Burnley Grammar School

Comment by: Reedie on 28th November 2024 at 23:38



"I'm not sure why there's so much fuss about what seem quite reasonable rules for boys' PE. If the school policy is that boys wear white shorts and no top, that's up to them and you can either abide by the rules or send your son to a different school......"


With all due respect you seem to be one of those people who think If I'm happy, then everybody is happy, but life isn't like that, and as your experience dates to 1971, that is 53 years ago, and things should have moved on since then.

As we have seen if you go back a few pages, quite often a school will demand a whole sports shop full of gear, and the parents, some of them, not well off, buy it only to find their some are only wearing shorts in their lessons. So schools don't necessarily tell the truth (there's a novel concept!) so unless you specifically ask about the dress code, you might well get a misleading answer, and by the time the truth is discovered, it is too late. Also, of course, this is often at the whim of the individual teacher, who has his own agenda.

Just because you had no problems, doesn't mean to say everyone is the same.

As regards Ms. Sanderson thinking there should be more PE in schools, that reminds me of the people who think that National Service should be reintroduced - usually stated with conviction by people who never served themselves, and whose main exercise these days is going to get the morning coffee at Costa. So easy to tell others what to do, provided you don't have to do it yourself.

This triathlon sports forum Slowtwitch is amazing, some women get offended by seeing blokes in the gym without their shirt on and feel 'deeply offended' by the sight of a males bared chest, OMG! GET A FREAKIN' LIFE!

https://forum.slowtwitch.com/t/shirtless-wonder-on-or-off/615509


I only left school in 2012 and we were always hanging out shirtless in class and in front of girls. I#ve hung out around lots of women down the gym too and nobody has ever given me so much as a funny look about it, some admiring ones yep. Some women are trying to get us guys to become like them. School was really great encouraging positive body awareness and enabling us to go shirtless, sometimes we chose to other times we just had to. Most guys are not showing off by going shirtless ladies, and if you're bothered by it then stop looking in me or my fellow males direction, how's that sound.

I'm not sure why there's so much fuss about what seem quite reasonable rules for boys' PE. If the school policy is that boys wear white shorts and no top, that's up to them and you can either abide by the rules or send your son to a different school.
Yes, I'm sure many teenage boys are reluctant to bare their chests, whether it's because they're pale-skinned, lacking in muscle or overweight for that matter. But another way of looking at it is that there's less incentive for a boy to work harder at keeping his body in shape when he can just hide under a T shirt or vest.
In a situation where it's compulsory for every boy to take off his top, surely that can encourage them to put in more effort at building up biceps or a six-pack, or losing weight - and long-term that must boost both their fitness and self-confidence.
In any case, presumably the school also requires boys to be bare chested in swimming lessons, so why should it be so different when they're running around in the gym?
Every school gym I was ever in did bare chests in PE, my first, middle and comp. Even had to start showers in the middle school. We did 3 PE's a week in middle and 2 in the comp, none of this once a month if the weathers nice stuff.
Bare chests in the gym and group showers never did me any harm. I was even dragged to the headmasters office from PE for spitting on the gym floor once and stood there in my bare feet and bare chest as my PE teacher watched the headmaster crack three strikes of his belt across both hands held out. My god that stung like hell but worst was everyone seeing me struggling with the teacher as he pulled me to the headmasters office for that hand whacking. This must have been in 1971.

It makes you wonder what they'd do without a camera pointing down at them in a room such as that. They must know it's there. Plus, why is it there anyway? A normal respectful human being knows how to treat others, adults and children alike. It doesn't take training. I was only on the end of one bit of rough physical treatment in school that I can remember from a teacher, as a twelve year old child in school, pulled up and grabbed by the neck and frogmarched naked to my first school shower and thrown in it, slipping in the wet tiles onto my knees, it lasted a few moments but even just one incident like that never leaves your memory ever, even after having a fair relationship with such a person after they behaved like that.

