Burnley Grammar School

Being naked in the boys' changing rooms / showers became a regular part of school life. That was not a problem after a while, we had to accept the compulsion to do it and there was little point creating a fuss about it. All of us, myself included went through that process well over 100 times a year for (in my case) 7 years, from the age of 9 (middle school) and then 12 (comprehensive school) ending at 16. That's a lot of communal showers, 700, which amounts to a lot of time too even if they were just a couple of minutes and out. That amounts to a full 24 hour whole day of my life in the school communal showers mingling naked side by side my class!! At comprehensive we were actually told 4 minutes for a shower so it could be double that.

One thing I do know is that they went far harder on the boys at school over the demand to make us shower than they did the girls who could get away with not taking them at all.

I remember my first ever shirtless PE lesson being dropped on me at comprehensive school without any warning at all. Simply a teacher who taught his PE that way and always refused to let any of us wear t-shirts in his PE lesson while we were in what he called 'his' gym. Another teacher was a bit more flexible, but even so we spent a lot of time whipping our tops on and off even with him. I never liked having to file down the school corridor to the gym with my shirt off because it was a long walk and we always went past somebody else.

Comment by: Ex-Navy David Turkington on 14th March 2025 at 22:56


David, you chose to go into the Navy, and presumably had some idea of what you were letting yourself in for. All of us at 11 were forced to go to school. I think the bathroom arrangements you had to contend with sounds disgusting.

I was an only child - there were/are a lot of disadvantages, but one bonus was that you got privacy, which to me was paramount.

Hi Yours Truly.

I thought you might like a quick couple of minute read of this American article and website, titled - The Double Standard of Physical Education in Schools.

https://www.ablineducation.com/post/the-double-standard-of-physical-education-in-schools

Hi Mark,

'I know others don't like going down this road too much and I agree but it's worth a quick mention to notice that it's not always men who can't be trusted, women sometimes do the same and this woman has been convicted today for a couple of years for abusing a schoolboy and actually having full sex with him last year at his boys school in Northern Ireland. She has been described as a 'cold calculating child predator'. '

This is why I keep pressing for awareness of the double standard, though other posters here seem to think I'm just harping on. The double standard has far more serious and far-reaching consequences than boys being treated with casual disregard on a daily basis. The fact that she actually tried to counter-accuse the boy just goes to show her absolute lack of penitence.

I absolutely agree that a man that committed the same offence wouldn't have been treated so leniently. It prompts the question: when the law deliberately turns its back on their issue where is a concerned parent to go?

I'm surprised being bare chested or naked showering is the big issue it gets made to be now in the UK. Are we returning to a new Victorian Age? How does an entire class of about fifteen or twenty or so boys change clothes for a PE class, then go in the showers and change back at the end of the class period (assuming the other half class of girls are separately doing the same)? In Durham where I attended school, such a PE class ran from first to fifth year at my big school after I left primary, where I'd also been taking part in bare chested PE whenever it suited them too.

I was not initially the most confident at such things as a youngster but only by joining up and meeting challenges head on did I end up removing completely all these hang ups and come to realise how futile they are to hold onto.

What do people think life in the military is like, where dozens of guys simultaneously use the shower rooms. In Navy basic, there were no doors on the line of toilet stalls, you were watched emptying your guts with all the smells and sounds that go with it, openly urinating with each other as well. Up at 6am and twenty minutes for what was referred to as a "shit, shower and a shave". Ditto for shipboard life, literally tripping over each other and having various random nuts and d*cks in your face. (I've served on an aircraft carrier). One for Felicity's son to think about, good luck to him with his future ambition, it will be the making of him if he succeeds. The only thing we didn't actually do in the navy was the PT bare chested like school, we were strictly in proper clean white vests or close fitting T-shirts with no loose fabric.

When in Stockholm, Sweden, some years ago, I switched on my hotel TV and came across a documentary type show of school kids of both boys and girls, shown fully nude front and back, intermingled and sharing the very same open plan communal showers and change rooms for PE. I asked one of the Swedish engineers on the job I was on at the time for an explanation and was told that it was the government mandated response to reduce the country's high sex crime rate. When children of both sexes became accustomed to such intermingling from an early age, physiological differences became no big deal as it yet largely remains in our own Western culture. There was full acceptance across the sexes, sexual inequality vanished in every aspect of life, and there was a sharp decline of the former sex crime rate with the new generations.

