Burnley Grammar School

I think everyone who comments on here already could tell you that PE teachers have always decided for themselves what you wear in their lessons haven't they, that's my experience anyway. I remember that we would frequently start lessons dressed differently to how we ended them, often this meant we started out with maybe a top of some sort and then ended without, having been told to take them off during the course of PE, so starting any given lesson with your shirt on didn't guarantee you'd be keeping it on. This happened an awful lot in my school PE lessons irrespective of who was teaching us, it just seemed to be a thing.

So I suppose the "advisory" word just covers their backs doesn't it, if that isn't an unintended pun.

Lots of PE teachers love stripping their male classes to the waist at some point even if it's not strictly needed or part of official kit, and most of them would probably hate the right to do that taken away from them!

So saying that the school PE kit is being so called advisory makes me wonder if they consider the main school uniform advisory as well. Something tells me not very likely. They will be dictating that to the exact colour of boys socks and the precise length of girls skirts won't they.

To Howard.
If you are dissatisfied with any aspect of how the school is managed or you child is treated, you are free to contact the Chair of the board of Governors who can raise your concerns with the school. If you know of other parents who are not satisfied then encourage them to raise the issues also with the Governing body.

My message to Marion as a 54 year old father whose son started his academy school just one year ago when he was eleven and a half is don't worry too much but I do have some good advice for any actual parents. We had the school website lay out everything clearly and most of our questions were answered on it long beforehand.

All the sports our son was going to be expected to take part in were listed quite methodically, alongside a comprehensive detailed list of all the items of PE kit to bring for indoors, outdoors and swimming. Our son showers. He's fine with it, so are we. I grew up in the 80's and it came as second nature to me and I don't want him growing up with pointless and silly hang ups that are unhelpful to his further developement. The era I grew up in at school seems to have screwed with a few peoples heads.

But what I want to advise here is how the school details we got given, and also what was on the website surrounding PE wasn't as set in stone as it first appeared. We both went to the open evening last December when I got a chance to chat with his PE teacher who told me that the PE kit on the school item list was only advisory. Our son had been coming home saying he was increasingly doing PE in the school gymnasium segregated into the so called skins and shirts by the PE teacher we spoke to despite no mention of the potential for such.

I wrote an email to his head teacher after speaking to his PE teacher at the December open night saying he might like to put the word 'advisory' onto the website listings which he agreed to look into and a few weeks later I saw it had been amended to include this word, but not before the head teacher actually told me that it was entirely up to his individual PE teacher on the day how he wished his class to dress and I even found out that if I was one of those parents that objected to anything like that then I didn't really have any power to veto, not even a shower at school unless there was a very good medical reason and no power to even ask that the school follows their own PE listings if a teacher wants to alter it and for instance make some or all boys spent PE without tops.

I was aghast to say the least. A very good job I'm not one of those who objects but the principle of the matter does annoy me that school is able to undermine my parental authority as they see fit.

I agree with both Andy and Nick here regards what Marion has said.

It would be of value to get some further feedback if possible from you regards how the lad got on. But don't make it seem like a big deal because it really isn't. Imagining (presumably communal) showers at school was a very different thing to actually ending up doing them for real. We were all in the same boat after all and had the same bits and pieces. I really didn't care very much about teachers watching me much either which seems to have been the big bugbear of a few, including my own elder sister who loathed all PE.

The school could have communicated better I think. It would have been quite important especially if the lad was not expecting it. I'm sure he survived it just fine.

You are creating a problem where there isn't one Marion and you explain that you have no issue. It sounded like you did really.

On the whole enforcement issue that you went on about Jason I'm minded to think of a theoretical someone deciding to use the human rights act, if that is possible, against either historical methods or current ones, to take a specimen point lets just go with the enforcing of school showers and throw in enforcing of a bare chested shirtless PE rule as well, much derided by some. My opinion for however much or little it's worth is that if these things were able to be brought to court under human rights laws now in place then I think they'd be thrown out and dismissed with being told to do these things not considered a violation of anyone's human rights. Presumably under the human right to privacy or respect or something like that.

I think the bare chested PE one would be treated as trivial but I'm willing to accept you could make a reasonable case against the enforcement of a blanket shower rule for everyone where communal unwanted nudity is involved.

On balance I don't think either are unreasonable demands.

Marion - a follow up how it worked out would be worthwhile if you can. He and the family were completely unaware of expectations until just 3 days ago, are you sure about this?

Is the word 'teenagers' still used much nowadays?