The boys at Sunlake in their black shorts remind me of shirtless cross country running I did in the upper sixth. Just like that we were, black shorts and barechested, albeit a smaller group of older boys took the free period PE session in sixth form. Those boys looked at least 17 or 18 to me. Isn't it nice to see young non-tattooed clean looking bodies nowadays free of ink and American youth that are actually in shape rather than obese before they leave school like so many are over there nowadays. No mega food portions for those boys I bet.

Thanks for the reply Christine. I thought you might give that type of answer.

Comment by: Mark on 27th November 2024 at 15:31


I think you'd agree, Mark that Florida is rather a warmer and less damp place than the British Isles. As regards that appalling school in North East London, why on earth - assuming the school has been inspected - were no enquiries made as to why the building had padded rooms?. Perhaps, because these inspections are pre-arranged they filled the rooms with soft toys or something equally innocuous.

If you are going to inspect schools (or anything else) it should be carried out with no prior warning whatsoever so that you get a true picture, not a manufactured one.

Looks like you've got a couple of new allies there Alan, with Christine and Yours Truly. You've both posted the same news link last night. I think you might agree you were a bit quick on the draw with criticising her because it looks like she agrees with your main arguments on privacy and child protection.

Has anybody here taken a look at the link to the shirtless blog recently left on here? There's a really good example of boys at school running shirtless for cross country only very recently (2022) and talking about cross country running, while they are all shirtless. One of them has left a comment there about it saying being shirtless like that gave him a great deal of coinfidence.

Sunlake High School - Land O'Lakes, Florida.

https://fl.milesplit.com/videos/581053/sunlake-boys-interview

Education form pupils with learning difficulties in the 21st century:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjw0e3zjx2lo

When will school inspections really get to grips with some of the sadists and perverts who infest British schools, and if "safeguarding" and "inspections" are so thorough, why on earth was this not flagged up years ago - especially for such vulnerable children?

To answer your question Danny, school inspection would not dictate whether a school should make anybody use a shower, only that the appropriate facilities were available and given enough space provided.

My own personal opinion on the matter is that all schools should provide PE lessons for everyone irrespective of ability and that these should be compulsory for all, and that there should be a little bit more on the timetable not less. PE has been the first casualty in crowded timetables in recent years, some of the worst examples halved their provision. Ofsted supports a minimum two sessions per week. Many years ago everyone took a minimum of two classes per week, some did three and in some schools a very long time ago and in private education it would not be unheard of for there to even be a PE lesson at some point in each day, even if it was just half an hour.

On PE aftercare, my personal attitude is that a shower after PE should be available for all, and that use should be encouraged if needed but not going down the route of compulsion. I think modern day schools are a lot more aware of issues young people deal with when growing up compared to even just 25 years or so ago when I started my job at Ofsted in its infancy. I remember the days when I had to shower at my girls school in Bedfordshire in the 1960's, we had a very strict Miss who checked the girls had stood and washed properly for long enough, and we were put through our paces with her and no answering back to any instructions given. As they say, we were all children once and did the same things. We've all been there.

Yours Truly you have mentioned talking to pupils. I spent a lot of time speaking with pupils as and when applicable during school inspections. I can't claim to remember any pupil speaking to me directly about the subject here but I certainly observed many facilities and I do recall a few recommendations about damp and especially black mould in changing rooms and shower areas being identified by others. Pupils should never be expected to use dirty, unclean or mould infested changing areas or showers. We also looked the toilets over.

I read your story about the boy being locked in the cupboard. It's disgraceful isn't it. As it happens something very similar was being reported tonight about young special needs children being locked into a bare padded room alone and then handled inappropriately, and this was filmed. I have the story here, so it seems even now some lessons refuse to be learned about how to treat people, young vulnerable ones in this case. I just wonder why the same mistakes and behaviour like this keep getting repeated. I think it's fair to say some people misuse the powers they have over youngsters and maybe this will never change, all we can do is find them and remove them.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjw0e3zjx2lo

Alan, thank you. I have just looked up "Aubade". The poem is beautiful, and a bitingly clear reflection on the inevitable.