I'd suggest everyone does a long stretch of bare chested PE from an early age and all schools should require showering, and the Swedish model may sound un-British but aren't some things worth a look at for the greater good of all in society in the longer term? Some contributors on these pages have spoken of double standards on behaviour and schooling on the male/female divide but what the Swedish example suggests is the perfect answer to this and a "one standard" for all from a young age onwards.

Felicity, in your post you passed comment on shirtless PE being old fashioned. I often wonder why some people think of it like that, or just because something is old fashioned means it can't be current too. When I was growing up I always remember seeing lots of boys playing in the streets on long summer afternoons and evenings shirtless. It does seem to me that you don't see it as much as you used to although when we have had the really hot weather it happens a lot still. One thing that you do see now more than ever is men and bare legs though with shorts on all through the winter, even much older men. I rarely saw my PE teachers knees, they were always wearing long tracksuit jogging bottoms in navy blue with white stripes down the leg, and I never recall seeing any of my own PE teachers shirtless like our own gym rules were, but this was only because our teacher decided it, it certainly wasn't down to set school rules.

Peter W. I'm curious was there ever a reason given for stripping off halfway during cross country. I remember those very thin vests and our teachers disdain for them. We had a daily PE lessons. Indoors everyone was barechested throughout my time while the vests were supposed to be for outdoor use.
We soon discovered outdoors lessons were performed in teams of skins and vests or with everyone barechested dependant on the teachers wishes regardless of time of year or conditions. Cross country and athletics were barechested with no exceptions.

This one's for Alan.

I know others don't like going down this road too much and I agree but it's worth a quick mention to notice that it's not always men who can't be trusted, women sometimes do the same and this woman has been convicted today for a couple of years for abusing a schoolboy and actually having full sex with him last year at his boys school in Northern Ireland. She has been described as a 'cold calculating child predator'.

It says here that there is a stigma attached to boys reporting women like this. I couldn't help feel she got off very lightly and that if this had been a man committing the same abusive breach of trust and offences against the boy, or a female pupil, then he'd be looking at five or ten years instead of two. Therefore do we not have a double standard here too. She has been put on the offenders register for life. In this case she tried to turn the tables on her victim by accusing him of assaulting her. It's not clear what this woman taught except one to one hands on biology and sex education to favoured pupils she liked.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqjd9vv2nylo

I was packed off to a boarding school in the late sixties by my highly ambitious parents who were determined to give me what they never had themselves. Although not an unhappy experience I did not really enjoy it much either and sometimes I found the physical education to be a nightmare of extreme competitiveness when I was just happy to take part and get my body moving and heart rate up a bit.

Shirtless PE was very frequent and it was a permanent feature of any gym based lessons where any notion of boys in tops was a non starter and the mandate never changed on that in my time.

We used to run cross country in small thin vests all year. I've no idea how long the cross country was but I think 7 miles wouldn't be a bad estimate, they were very long and winding and up and downhill in all weather. There was a halfway point landmark on our normal cross country run and we would reach it and take a few moments breather as a group for everyone to catch up before setting off again and nearly always we would then be told to pull our vests over our heads, tuck them into our shorts and do the second half bare chests. You might call it a skins and shirts run. I always got the impression that there were a decent amount of confident boys at school who rather liked to be able to run stripped off like that showing off their growing physical attributes.

Our school had something known as 'PE Drill' once a month where everyone came out of school in shorts and trainers/plimsolls as we called them then, all bare chests, except teachers stayed in vests, and upwards of 300 boys would do a form of mass calisthenics for half an hour. It was quite something to see and take part in. I remember wjhen I took part in these things feeling less like an individual with the sameness it made us all.

But when it comes to taking your kit off for such things, no boys are meant to be ashamed or reluctant to do so are they, we are conditioned from a quite young age that as young, or even old males that our bodies can be displayed to anyone at any moment and we should accept and embrace that openly and with enthusiasm and much of this happens to us at school.

I remember having a conversation with my own father soon after he packed me off to boarding school and speaking of the physical education I was getting there and he told me it sounded like I was getting given it tougher there than he had as a rookie national service recruit not long after the war.

During the course of an average week at school in the 1980's I would regular as clockwork have three communal nudity showers. Two of these were after both my usual PE lessons, the gym and outside games, but the other one was on the day I had to show up after school hours for football practice. The PE teacher who always took us for practice would never let us just go home at the end even if someone's parent was waiting at the gates or with a car pick up. He always said nobody was going home to their parents without a proper shower so they went home clean. My dad used to get fed up waiting for me, but without the pressure of time constraints in the schoolday timetable our football practice teacher made us shower for longer and all over with school issue soap and if we wanted it some shampoo.