What a very silly way to describe teenagers from the 1960's/1970's/1980's Alan. How can you say that with a straight face? Snotty nosed little street urchins lacking intellect were we, which century are you meaning, I thought the 20th, not the 18th or 19th. I even managed to walk to school with leather upper shoes on my feet would you believe.

The truth is that the confidence often outweighs the abilities of more modern teenagers. They talk a good game but often come up short. They are not more intelligent than our generation above. They just think they are.

My grandson started at Willingdon School where he lives down in Sussex last week and on Friday was told he needed to bring a towel with him for his first PE lesson today, Monday, because school expects him to go in their shower when he has done his PE. I wasn't as convinced he was as unbothered as he made himself out to be when we spoke about his first three days last week and I hope he hasn't been worrying over the weekend about it. I have no great objection to this kind of requirement being laid on, but his school has produced a rather long glossy prospectus with quite a few pages devoted to subjects and PE receives quite a number of pages on expectations and ethos in general, much of it the usual bloated wordplay but nowhere amongst all the self aggrandisement on the glossy pages that I've seen is there any mention about the requirement to do PE showers. I wondered if this was a deliberate ploy. I just think it was a little unfair to suddenly give out such a reminder when nowhere is it written down that I've discovered. These glossy prospectus books must cost a small fortune to produce and seem more about school promoting itself over and above pupils.

Comment by: Brian on 10th September 2023 at 18:51

I seriously wonder how many HW contributors have actually employed 16/17 year olds in the past few years. They are not the snotty nosed little street urchins of 40/50 years ago who automatically called you "sir", many of them are intelligent individuals who are quite sophisticated and have minds of their own. Teachers should remember they are individuals, not a mere unit to be drilled.

I could not disagree with you more Gavin on your wish that PE should stop at 14. Absolutely not. It should continue to 16, preferably 18 and be more than one day each week in places where it isn't already. A basic minimum 2 hours per week does not seem too much to me.

It shouldn't really matter what anyone wears in PE so long as you are getting the required activity but I was not especially impressed by that teacher getting taken to task over how he handles his current role by others here.

What's wrong with having a uniform Alan, even in sixth form. I had one. The only difference was the school tie was a different colour in sixth form and was optional. I didn't wear it. But we all looked smart.

Aren't PE kits just an extension of school uniform too? So if you go to a school that likes PE done a certain way, even if that means stripped off to the waist then I see that as uniform of sorts. Just like the main school uniform makes everyone look very smart then if you have a PE class with all the boys stripped to the waist that also looks quite smart in its own way. My son was on his youth club swim team a number of years ago and the photo I've got of him on the team makes them look great and rather well disciplined in my view, far better than if the swim coach had let them stick on anything that randomly came to hand on the day they turned up.

Comment by: John on 10th September 2023 at 12:25


John, if you treat what are after all, young adults.many of them under sufferance, then you can expect them to behave like children. If I had been placed in a situation of that sort I might have shown my displeasure that way myself (don't worry gents, I didn't) and at 18 if a teacher had told me how to dress I would have told him where he could go. All the sixth formers I see these days dress as individualists, not with a uniform - they just have to wear a lanyard.

It is my explanation for the increase minor crimes, or at least a contribution to the debate. What's yours?

My experience was from 1994 and at that time there was a difference between what we wore as 11-12 year olds and what the older boys wore. When I moved up from cubs to scouts, at my first scout summer camp, us younger boys wore long shorts to our knees and loose tshirts and I was surprised to find the patrol leaders and older boys would just take off their tops after inspection and mostly just wore running shorts. I remember during camp realizing that maybe, as I was away from home and rules, that maybe I could try being shirtless too. I was really shy and really skinny so didn't dare, but after coming home I started to think about it a lot, that I wanted to try taking my top off outside.

My situation was different to many people here in that I felt I was missing out and was really enthusiastic but also terribly shy and body conscious.

When my parents would go out and I was alone, I would practice, I would pretend I was at going on a hike and dressed up in shorts, no shirt, hiking boots, and my hiking backpack and would hike around the house and look at myself in the mirror. I would take a comb and style my hair to the side or in a parting so I looked "cool".

When secondary school started in the autumn, at our first PE class the teacher explained the uniform and there were three PE kits: athletic, rugby, and cricket. The athletic he explained consisted of just shorts, the singlet was optional and that it was better for us to do PE without a shirt. I was so shocked and also excited by this. The rule also was that if you forgot your PE kit there was a box of old shorts that you could wear, so if you forgot your kit you didn't wear a top.