YT 26th November 2024 at 11.50

Y.T: I think the aloof persona of Philip Larkin was, to some degree, a device. He hated or dreaded (perhaps both) interviews and having to explain himself or his work . He could never understand why John Betjeman courted publicity, though, ironically, the BBC have in their archive a 1962 TV recording called "Down Cemetery Road" where the two men discuss their work on location. JB tries to draw out PL - he remains gloriously taciturn - so with little success. The film was made for an arts documentary programme, and is worth watching.

He had close friends such as KIngsley Amis, probably his best fri and Andrew Motion's biography describes many of their literary jokes (some quite ribald) and of course, he was a great jazz fan of earlier jazz music , and had a sideline in reviewing records for the Daily Telegraph - he described an evening of reviewing, with a large drink beside him as his favourite job. He thought jazz ended about 1938 - unfortunate as most of the records sent to him came from the LP era of the fifties and sixties, but there was a sort of grim determination about him, a rueful realisation that he was out of his time. Finally, he became alcoholic, though even there he made it a rule to leave the port downstairs so he had to get up to drink his breakfast.

I can forgive all that because he wrote the most beautiful poem in the English language (in my opinion, at any rate) - 'Aubade'. In just a few lines, simply written, without artifice, he sums up the human condition, and the total pointlessness of everyday life.

i never learned any of this stuff at school - I am a great believer in self-education. School is the Poundland of knowledge.

Sorry - a long way from the merits or demerits of wretched staged school inspections!

Alan,

To be fair to Philip Larkin, he hated everybody and everything, didn't he? Himself most of all if the available evidence is anything to go by.

There is a biography, presumably out of print now, titled Philip Larkin, The Marvell Press And Me, written by a woman called Jean Hartley. She was the wife of the publisher of his second volume of verse, which was a cottage affair run out of their council house. (If this sounds somewhat ignominious for a man who would go on to be offered the poet laureateship, his first volume had been published by a pornographer who would publish the occasional novel or poetry anthology as a cover and who never paid him a penny.) She became a lifelong friend of his, although she was never one of 'Larkin's women'', if you get me. She shed some light on his personality. For instance he was seemingly happy for her when both of her daughters got in to university, despite being known for his stated opinion that extending higher education to the working classes was the final nail in the coffin of western civilisation.

I think Philip Larkin was an intensely shy man who found ordinary life very difficult. I think the relentless pessimism was fifty per cent true. He must have found basic social interactions difficult and probably got bullied. And fifty per cent a cloak. Nobody wants to admit that they were a victim. A sense of superiority, real or feigned, can be quite consoling, I suppose.

Anyway. Sorry for the digression. I have no idea whether Philip Larkin or Jean Hartley had to shower at school. Were school showers even around in their time?

Hi Alan,

I couldn't agree with you more about school inspectors asking children about their experiences. After all, we were the 'consumers' undergoing this experience, were we not?

She has herself expressed concern about how the two-day warning convention gave schools time to sweep any malpractice under the rug ahead of inspections. Well, if she and her colleagues had asked the children in those schools they might have got an honest opinion about how things were there.

I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s, so before ofsted. But I don't have to search my memory too hard to come up with incompetent, academically negligent teachers in my secondary school and downright abusive teachers in my primary school - like one teacher who patently hated children and who actually locked one boy in a cupboard because he wouldn't stop crying on his first morning in school. That is a true story.

Christine and her cohorts could have been there for children like that. Could have been.

Hi Donna,

Very sorry to hear you were sexually assaulted.

The way that teacher treated you was horrible but not surprising.

I had heard before of primary-age kids having to shower after PE but this must surely have been very unusual.

Sorry to disagree with you about boys having it easier in the showers. It certainly wasn't that way at my secondary school, where we had a communal shower while the girls had cubicles. Sometimes, in some schools, girls did have communal showers, it sounds like you did, but for boys communal showers were universal.