I'm of an age that remembers the Fit and Healthy school programme and remember watching many of those in that series including the one with the boys in the showers. I think a lot of people who saw it at the time will have remembered it and one or two others. I think the boys who took part in the changing room showers deserve a medal for bravery for doing that. It's not so much that their winkles were out all over the place in front of the lens but that all their faces were easily identifiable as well at the same time. I wonder if the school benefitted from the endless repeat fees on that, although the boys deserved to.

Comment by: James on 12th March 2025 at 04:11
Does this bring back any memories of anyone's school cross country?
https://youtu.be/iWC_-evE8qs?si=pNWYJrw7q2k8FaNq



It does James. That looks like many school cross country runs I endured in my time in the 70's at a slightly younger age, made to go out without my shirt on and just keep on running with a teacher up the front of us and another at the rear of us forever blasting the slower boys to keep up. We ran the school cross country like we were in the school gym, completely and utterly shirtless the whole class group. We would often get wet through rain or just sweat until our hair was dripping too. I remember boys that looked completely out of shape and finding it very hard. Sometimes when we got back from the cross country the less fit boys could barely manage to stand up straight to shower the sweat and grime off, some of us used to sit on the floor of the showers at school and just rest while the water cascaded over us. We were actually allowed to do that.

The difference between us and these boys is they look like they were sort of enjoying it while many of us were not. It was like a school boot camp existence doing the cross country shirtless like that until you almost dropped through exhaustion.

Comment by: Terry on 12th March 2025 at 15:01



Totally agree, Terry. I think the point is you can get men and women who "only" went to a state school who are just as intelligent and hard working as those who aim higher (or were aimed higher). Recent PM's of both parties have proved that just because you went to Oxbridge and got a title, it doesn't give you extra wisdom or even commonsense.



Comment by: Yours Truly on 12th March 2025 at 09:55




"Hi Alan,

I am rather surprised to hear that in 2025 upmarket schools are marketing themselves as offering 'traditional values in a traditional setting'. How traditional are we talking about here? They can't cane kids anymore so it can only be so traditional. Is it Jimmy Edwards era traditional? Or Tucker Jenkins era Grange Hill traditional? Both are traditions. My primary school was big on 'traditional values' (no caning though) back in the 1970s in a working-class area, so more fool people who are willing to fork out for this pantomime nonsense....."

One of our two "traditional" teachers loved the cane and used it until the last day it was legal to do so, the other one - well let's not go there again!.

As regards our P.M - he got free access to Reigate(?) Grammar School, something denied to others these days, and I think some of his recent behaviour shows he has no conception of what life is like for the elderly and the poor. I would also refer you to the horrible way he ingratiated himself with Mr. Trump a couple of weeks back..much they way he did with Blair and Mandelson. A "good education" doesn't necessarily equate to compassion and empathy, and plain old hard work.

I understand, to some degree why pushy parents want their children to go to such establishments, but it is more about fulfilling their desires than that of the sons or daughters. As I said earlier when I was eleven I wanted to be a bus driver. That was two years or so before I discovered the trumpet - goodbye to bus driving. I was a much better brassman than I would have been a busman. We all change a lot in our teens, and the lad concerned might well have had enough of "traditional discipline" when he gets to 17 or 18. Who knows?

It is sad that the school system is so two tier that people find it necessary to pay thousands of pounds for slightly better education - possibly. I should say a good well motivated state school teacher was the equal of a grammar school teacher. As I have never been in a David Lloyd gymnasium, I can't comment, but for children who are nervous or even scared, they will be just as scared in a grammar school gym, as they would be in the one at the local comprehensive - but these little baubles seem to play a good part in encouraging people to part with their money. A case of preferring the box to the chocolates.

I can honestly say I would have loathed any school I had been forced to attend, but at least mine lacked pretension.

Nothing perpetuates and reinforces the class system in this country more than the education system and it does that to children from an early age. I think it is perfectly fair to say that many people, no matter how brilliant they might be, are condemned to a certain life trajectory even while still in the womb.

I don't know who these people are who try to convince themselves that this is a less class ridden country nowadays, and as Starmer has been mentioned by a couple of you he was even faced with the two teir Keir comment in his face today by the opposition over criminal justice but as usual pretended we are all equal. Yes, some are more equal than others to coin the cliche.

Hi Alan,

I am rather surprised to hear that in 2025 upmarket schools are marketing themselves as offering 'traditional values in a traditional setting'. How traditional are we talking about here? They can't cane kids anymore so it can only be so traditional. Is it Jimmy Edwards era traditional? Or Tucker Jenkins era Grange Hill traditional? Both are traditions. My primary school was big on 'traditional values' (no caning though) back in the 1970s in a working-class area, so more fool people who are willing to fork out for this pantomime nonsense.