I was too shy to come to PE shirtless but a 3-4 of the boys consistently did so which amazed me at their bravery. But my chance did come, when we did the bleep test where you run back and forth to ever increasing frequency of these bleeps. As we started to get hot many of the others started to take off their shirts and in a moment of daring, I did too, throwing it to the side and immediately felt the air on my chest and the feeling was very new and feeling the air pass over me was a reminder of how skinny I was.

I was brave enough to even walk back to the changing room without my shirt and some girls from my form were also heading back from the girls gym at the same time and they stared at me, but in a good way.

Over the year I still didn't get the confidence to come to PE without a top. I would take off my top if lots of the other boys were doing it, but I was very cautious. I was very skinny and I didn't think people appreciated skinny chests. I also thought I was too old at 12 to be randomly shirtless!

But next summer's scout camp was coming up and for that I mentioned before camp to my patrol leader that I was shy about taking off my shirt but wanted to try it. He thought I needed to come out of my shell, and that the best way to do this was after inspection, just take off my top. The first day it took some encouraging, but every day after that I started out with no top. I felt very good and very proud of myself. I also leaned that being skinny was a good thing. An overweight boy said to me: "you're so lucky that you don't have to wear a shirt all summer" and explained how his body looked weird depending on how he stood. I didn't tell him that I'd just started. This brought me a lot of confidence and although I was still very shy, but if I had the chance to be in shorts and shirtless, like cycling or playing frisbee, I would take it.

I was in school in 1959 aged twelve and look about the same age as those ones in the picture. In my grammar school we wore simple unfussy plain vests and shorts all the same white. One thing that differentiates my own 1959 time with the photo is the plimsolls. Gym PE could only be done properly without obstruction around the feet we were told and we did so barefoot. If my own school teachers of the time were about now they would say that it was far more important to leave your footwear off in the gym than to leave your top half off such as vests. So the picture is interesting in that in this case the no shirts way of doing things was considered most important and not the footwear, which contradicts memories of my own from that same period. But obviously no two schools were ever quite the same. To me, seeing the picture here looks surprising that this school wished for no PE top while insisting on plimsolls, but that's just my personal view.

By linking barechested PE and staying on at school to 18 to youth crime, now that's what I call over analysing the subject somewhat Alan.

Comment by: Gavin on 10th September 2023 at 05:50
They enforced totally shirtless boys PE on me and my classes.



But why should enforcing this be any different to enforcing anything else if it was considered to be part of your PE attire? Why are some people so scared of their bodies? We are all essentially the same after all.

I entirely agree with Gavins comments (0550 10/9/23). But to take it a stage further - back in the 8s you were only obliged to stay at school till you were 16 - today, the government insists you wait till you are 18 at school if you can get a job to massage the unemployment figures. If a 16 year resents being told what to do, imagine how annoyed a 17 or 18 year old man does. This was a point I was trying to get over to Nathan. he was 17 a lot closer to our current times than we were. I would hope he would understand. As you yourself say, there are basically three groups of attitudes and I was much like you. I think to force somebody to do something when they are adult, against their will is entirely wrong, and I still hope Nathan and others with his mindset reconsider. I suspect forcing adults to stay on at school is the reason for the rise in casual violence and low level vandalism. I don t condone it, but it is an outlet at being forced into being treated like a child.

They enforced totally shirtless boys PE on me and my classes all the way from September 1978 until about May 1983. I was sixteen on the first day of the following month. So Toby that almost reaches the mid 80's for you. For some of my friends who had autumn birthdays and reached 16 many months before me I knew they really rather resented the fact that they were still expected to keep doing PE at the time, and back in '82 and '83 many 16 year olds did not feel like children even if we remained technically minors until 18. One of my friends even left school months early having secured a nice little job that he was allowed to take and just vanished from school rather suddenly in about March, coming back for some exams later on only.

The enforcement of shirtless PE was primarily school gym based but not entirely. It also occurred outside at times throughout summer term. One of the senior PE teachers used to like taking us out running without shirts and would also run like that with us in what I thought at the time was just him imposing his own personal tastes on the rest of us.

However the enforcement of shirtless gym PE in my school was like some kind of religion to be adhered to, they really did go big on the idea of it and you had to oblige without whining about it. But to those who say most boys in any sizable group don't really care, I say I think that's a bit of a myth actually. I'd say you can split the average class into three more or less equal parts, a third rather like doing it, another third are largely indifferent and the other third worry and get nervous about it and simply don't like it much for all kinds of reasons. I kind of fell borderline between indifferent and a small bit of worrying.