If boys seem to take things more in their stride than girls, well, that's exactly it. The key word is 'seem'. We are made to feel much more than girls from the earliest ages that our feelings are not appropriate to many social situations and so we learn to mask them. The boys you remember might have seemed like they were taking it in their stride but that was because they had no choice but to do so. Boys found communal showers humiliating as well.

If you are referring to the female school inspector that has posted here I wouldn't hold my breath. I agree with you - I would have thought that someone championing the benefits of school showers would have regarded the feelings of the adolescents who had to undergo them as a primary concern. But Christine already stated in, I think, her first post, that she and her colleagues made a specific practice of not consulting individual children about their feelings and experiences of school.

Comment by: Donna on 25th November 2024 at 23:28


Donna, a few years before he died the poet Philip Larkin was asked in an Observer interview if he regretted not having children (I think this was inspired by his poem "This Be The Verse"). His reply was immediate "Children are very horrible aren't they? - nasty, selfish, vulgar little brutes"

I have every sympathy with your plight, both in school and out of it, but I think there is little difference between the bullying of boys and girls in school, frankly. I went to an all boys school and the bullying and name calling could be intense - I imagine the same is true in girls schools. Judging by the din that happens near to me, the girls are just as foul mouthed as the boys as they wait at the bus stop each morning.

I sadly don't think there is an answer to it -0 the "be kind" message of the Covid years will never be remembered by children of either sex. But privacy should be a human right for children just as it is for adults. I was also an only child, by the way, like yourself, so I fully understand what you mean

.



Comment by: James D on 26th November 2024 at 02:21
I'd like to add a different angle of mine to this shower and privacy debate stirred up by the recent comments made by an ofsted person and also references made to comments underneath a news item on the subject........

.

.....But there was one thing I didn't like. The attitude of many (not all) PE teachers. I strongly disliked the way many of them watched us while showering. I don't mean striking a casual glance, I mean really looking and keeping their eyes on those of us showering, instead of knowing we were in the showers and just leaving us alone to get on with it. The intensity of the watching over was not needed, in my school at least. I lost count of the amount of times I stood there thinking to myself will this guy just f**k off and leave us to get on with it. "




I think you are correct - some teachers were FAR TOO interested in the lads ablutions and that should raise question marks, not least among their colleagues. If they are too scared to report them to the head, perhaps part of the inspection process should be interviews with staff on a confidential basis. For all the "inspections" far too many schools are a dump, and some very questionable staff get to keep their jobs and pensions. Just to say, James, that I went to a very tough school, and if any lad had caught another looking at his body - even clothed - it would have resulted in a fight. I can't imagine what would have happened in the showers.


Ms. Sanderson will correct me if I am wrong, but I understand many of these otiose "inspections" are done by prior appointment, unlike previous times when they could call unannounced. Plenty of time to get the dubious teachers out of the way, clean up the lavatories and generally run the Mr. Sheen and Dettol round the building. I frankly don't see the point. Perhaps that is whey schools like The Royal Liberty got away with Mr Quinlan for so long. What are they really inspecting? - a rehearsed display, with the ragged edges filed off?. Checking to see the regulation Dulux Magnolia has been touched up this year?. Boxes ticked, exercise done.

As regards that absurd idea by the University of Essex that boys who shower are fitter, stronger etc. Consider this. At any school, any day you will see a class of lads - some will be a thin as a whip, some will be on the larger size and many fall in between. I assume they all take the same lessons under the same dictat, showers or not. I was as skinny as a rake, my best mate was the opposite end of the scale - pardon the pun - we were both taught in the same way under the same rules. I think they were clutching at straws on that one (on public money no doubt)

I'd like to add a different angle of mine to this shower and privacy debate stirred up by the recent comments made by an ofsted person and also references made to comments underneath a news item on the subject.