'Felicity - have you asked the person most intimately concerned with all this "traditional values" jazz his opinion? - that is your son. If he doesn't have a problem with it, well and good, but if he does.....'

You have hit the nail on the head. At the end of the day the final decision should be their son's since he is going to be the one having his character shaped by his experiences in this school.

'I will say no more than to remind you that our current Prime Minister is the product of one of those selective grammar schools (the only difference being his parents got it for nothing and you will be paying for it). Let's just say that when I look at him, I don't feel deprived or jealous.'

Do you mean 'Sir' Keir Starmer, who graduated from the universities of Leeds and Oxford, qualified to the bar and was previously the Attorney General before becoming prime minister?

That is why parents are falling over themselves to get their children into these schools. You have answered you own question there. If he had gone to Bash St Comprehensive he might have ended up just plain Keir, with his name on a badge on his B&Q uniform shirt. The UK school system is nowadays even more feudalised than when I was a schoolboy forty years ago and it all comes down to the way in which money is (mis-)allocated. Grammar schools were always given far more state subsidy than comprehensive and secondary modern schools.

'Academy' is a confectionary term for what everybody understands was previously a failing school. Comprehensive schools are now referred to as 'high' schools because the term 'comprehensive has become so degraded after decades of slandering from our lovely right-wing media. Every concerned parent with the means is tripping over their own feet to get their children into grammar or private schools.

In this bankrupt educational climate you can hardly blame Felicity, or any other parent, for wanting their son or daughter to get a place at one of the 'better' schools. And I state this as someone who thinks that a truly good, enabling education is a universal right and that the concept of good education being only for those who can afford it is an atrocity and a criminal offence.

Comment by: Felicity on 11th March 2025 at 15:45


"Thanks for the reply. The school is excellent and not how you describe it, when we went there we were treated very well, even getting given tea and biscuits for the three of us. He will definitely come out of equiped for the times we now live in, I am in no doubt about that, it's very modern, I think you may have taken the "traditional values and setting" too literally. It's not a 1950s time capsule with wooden desks and masters in black capes.

He's quite active and likes all sports and will get to do all the ones he likes and to specialise, but he's going there for the academic first and foremost.

He is not concerned by the "no tops rule for PE" or even the showering. We were shown this area and it looked more like going into a David Lloyd Leisure Club....."


Felicity it seems to me you have no problem at all as your son is content with the schools arrangements, and if he is going to join the RN he will have to get used to the lack of privacy (when I was eleven I wanted to be a bus driver!)

I would just make the point that the grammar school is a business, and they are asking you to pay thousands of pounds a year for something that you could get elsewhere for practically nothing - therefore the Crown Derby and green tea and biscuits was merely PR - they would hardly give you three chipped mugs with a Lidl own brand teabag in each. It seems an expensive way to get a Rich Tea. I just hope that their "traditional values" are not the traditional values a couple of my teachers used to practice, but good luck to your son anyway.

Does this bring back any memories of anyone's school cross country?

https://youtu.be/iWC_-evE8qs?si=pNWYJrw7q2k8FaNq

Jason Bray your excellen shower take was a thought provoking one I must say. You're right too. That's a very clever analysis that not many people make. It's actually quite weird when you put it like you did there. So true!

Felicity, looks like he's set for a good school. Don't even give the no shirts in PE rule a second thought, it's not worth it, even more so if he doesn't care. He'll be just fine, a young one his age who is already wanting to be in the navy sounds very well adjusted.

Yours Truly, your not the first person to talk of rite-of-passage regards school showers, I've seen that comment before from others and I agree with that too.

Craig I really love hearing your latest bareskin updates and how well that's going. It really does sound like it bonds you lot there. Twenty nine of you in one go must have been a picture. I look forward to seeing any social media you do in future about it.

I'm very pleased to hear that you are very pleased with the grammar school your son will soon become a new pupil at in a few months time Felicity and my advice is to always keep abreast of his education but without looking for problems that don't really exist such as the one you have described, especially as your own son seems mature and well rounded as you descibed and shows no outward concern on that requirement. Some schools set the rules in a more precise manner than others so that everyone knows exactly where they stand and others are a little more flexible. Both are equally valid. PE without tops is not old fashioned and remains an aspect of school for boys, from schools that require it full time to those who may ask it just once or twice a term. It's still uncommon for the 11 to 16 age range to go through their entire school time not coming into contact with some kind of top free situation.