I don't know whether anyone else will relate to this but I would have good days and bad days in school with my confidence. The very same PE lesson that I felt fine in one week I might feel rather worse about the next week for all kinds of reasons. Shirtless PE was just one added factor to deal with each week that did play a big part in quite a few boys confidence levels for better or worse.

I think with our options at 14 we should have been allowed to opt out of PE completely in retrospect, and perhaps if it helped with confidence also had an opt out on shirtless PE because I think to go shirtless is actually quite a personal thing about oneself isn't it.

Pete C question on 6th Sept - no is the answer, it definitely wasn't him but I can't remember the name now.

As I've said before I don't remember enforced shirtless PE being common in mid/late 80s. I think it was just swimming (the few times we did it) and occasional games of shirts and skins.

I don't think I minded going shirtless per se - teenage boys aren't really expected to be shy about that at pools or beaches or whatever. It was more that I didn't like having my belly button (an outer, still) commented on. Though from this remove I don't know why I let it bother me!

I don't remember anything like these high temperatures in September when I was at school and it was in September that we began immediately going out on cross country running for the first time since the spring. I'd like to think none of my PE teachers would have taken us out for the regular 3 to 4 miles in these unusually hot conditions despite the mantra we do things in all weathers, which normally meant poor weather. We'd have been dropping like flies with heat exhaustion and there was never water on hand either.

Nice post Zac.

I'm sticking this comment on at 5.34pm but I'm convinced my comment showed up an hour earlier the other day, so on GMT, not BST. Using this to find out if I've imagined it since the return of the site a few days ago.

You thought shirtless PE was a privilege. That's an interesting angle I must say!

I had an interesting trajectory through my middle school and into the senior school I went to. I had 4 years in middle school, a year longer than some people used to do, followed by another 4 years in seniors. I preferred the PE we did in middle school because it was generally speaking far more enjoyable and relaxed, although we were certainly put through our paces there is no doubt about that.

I always liked going outside to do things, am an outside person generally. At middle school I developed a liking and strength at long jumping. A bit of a growth spurt up to the age of 12 helped.

My middle school was almost a brand new building when I began there in 1982 with modern looking facilities by the standard of that year and for a school with a pupil count of about 250 and no more than 300 at most had a magnificent and large playing field that any secondary school would be fine with. There was this footbath kind of thing in there which we never used but was talked about sometimes. But we did shower frequently at the school when considered necessary, such facilities were built into the new building so although the average middle school might not have done so they probably felt that if we had the facilities there we might as well use them, except this strange little footbath thing I still remember. We were able to hang our sports bags, commonly known as plimsoll bags and the like on our own named hook in the cloakroom and just leave it there hanging all term to save us bringing it in each time or forgetting. This was very useful. Mine had trainers, shorts, a t-shirt, a bar of soap, sponge and very tiny towel not much bigger than a big flannel in it. I can remember being asked if I needed to bring it home for the contents to be washed. It only came home every half a term after at least a dozen if not many more PE lessons.

The first three years in middle we did PE in our trainers/or barefooted, shorts and t-shirts. But the fourth years, as we called them in our school, or the big boys as they seemed at that young age, did PE in the gym bare chests throughout the final middle school year and in my case these lessons took place under what I thought at the time was the toughest, strictest, sports obsessed male teacher in the school. Actually he was a pussycat in reality but at that age he didn't seem it. I've met him many times hence as an adult. The fourth years at middle could would also take our tops off outside if the weather was nice. The three lower years did not do this. It felt like a kind of privilege bestowed on the older boys to be able and allowed to do this for physical education, although we were actually told to. But I thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

Arrival at secondary school came with a deeper seriousness of trying to find out what we were good at in those early months. I mentioned long jump from the middle school but in the end I rarely got a chance to do it again which was a shame. In my first secondary year I remember a strong emphasis on measuring a lot of things, either with timings, tape measure or counting in general. I did get a couple of long jump opportunities but that was it. I cannot even remember what the distances were now but they were long by school standard.

Kit was strictly imposed. The gym was white shorts, white vest with a horizontal stripe and most times done in our bare feet only, although light soled trainers were part of the kit.

