did he.

Aidan on 22nd August 2022 at 13:45

Thank you for injecting a dose of common sense into the discussion here. After all the Litherland hysteria it was needed. As you point out, the figures there were deliberately presented to create a sensation and they succeeded, more is the pity.

Andy talking to himself.

Aidan on 22nd August 2022 at 13:45

How dare you post something here that Alan won't approve of? You will be on the naughty step (a post STOPP invention) for that for ever more.

Alan on 22nd August 2022 at 15:43

I wouldn't waste my time posting a wind up - unlike your good self by what I read looking back.

Ooohhh, I must have offended the class monitor and Alan is cross. How sad he is.

I was born in 1998 so no memory of some of the stuff discussed here. I went to an independent boys school in London which had been a grammar school until it was forced to choose between independence and comprehensive. Standards were high, I got good A levels, went to a Russell group university and now have a pretty good city job.

The gym pic above is from another age but it could have been my experience of school gym. We had tops but after the first couple of times no lad wore them either for gym or cross country. For rugby we had proper kit, I played all the years and for that matter still do.

We always had to be clean and well presented at school and sport was no exception, all the staff emphasised the need for sport to look as professional as anything else we did.

Strange though some will find it, at school we had communal showers and they were refitted and remained communal in my time there and featured on the architect's website when the work was done so they must have been quite normal. No one thought anything much about it and going to other schools, I would say 90% had communal showers.

At university and playing rugby, sometimes you found showers with partitions of a sort but never doors or curtains and often at rugby clubs they were communal too just as they are at the club in south west London I now play for. No one is bothered, it's what happens.

Equally for training which is a couple of evenings a week, no guy wears a shirt and most guys wear shorts and trainers and are commando for training but obviously for matches support and protection is required, I wear compression shorts - but we are marked down on appearance if they can be seen when standing and rugby shorts are pretty brief for obvious reasons and the shirts very fitting to make it difficult to get hold of them.

So, I think things may have come full circle and we are back doing gym like Mr Parry would have approved of.

Aidan I take it your message is a wind-up, so I will ignore all of it except one detail. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a Rt. Hon, not a Sir, as I am sure he will inform you of the fact - if you do write to him.

Boys grammar school of about 800 boys through the 1960s. Corporal punishment was there as a sanction and while not every day was not uncommon. I reckon I got the cane once a term and most other lads were about the same. That would amount to 2400 canings a year if you want to try and sensationalise the numbers while in reality on the ground it was nothing extreme and to get into trouble once a term indicated that in the main most lads were fairly well behaved.

STOPP was a hippy/lefty organisation determined to destablilise the education system for their own ends and they whipped up support among working people who felt they were entitled to more than they got. The cases that were brought never should have been and were the reason why corporal punishment was withdrawn from state schools when its reasonable use should have continued as it did in the private sector until lily livered Bliar bowed to pressure and outlawed it there too.

Not everything is better these days and when I see louts exiting schools at the end of the school day, looking like they've just been dragged through a hedge and smoking as they do it, it demonstrates a world gone wrong. A Brexit benefit could be the reintroduction of the cane in boys schools. I will write to Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg today, I'm sure he will agree.

I had one of those inappropriate moments when I just had to laugh at the film clip of the school in Liverpool from the eighties and then the hansard report also posted. The whole thing was just so OTT outrageous and it was a description in hansard of teachers actually turning a hose on children that had me in disbelieving chuckles. The whole thing just creates images in the mind of a school of the absurd.

At least all my teachers just shouted and waved their arms around at us when we broke the rules.

I nearly got a smacking from headmistress for running in a corridor when I was only 7. My class teacher was about to send me to her office to be punished with a smack when she changed her mind. I remember the fear, overwhelming anxiety and actual shame I felt about it and it happened 48 years ago. My headmistress smacked children now and again for trivial things. But I'll give her one thing, she was respected and we behaved. But that's only at infant first school level.

I couldn't believe how angry I was when I heard about the Litherland School even a long while after it happened. But it does look like that school has had issues in recent years including sudden departures of heads. The mud has probably well and truly stuck to that school and as someone else noted surrounding name changing, schools that go into special measures in recent years have sometimes had complete overhauls including name changes. You would think Litherland would be good for a change and the fact that so many of us are on this history site talking about it forty years later rather proves it doesn't it. My old first school had a name change not long ago just for the sake of it, not because of any adverse issues surrounding its reputation.

Comment by: Tanya on 21st August 2022 at 02:35
"The headteacher, Mr Eric Colley, drew up plans in April 1981 to reinstate the cane in an attempt to reduce the amount of physical punishments"

This quote literally makes no sense.



That's bizarre. Complete agreement with you. Colley sounds like a sadist. But he wouldn't have been alone. Where were the governors, asleep?

What a sickener of a school with that endemic culture of violence. That headmaster had some significantly warped thinking processes going on inside his head to think anything like that was even close to being acceptable on a daily basis.

There was an incident in my secondary class one morning about autumn term 1979 where we had an older male geography teacher, forties I'd guess, who wasn't especially likable. He was actually quite a scruffy bloke and looked generally unkempt with an untamed beard and sideburns and hair that looked like a comb had never been close in years or a decent haircut. Yet us lot turned out smart in our uniforms and had various rules on what we had to look like and couldn't wear. General appearance didn't seem to apply to teachers though, they could show up for work teaching us as if they'd been dragged through a hedge backwards at times and our geography teacher was one of those kind who taught us. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if he was half decent as a teacher or had a great personality but he had none of it.