Thanks for the reply. The school is excellent and not how you describe it, when we went there we were treated very well, even getting given tea and biscuits for the three of us. He will definitely come out of equiped for the times we now live in, I am in no doubt about that, it's very modern, I think you may have taken the "traditional values and setting" too literally. It's not a 1950s time capsule with wooden desks and masters in black capes.

He's quite active and likes all sports and will get to do all the ones he likes and to specialise, but he's going there for the academic first and foremost.

He is not concerned by the "no tops rule for PE" or even the showering. We were shown this area and it looked more like going into a David Lloyd Leisure Club. I think showers are probably sensible and offer a certain discipline. For an eleven year old he has quite a mature head on his young shoulders and his ambition is to join the Royal Navy in a few years time and so obviously things like personal space and privacy would be compromised on a ship if he was ever to do that and realise his ambition.

The school has some amazing reviews but like you do when checking further for yourself I have tried to find ones that might not be so glowing and haven't found any other than one that made brief reference to the no tops rule they employ there.

While I'm not against it, my first reaction was to think it was a very old fashioned way of doing things and when I saw the picture from the 1950s when I brought up this forum that rather reinforced what I thought. I suppose what brought this to my attention was that this school made a point of mentioning this in the way they did by talking of it "as a rule".

Hi Graham D,

I am replying to your comment on 6 March.

I can't find the comment to make sure but there was a recent comment here by a man who remembered a boy in his year actually being forcibly stripped and hurled in tears into the showers by two male PE teachers who would have none of his very real inhibitions. At the same school girls were not even made to shower at all. This level of discrimination is an atrocity.

Really, this insistence on making boys shower is strange. Especially if they do not subject girls to the same requirement in the same school.

You shouldn't have had to endure that inequality with the girls gloating. And the fact that the head and deputy head at your school were both women just makes the injustice even worse. We are always told that women know better and are more sensitive to these issues. This just isn't true, is it?

We live in a time when a certain narrative is being pushed, and pushed aggressively. Gender discrimination is real. It is very real. It always was. The fiction is that it only ever affected one sex.

A recent poster here referenced a book called Self-Made Man, which documented the experiment of a woman journalist who spent eighteen months living as a man, because she had always believed men have all the advantages. She ended the experiment after eighteen months because she could no longer endure living as a man. Shortly after she voluntarily submitted herself into a mental health facility. Going forwards she stated that the experience had made her much more sympathetic about the men she knew.

How telling that I had to come to this forum to even hear about this book. Although this book was published in 2003 I had never heard of it before. Self-Made Man was a feminist book written by a feminist journalist but it did not meet the narrative and so it was excised.

Women have always been just as guilty of lazy stereotypical assumptions as men. But we have yet to reach the stage where they are made aware of that and it is taking a sweet while. During World War One it was the suffragettes who instituted the 'white feather' campaign.

I have tried several times on this forum to enquire of women posters as to their feelings about this double standard but it has been my experience that every time they just go silent. After a century calling men out on their very real prejudices it seems women are unwilling to address their own.

Hi Jason Bray,

'our teachers gave themselves more rights over our personal privacy than our parents had over us. It kind of feels wrong when you see it like that.'

It does seems weird when you express it like that. I said before that school showers, looking back, seem like some sort of 'rite-of-passage' that everybody - or every boy, at least - had to be subjected to when they passed a certain age. During my first year Games was the last lesson of the day which meant we could just have gone straight home and showered/ bathed there. And we never had to shower after PE, only Games, which means hygiene was not really the issue. It just felt like a particularly cruel thing to inflict on eleven-year-old boys, most of whom barely even knew each other. And more so on teenagers with all of their self-consciousness issues.


Hi Alan,

Yours is a question I have already asked on this thread, and pondered myself, and still can find no answer to. As a first-year in secondary school I just accepted that our PE teacher was a tyrannical bastard. I had no choice but to do so. All these years later I discover that seemingly every man remembered a teacher just like him. Why is it that so many male PE teachers had exactly the same personality, with the same seething, barely-repressed anger? I really don't think this phenomenon can be explained by training alone.

When you think of it, PE teachers really are at the bottom of the pecking order in schools, aren't they? They take a non-academic subject and (although I may be wrong) never, ever seem to make it to headteacher, do they? Maybe that contributes to it but even so I just can't understand it.


Hi Robert,

'I'm heading into my mid sixties and still remember that and many other things from my school years as if they happened a couple of years back. Something about school memories seems to stick.'

It's not for nothing that those years are often referred to as your formative years. All the more reason for the adults around them to act professionally and with consideration.