I was never anxious or concerned about the rule I had to shower after PE at school when I reached eleven, or any time after. I didn't mind that they made us do it, that it was a teacher demand on us all. I was never anxious or much bothered about sharing a shower with my classmates, rubbing shoulders with them all while stripped fully naked, no modesty pants in the shower either. None of that gave me any kind of fears. Actually I quite liked the ability to see others and judge and compare them to how I was, not just the obvious but the whole human form. I thought it was interesting to see what others looked like under their clothes and I didn't care if anyone looked at me and thought the same. Sharing the school showers seemed quite normal and sociable to me. I thought of it as a quite grown up thing to do, we were now at big school after all.

But there was one thing I didn't like. The attitude of many (not all) PE teachers. I strongly disliked the way many of them watched us while showering. I don't mean striking a casual glance, I mean really looking and keeping their eyes on those of us showering, instead of knowing we were in the showers and just leaving us alone to get on with it. The intensity of the watching over was not needed, in my school at least. I lost count of the amount of times I stood there thinking to myself will this guy just f**k off and leave us to get on with it. I didn't let it upset me or anything like that and was fine with the showers, but the teachers just got on my nerves, especially the joy some of them took in getting everyone ready to shower or chasing down boys who tried to slip away without one.

It's okay to have compulsory communal showers in school as far as I'm concerned, but if you're going to do that just let them get on with it and leave alone, no watching. It wasn't prison, it was school. We didn't let our parents watch us bath or shower or stay in the bathroom when we became old enough or young teenagers, we told them to keep out the bathroom while we were in there didn't we, and PE teachers should have done just the same. My classmates were entitled to see me naked and wet after PE, they were too, and the same age, in the same boat as each other, and a lot of the time we needed that shower. But those teachers had done the lesson and should have just kept clear while we did it.

So I'll stand up for the principle of school showers. I think it's quite healthy for your classmates to share and not be afraid of each other like that, or might I add to be shirtless for the main lesson, I was heaps of times. But teachers, get lost.

A question for Christine.

You mentioned that it was up to the school or a teacher and not up to inspectors like ofsted or Her Majety's Inspectorate to dictate policy on whether schoolchildren took communal showers after PE lessons. Fine, that's clear enough. But I'd like to know if Ofsted or previous inspectors actually have an official stated opinion, or would have had an opinion in the past on whether school showers should actually be compulsory or not for all, like in my time in the 1980's, or whether they should have been available but voluntary. It was quite a big deal for a lot of us you know!

I once slipped and fell stark naked in front of the p.e teacher because I was rushing to get in and she humiliated me in front of the whole group. Was awful and I'd still like to smack her in the face for it over 30 years on. I was only 10. I was an only child and not used to taking all my clothes off in front of others and had the task of p.e showers in primary and comprehensive, exactly the same as all the boys did. I had also recently been sexually assaulted and just wanted to die, there and then. Fair enough, the teacher wasn't to know that but she would have been hauled over the coals for doing what she did, these days. Wasn't at all against the principle of showering at all because I hated getting sweaty and smelly even back then but the lack of privacy was awful, especially as I had an early puberty.

Boys had it easy in the showers compared to the girls, even with you all sizing up your extra bits with each other. Nearly all girls felt humiliated by showers in school but I'm sure a female schools inspector already knows that if she has the facts at hand or spoke to anyone.

Hi Terry,

I wasn't even referring to Christine in my last post. I was referring to the Essex University report that referenced the data compiled by her colleagues and her.

Regarding the 'everybody's different' argument, well, I don't think it washes (boom boom). If you go to that BBC article and down to the comments you can see it for yourself. Post after post after post detailing bad memories of communal showering at school. Clearly a lot of people feel the same about this matter.

Every few years or so some random hand-wringing news article crops up in this or that newspaper or whatever news website, asking essentially the same question: why, oh why, are the nation's teenagers being put off school sports? Well a lot of the respondents to that BBC article supplied one of the main reasons for this in plain English. In fact one respondent even made the cutting comment that the only other groups in UK society compelled to undergo communal showering are army recruits and people in prison.