I was in one of his geography classes in third secondary year and he had this habit of chucking things at certain boys not paying attention, often small items like a rubber which he aimed to hit with. But he also had a habit when a bit more moody of grabbing his wooden blackboard chalk rubber out thing and launching it at speed across the class to boys near the back. He always clearly aimed to miss though, just sending it over various heads. But one time he did this and missed the boy he was aiming at and instead smacked it straight into the face very hard of an innocent boy nearby. I remember the boy crying and the instant panic on that teachers face because the boy was cut. He legged it out the class leaving us alone and took the boy to the medical room.

Next day this boy shows up with a black eye and a cut forehead.

We never set eyes on that geography teacher ever again from that day forward. He just vanished and we were left guessing and nobody would say anything about him when asked.

Daily Mail - 24 January 1981

A blow-by-blow story of life in class.

Staffroom mole leaks secret of his school's beatings book.

By Andrew Loudon.

Teachers who want an end to corporal punishment yesterday branded a 1,030-pupil comprehensive as a school for scandal. They said that Litherland High, which handed out more than 1,800 slipperings last year, was "top of the beatings league table".

STOPP, the Society of Teachers Opposed to Physical Punishment, highlighted the Merseyside school in a report on "the unacceptable face of British education".

Leaks from Litherland's punishment books show that in one fortnight 65 boys received between one and four strokes with an old tennis shoe. One boy was slippered five times in four days for offences such as missing detention, fooling about and being out of bounds.

The confidential files were given to STOPP by Left-wing English teacher Mr Alan Corkish, a 36-year-old ex-bricklayer. He said: "The rest of the staff are calling me a scab and the headmaster has stopped talking to me".

Mr Corkish, of Barons Hey, Cantril Farm, Liverpool, is a former building site shop steward. He has been a teacher for less than three years, since entering the profession as a mature student. Litherland is his first school.

He added: "It is the frequency of beatings that I am against, rather than the principle. The slipper is used so often, it is a waste of time".

He said he never had discipline problems in his class, but admitted that his size - 6ft 4in. and 17 stone - might have something to do with it.

Mr Corkish, who wore a ban-the-bomb badge in class yesterday, denied that he had a political motive. He said: "I'm a member of the Labour Party and I have read Marx but I would not label myself as a Marxist."

Litherland's headmaster, Mr Eric Colley, said: "Whatever your views on corporal punishment they are going to be wrong with somebody. There are many good things being done at this school, and this business is not going to help anybody."

The slipperings are carried out by two deputy headmasters using a size 10 tennis shoe in the presence of witnesses. The majority of punishments involve only one or two strokes.

Mrs Marlene Foster, 39, of Ince Avenue, Litherland, an opponent of the slipper, said her son Gary had a bottom "as red as a beetroot" after he was punished for writing on desks.

Gary, 13, said the slipper should be banned. But his brother, Wayne, 16, said it [...] was better than detention -- and most beating victims I spoke to agreed. [...]

"The headteacher, Mr Eric Colley, drew up plans in April 1981 to reinstate the cane in an attempt to reduce the amount of physical punishments"

This quote literally makes no sense.

It says rather a lot about Colley that he presided over a school like that. The man was no disciplinarian, he was an unpleasant fool at best, and at worst, well draw your own conclusions.

It's the mere threat of punishment that keeps discipline. Not around the clock thrashings day after day. That's not discipline, that's complete failure.

You look at Litherland in the early 80's and schools like that and then plant yourself back into todays media narratives and have to ask what white privilege those boys actually got. Going to a school like that could breed a lifetime of resentment. I don't think many of those pupils will have felt they had a very privileged start in life. Quite the reverse, that place will have actually damaged permanently a large number of people's future prospects and Liverpool in 1981 wasn't exactly thriving.

The culture of trouble seems to have been from many of the staff, not the pupils. But is it any wonder some of them began playing up when the teaching staff seemed to treat so many of them with utter contempt. Respect works both ways.

Flabbergasted at that school. Even more astonished it's not had a name change.

That school was brought up in the chamber of the House Of Commons by the local MP on 9th February 1981.

Here from Hansard.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1981/feb/09/litherland-high-school

Good find Tony.

The trouble with that Litherland school back there in 1981 is that it seemed to normalise such behaviour on such an industrial scale.

So Alan Corkish who blew the whistle lost his job, oh how depressingly predictable.

Who the hell was the headmaster of that school at the time? Why was he not named in the item? The head at the end from another secondary was spot on when he said quite simply it needed to stop and his wise words about children not being cowards. Quite so.

One of the most intelligent things actually came from one of the teenage boys from that school when he said the out of control use of corporal punishment meant the teachers were weak. No fool that boy.

What this Litherland film ultimately proves is that corporal punishment simply does not work. A few weeks ago there was somebody on here (sorry I forget the name) who also proved that when they spoke of being caned for something they did out of school and being caught by a teacher, smoking with an older boy. He admitted it made no difference to his behaviour.

You have to imagine what the PE teachers were like at Litherland on the basis of that film. Probably a beating for wearing the wrong length socks or not making the cross country time, or a plimsoll across the arse for being too slow into the showers.

Shocking school. I looked to see if it still exists under that name, it does. I hope it's a million miles away from what it used to be but that's some bad reputation to live down even four decades on.