'I disliked the football and rugby but so do lots of boys and men, that's not unusual, it's actually very common.'

I'm glad you say this. Growing up I seemed to be surrounded by other boys that all loved football.

As for being slippered for not wanting to shower, well - what the fuck was wrong with Why did not one of their fathers go to the school and punch that teacher out?

Of course if they had been girls not only might they not have had to shower in the first place but they could not have been slippered for it at all.
All I can say ism thank God I did not go to secondary school until the 1980s.

Comment by: Jason Bray on 10th March 2025 at 02:28



I think you make some very good points, Jason, very cogently reasoned. I agree with every word. It makes you pause to think that it seems that this enforced intimacy is still going on for twenty first century schoolboys, which brings me to....


Comment by: Felicity on 10th March 2025 at 21:46


"I have discovered that the school my son will be going to in six months time operates what they call - traditional values in a traditional setting - as the school ethos. It's a selective grammar school and we both had a look around it last week and were very impressed by what we saw........"

Felicity - have you asked the person most intimately concerned with all this "traditional values" jazz his opinion? - that is your son. If he doesn't have a problem with it, well and good, but if he does.....

It is a bit like joining a club or a group, - you have to take the whole package, you can't just have bits of it. May I ask why you want traditional values (and you don';t have to read far in these pages to see what some of those "values" are)?. Your son will be loving in the modern world of the mid and late 21st century - he will have been educated at an establishment that likes to dream it is still 1959. Will he be a square peg in a round hole?. They used to say that in the good old days, that life was better in every way - but was it?. I will say no more than to remind you that our current Prime MInister is the product of one of those selective grammar schools (the only difference being his parents got it for nothing and you will be paying for it). Let's just say that when I look at him, I don't feel deprived or jealous.

Have an honest discussion with your son, that's my advice, and please put his wishes before your own. Better to be happy(ish) and at home in a state school than unhappy and miserable at the grammar, with the snobbish old relics who will be teaching him.

Felicity, My parents both fully backed my school having me me go barechested knowing that it was for indoor and outdoor sessions all year round regardless of the conditions or time of year. As a parent I'm supportive of boys experiencing as much as possible. The school may have an expectation for athletics to be performed barechested too, or with half the class wearing a PE vest. It would be worth checking with the school, perhaps even visit and see a PE group in action. I've found if you're nervous about certain aspects of the sessions your son may well pick up on it too. Hope this helps.

I have discovered that the school my son will be going to in six months time operates what they call - traditional values in a traditional setting - as the school ethos. It's a selective grammar school and we both had a look around it last week and were very impressed by what we saw.

Over the weekend we were discussing the things we are going to have to provide later in the year, uniform, books and of course a PE kit. This school appears to operate what they themselves call a "no tops rule for PE" for the gymnasium there and this is all mentioned in the prospectus. He will be expected to shower. I was quite surprised by the no tops rule for PE though and decided to do some further research using the trusty google search engine and found this here.

I can see these grammar schoolboys are doing PE with no tops but that's a very long time ago. We both been keen for him to have a good solid traditional education but this is one thing we didn't bargain on.

Would anybody like to offer me some thoughts? Thankyou.

Greg2 (on 6th March), thank you for being kind enough to comment in reply.

Though it was the summer term, I don't think it was an extremely hot day - the young men themselves had said nothing about the temperature - and I remember the teacher's words given as an instruction, not a suggestion.

School showers - my take on them.

Think about it like this for a moment. Your own parents, your next-of-kin, would not dream of standing in the bathroom at home watching their own teenage son (or daughter) post puberty, at the age of 13, 14, 15 years old, having a shower (or bath) with no clothes on, naked.....

.....yet come to school and that whole dynamic gets turned on its head and your teenage self is not only forced to shower and to do so with no clothing on but that mere teacher is permitted to have a good watch at you doing it and in most cases did so.

Like me, your PE teachers have probably seen more of your young teenage self than your own parents ever have done. Few of us as teenagers allowed our parents to see our naked selves with pubic hair, but our teachers saw the whole development of us all as we passed through the senior school PE years.

Our teachers considered themselves to have the absolute right to see all our naked teenage bodies while our parents would not ever say that, so our teachers gave themselves more rights over our personal privacy than our parents had over us. It kind of feels wrong when you see it like that. If your own father insisted on standing watching you shower or bathe as a 14 year old while naked, even though he was your own family, your dad, you'd think he was a bit weird to do that, but we accepted those teachers, sometimes men older than our own dads, doing this with us.

When you think of it like this it does seem a strange doesn't it.