In fact, according to the BBC article the report did actually cite concerns about showering as a barrier to participation in school sports. I think we can assume Christine was not involved with this part of the report.

Christine actually ended her last comment with the following;

'One final thing, where enforcement of school showering took place after PE, parental pushback against the practice of offering or requiring showering with PE was negligible to nothing in findings.'


So no complaints then. That sounds right. Didn't one of the PE teachers on here a few months ago actually say that almost no parents ever complained about showering at school, or for that matter shirtlessness. I think so. If I'd seen the wording from the website I'd assume any child of mine was showering, and I would not complain about it if I discovered they actually were doing so.

Is there anybody reading this who thinks they would complain about it if they had a minor family member being told to shower in a school?

The BBC news item about school fitness and showering was hardly a bombshell revelation in my opinion. Like many surveys they often discover the bleeding obvious. My take on that, a school that takes PE seriously is more likely to have fitter pupils in it and is probably more likely to do and have all the things needed for PE, including the ability and need to shower. It's so easy to understand I don't know how anyone can argue about it.

Comment by: Yours Truly on 25th November 2024 at 15:06


I should have thought one of the duties of an inspector would have been to talk to some of the pupils to get their views, and to express their opinions, but Ms Sanderson seems to have viewed them much as she did the equipment and facilities, just as figures to be noted down on the clipboard or spreadsheet. She tells us she had been a school governor, but these posts are very much taken by people who seek them out. She told us her findings were facts and not opinions, but she merely cites the University of Essex study, which, again are based on supposition not concrete fact, so they are the University's opinions, and she apparently agrees with them. I repeat you can juggle statistics so that you get the findings you want to put across.


Tom made a good point - his son's school website suggests that showers are encouraged but not enforced, yet he tells us they are in effect, compulsory - you have to wonder why schools are so nervous in making these facts known to parents.. What are they afraid of? - complaints?.

No doubt the schools, like Ms Sanderson, must imagine because nobody complains, everyone is happy with their arrangements. This clearly is not the case.

Well thankyou for answering my question there Christine in a quite informative manner.

PE changing and showering privacy was addressed in one of Christine's previous answers Yours Truly. Privacy was addressed she said in more generalised terms rather than one on one individually looking at the arrangements.

The thing about privacy is that everyone is slightly different with it. Take my old school changing room for example. Some in that didn't care if they were swinging their boy bits in your face while changing or drying off, while others wrapped towels around themselves and faced the wall to prevent more looking at them than was necessary and were definitely hiding themselves. Most of us fell in between.

Even this site, some people are more open than others and reveal more. Each to their own. Did you notice for example how three of the PE teachers that commented on here over the past year or two all used their full names and gave a lot of personal information, so their privacy guard was set low, and of course they were all in favour of school showers and had no concern about shirtless PE mandates either. Just like soldiers, PE teachers don't go big on privacy because it's not practical for them to do so.

I have by no means read all of the nearly 600 comments on that BBC article but virtually every second one cites communal showers. How much more obviously can it be made? In fact one response even expresses surprise that the issue of showering privacy had not been addressed in the report. Well, exactly.

Christine Sanderson, thank you very much for your willingness to take the time to answer our questions so fully.

My own lad's school still does the shower thing for P.E, much like I remember in my day. The school website says 'we offer and encourage showering'. In practice I'm told their teachers have made it mandatory. So why not just say this on the website then? I don't mind, but just be more straight about it. What's your view on this Christine?

Good comments Christine. All makes perfect sense to me, I'm not sure why others see a problem with all that. That link beeb story was interesting and so were the comments underneath, hundreds of them, I've only caught a few, will go back and read some more of them. The beeb likes reporting things like this, does anyone remember this nonsence headline which they presneted as a serious news item some time ago - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-42236608 - all about asking if your boss can ask you to get into work in your birthday suit. Who writes this stuff!