I never gave the school showers much thought until recently and I left school 35 years ago. But I now think, leaving out privacy and shyness out of it, that they placed lots of us in a terribly vulnerable position where not everyone had our best interests as priority and the communal mandatory nudity on teenagers going through puberty was excessive, unjust and damaging to a significant number of people and should only ever have been a voluntary arrangement at least with better safeguarding against voyeuristic teachers, of which I definitely had two.

The question I now ask myself is why did it take me over 30 years to think like this and decide that what I was made to do at school was in so many ways not the right way to go about things.

We've had an unexpectedly fabulous past week on our bareskin running group and done four runs of various sizes since last weekend and today was amazing, we got 29 of us out for a whole afternoon nearly half marathon distance run of more than ten miles or so around a local beauty spot we agreed to arrive at by car, although where possible we try to not meet up by car if we do things closer to our homes but with more people some now live a little further afield, but all within 10 miles and most within 4 ot 5 miles of each other and me.

It really was an amazing achievement to get so many together, but after the dull winter I think the recent sun and now a bit of warmth made a lot of people keen to get out at last, although I myself have been running all through winter in small groups on shorter distances in the evenings.

We've now got 65 members on our bareskin whatsapp group, having gained more than ten new members since the new year and five in the last two weeks. Word of mouth is helping our numbers now and it's snowballed a bit recently.

In the past week I've done bareskin (fully shirtless + shorts) runs in groups of 3, 5 and 9 men on distances ranging from a couple of miles right up to over ten, an early morning one, a couple of evening ones and today's all afternooner.

I did a 6.30am one with three friends for half an hour early last week when the temperature was actually hovering around or just below zero. Not for the faint hearted and one for the seriously committed but nothing like as bad as you may imagine it to be. Anyone is capable of running without a top on in those conditions for a short period with the right attitude. It got my week off to a really good start to do that with two others just as the sun was coming up.

Some of the guys are like me and saying they are surprised how addictive they are now finding it, how great it makes them feel and how they love the camaraderie that goes with bareskin running with others. I absolutely agree.

What I want to repeat on here is that a lot of those on our group are men who are trying to prove something to themselves and are going beyond what they always thought were their personal boundaries, some quite openly have said how anxious the thought of going bareskin running made them at first but still wanted to try. Those now on our group are mentioning it to others and egging them on to give it a go. There are definitely many men on our whatsapp group who have gone running with us who would write similar things to some of you guys on here about your shirtless school memories.

We've now got a couple of 18 year old friends joined the group and their 72 year old grandad, and the old boy was the one who encouraged them. The 72 year old is actually a GP in our area and looks amazing for his age, doesn't look a day over 60 and would put some men of 40 to shame with his fitness and physical appearance. All three were out with us today. The remarkable thing is the wide age range who have been attracted to bareskin running since our group was set up.

We're thinking of setting up a social media page sometime by summer or even a YT channel as well to record some of our bareskin running activities so if and when that happens I will gladly provide this site with the means to check us all out!

Out of interest, would anyone else here ever consider setting up such a group themselves or joining one if the opportunity arose?

Comment by: Terry on 16th February 2025 at 21:33
ITV Schools - Good Health - Fit & Healthy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRRw-k7cGJs&list=PLv1UpvxmZIp0ZOOyeGcqnj7ELr3U-tkT8&index=1




That's something I remember seeing at primary school, my word that series takes me back a bit, although I didn't even begin my primary school until 1984. Lots of things we used to watch on the tall telly on wheels in those days used to be old programmes made a few years before so must have done the rounds a fair few times on repeat.

Everyone's different I suppose but I would have taken part in that without being very bothered and would have volunteered, even for the showering part to camera there if they wanted, because I'd have seen it as a bit of fun and actually quite a daring thing to have a chance to do and I always liked being a little daredevil. It's not the kind of thing that happens everyday in school is it. If I had done and now saw myself in the buff from my primary days I'd have a very good laugh at it and treasure it as a keepsake. I see it as totally innocent and maybe naive.

Respect to anyone who disagrees with me though.

Robert.

I had a man take me for all manner of PE in the late 70's who sounds roughly similar to your one. One of those men with plenty of mouth, as you said, which produced a lot of hot air about nothing very much. A keen whistle blower and also hand clapper at us. A very hands on individual who thought nothing of physically touching people, and he also had a pair of black sports shoes that I never saw him wear but that got used against us.

PE in the school sports hall was done shirtless for me in the 70's like with so many other boys, and I was in my second year at comprehensive school aged thirteen when I had a run in with mine.

I remember telling my dad at the dinner table that my PE teacher Mr Collett had smacked a couple of boys in my class across their bums in a PE class I was in with the sports shoe, including someone who didn't deserve it who was a friend who was always round our house. He made me promise to tell him if anything like that happened to me, and I promised him I would, he even made me repeat my promise to tell him which I did. I wasn't too concerned because I didn't see how I would ever do anything to warrant such a thing against me, I kept my head down, always turned up and did what was required to the best of my ability.

But I was wrong. I wore a brace on my teeth at the time and often ran my tongue around it in my mouth because it could irritate me a bit and make my teeth ache. The PE teacher saw me doing this and thought I was chewing on gum and said he'd been watching me for a while doing it. He stopped the lesson, made me walk over to him and open my my mouth wide and stick my tongue out while holding my head in both his hands. He accused me of just swallowing the gum that didn't even exist as I was going up to him. This sent him absolutely nuts and he got another lad in our class to pick up the sports shoe from the side bench of the gym and hand it to him whereupon as I stood there he smacked me three times with it on the bum, which did hurt, but my pride more. The act of doing it I found worse. When he did that he gave me a final smack right in the middle of my chest at the breastbone with the plimsoll by flinging it at me while holding it, onto my bare chest, and told me that I'd better not be chewing gum in PE ever again because it was very dangerous to do so and I should know better.

He wouldn't listen to me and no amount of trying to explain got through that I was simply feeling my mouth with my tongue because of my dental brace, which he could clearly see. Totally blind to reason.

Anyone who ever got a smack with the sports shoe in PE you could see trying to notice any mark from it when we were in the showers afterwards and I was no different, there was a mark on my chest but nothing too obvious on my bum, but I couldn't strain easily enough to see anyway without looking very obvious. I went into a toilet later to have a better look a break. The sensation maybe lasted an hour or so from it.

If I had fully deserved it for something I think my dad would have let it go, like most of our parents at the time did.

So after this I remembered my promise to my father if this happened at school to me but despite this I just couldn't bring myself to tell him, at first. I was fairly quiet for the rest of the day after that happened and when I went home. At the dinner table that night when we were all talking about what we had got up to, it was my turn to say what I'd done at school and don't ask me how, parental intuition, they both sensed I was not myself and my dad actually knew it had been a PE day and asked if something was up, eventually dragging it out of me that the teacher had hit me four times with a sports shoe, three times on the bum and once in the chest. By evening there wasn't anything to see on my bum but he asked me to take my top off and show exactly where he struck the shoe at me and there was a slight red mark remaining, nothing much but it stood out.

The next day the school was telephoned while I was at school, and before the end of the day I was called into the headmasters office where both my parents were along with the head to explain what had happend to him. The PE teacher was then invited in with us and had to explain. My parents made it quite clear that the behaviour he'd seen me doing was something I did a lot at home since wearing the brace in my mouth and also that I never ate chewing gum. My headmaster told my PE teacher he might like to consider his response to me and he offered both me and my parents an unconditional fulsome apology 'for any misunderstanding'. A bit rich that last term, which suggests we were both at fault not just him.

None of this stopped him sometimes making use of his sports shoe to chastise people in PE though, but it seemed to happen less and with me he suddenly became a lot nicer which I thought was hilarious because everyone else noticed it, they absolutely loved the fact my parents had forced our PE teacher to say sorry like that.

Like Robert and so many others who have opened up in these pages, you have to wonder why P.E teachers behave like a cross between the Kray Twins and an old army drill sergeant, and I can only conclude that even today, it must be something to do with the training they are given at teacher training college. Perhaps they have lessons in how to be obnoxious and how to humiliate boys. Perhaps it is the character of those men involved - probably bullied by parents when they were children themselves into being the best at their sport (you often read of fights breaking out between parents at amateur Saturday matches in the local parks), and need to stop trying to relive their childhoods through others. Any teacher must surely realise that there will be boys who don't like their subject, whether that is geography or history or P.E and the interminable games of football, rugby or cricket. They should realise that by shouting at them and demeaning them, they are not going to get any better results. In other subjects, teachers realise that not everyone is going to enjoy everything, but their attitude is one of acceptance (one hopes) and you just have to realise that it is not a personal slight. The attitude of some of these games masters is very petulant and self defeating. It seems to be the one subject where the teachers are just a little too demanding, and over ambitious. Not every lad wants to be a professional sportsman, or join the Royal Marines

Perhaps instead of "teeth brushing" lessons for 3-5 year olds, they should give lessons to PE teachers in how to behave.