Chris G your final paragraph is quite correct there. They is a lot of hard work involved. Some people have a total misunderstanding of what school inspectors are and what they do. There is nothing self appointed about it, it's a proper and very responsible full time job requiring a lot of hours and a lot of paperwork. It's only voluntary in the sense that I chose to apply and go for interview the same as any other position. I've been involved in inspections of schools catering from ages 8 to 18, but mostly secondary schools. I was asked my background, well I was not a teacher but had been a parent governor and then a non parent governor who had also held down a private sector job associated directly with child welfare and educational issues. I'll leave it at that.

I've presented some facts, not personal opinions. They are not unique to the findings our teams did. Actually the university of Essex used some of our data not long after our findings and also did similar research of their own around Essex schools using similar numeric methodology and numbers of pupils and found similar results, again around about ten years ago also. Their research on the back of our published data caught the attention of BBC who reported the following item in 2015 that I knew of and have just tracked down again for any interested eyes. The headline sums up what I said the other day about our inspectors findings, although these were not inspectors but university researchers in this case.

The Blair government did not abolish the school shower, most schools still have working shower areas connected to PE. They have to. It's the school and the teachers that decide if they are used, not the government or ofsted. One final thing, where enforcement of school showering took place after PE, parental pushback against the practice of offering or requiring showering with PE was negligible to nothing in findings.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30796304

Christine - looks like Andy's prediction (Comment, Nov 23rd) is coming true. Perhaps you should educate everyone here as to the exact role of OFSTED in the School Examination system in England (I can't speak for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland), with an indication of the operating brief of a typical Examination and the background/qualifications of the Examiners themselves.

Some of the posters seem to be of the opinion that School Examiners are self-appointed busy-bodies, but after nearly ten years as an elected Parent Governor at a County Primary school in the 1990s I can assure everyone that they are not.

And an OFSTED examination is not a push-over either. If I remember correctly, during my time as Governor we had two Examinations, each carried out by a team of four or five Examiners and each lasting four or five days, with not a stone left unturned, almost literally. By the end of the week we were all, Staff and Governors alike, utterly shattered.

Christine Sanderson, thank you for your detailed and interesting account of your experiences.

Please don't mind my asking, just from curiosity: did you ever work in or inspect primary schools as well as secondary? Did you work as a teacher before becoming an inspector?

Thank you.

Comment by: Andy on 23rd November 2024 at 20:34


No Andy, I am just wondering what qualifications Ms Sanderson had for her "inspections"?, or is it some sort of voluntary post, like those terribly good people who set themselves up as "Neighbourhood Watch Supervisors", which gives them legitimacy for their lace curtain twitching?

Also she repeats her assertion that schools that have nice showers will succeed better at sports. It is like saying a £5000 trumpet will make you play better than a £500 one. If somebody is not interested or not proficient, all the equipment in the world will not make them more interested or more successful. Still, who am I to tread on her dreams.

I ran a number of shirtless cross country runs at my school in Dundee in the eighties and didn't find them as much fun as some do in school running like Oscar and his mates here, as he's clearly very good at it and has the body like his mates to match. In my case many of the boys simply struggled to keep up with the best half dozen or so runners who went way ahead of the rest with one teacher and another teacher had to remain with the larger slower group. Teachers refused to ever muck in with this shirtless ethic they instilled onto the rest of us, including throughout the rest of PE in the school gym where no teacher in the whole school let boys stick tops on for PE, it was shirtless and nothing else. The exact dark grey nylon shorts had to be worn or it was underpants only. I could not have got away wearing the kind of different shorts like the one in the video here for example who lines up shirtless with his cross country running team from school.

I posted a similar comment earlier today on the link to the shirtless forum that was left here last week sometime and where I saw this video where I answered the boy on the left.

I just wish I could have been as chilled out as these guys here. Scottish school cross country running in no shirt was not as fun as Florida cross country school running.

https://fl.milesplit.com/videos/581053/sunlake-boys-interview