Unlike my final year at middle school i did not do a single PE lesson without tops in my first two years at secondary, even in the gym where we always wore vests and only vests, no t-shirts allowed. Then when we got to fourth form, which was only year three at secondary we began doing the gym in bare chests and found out that this was how the top two years at secondary did gym PE, which followed a very similar pattern to my middle school last year. Personally speaking I would have preferred to have just carried on the same way from my final middle school year and all through secondary in the same way. at the start of secondary fourth that brought out the 'why are we doing this' types in class who must have been a bit sensitive.

Secondary showering was compulsory and taken every single time irrespective of the state you ended up in after PE. I was always keen to just get on with such things with minimum fuss.

I ended up quite tall, a six footer by 15, and one of the most memorable comments a PE teacher ever made to me, some might say it was an insult, was to be told by a PE teacher I looked like a spider with half his legs missing as I lay spreadeagled on the gym floor one lesson with my long limbs outstretched. They certainly knew how to come out with them at times.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof - something that is rarely provided re: Allen Williams.

Why would anyone waste their time writing such obvious fictional twaddle.

Good to call it out Rich. Something about the Williams comment made me think he might have been a member of the naturist community or something like that. Wasn't someone else caught out on here with an email address which seemed to accidentally expose them for being part of what is described as the clothed female nude male community, abbreviated widely as cfnm.

If you want to know what a complete and utter fabrication looks like then here is the fully reprinted example left here by Mr Allen Williams shortly before last Christmas, left complete with his email at the time. So I emailed him about this comment only to be told he couldn't even remember placing it on here, could not remember what he actually said literally a few days beforehand and even though I gave the link to his comment made out he could not find it! I'd even cut and pasted the whole thing directly back to his email address too. There was no denial he made it. I should hope he was suitably embarrassed passing it off as plausible.





Comment by: Allen Williams on 21st December 2022 at 04:19
From 1960 to 1963 I was at a (mixed) state-maintained primary school in north-west Surrey. PE was done in the school hall. off which the classrooms led. The process was that the class would strip down to underpants/knickers in the classroom, then go to the hall for the lesson, then trot back and get dressed again. Some children came from very poor families, and, while the girls got underwear, boys did not, two boys in my class falling into this category. They had the choice of sitting out the lesson, or doing it in the nude, and they both chose the latter. So did boys whose underwear would not stay up during exercise without the support of the waistband of their shorts (including me). When I did get replacement pants, they were of the “string” variety, which concealed nothing, and were restrictive, so I stuck to not wearing anything. Some of the girls said they had the same problem, so went naked as well. I suspect it was more that they were more embarrassed to display their old-fashioned baggy knickers than what was underneath them. We also had swimming (at another school's pool). Neither of the two boys without pants had swimsuits either, and both wanted to swim, so they were permitted to do so in the nude. Boys who had not brought swimming costumes for any reason were given the same choice, and, then, of course, some of the girls claimed the same privilege. Effectively, either a boy or a girl had the same option to sit out a PE or swimming lesson or do it in the nude if they wanted to. At any lesson, about 20% to 30% of the participants were naked.

At my (boys) private secondary school in Croydon, from 1963 to 1970, the official PE kit was white cotton T-shirt, brief, but loose-fitting elasticated white cotton shorts, white cotton socks and white gym shoes, and absolutely nothing else. However, turning up wearing nothing but the shorts was acceptable. No kit meant you got punished. There came one occasion on which one boy did this, but he had borrowed the shorts, and the elastic was gone. Once he took away his hand holding them up, they fell down, so he took them off and did the rest of the lesson in the gym naked, without sustained objection from the teacher once the circumstances had been explained. Having established the precedent, boys who had forgotten their kit asked permission to do the lesson in the nude rather than get punished, and this was usually granted. Nobody objected or was offended by this. We all saw, and were seen by, each other naked most days anyway (in showers and changing rooms); we were in and out of changing rooms and showers six or seven times per week, so this sort of social nudity was entirely normal in any event. It was part of the curriculum almost. As far as swimming (in the school's own pool) was concerned, the rule was simple: “boys may swim in the nude, but if a costume is worn, it must be of the approved school pattern”. That is, the uniform trunks, of the right style, colour, size, and intact (not damaged or deficient in any way). It did not matter if it was your fault or not, if you did not comply with this when directed to go swimming, you had to swim in the nude. Swimming was compulsory, wearing a costume wasn't. Again, nobody objected or was offended. Embarrassed initially, yes. Anxious beforehand, yes. As the result of the rule, almost everybody did swim in the nude sometimes, often because the school arranged swimming at the last minute when some other thing was unexpectedly cancelled. They could always do this, because a boy could always go swimming: he could do it naked and did not need any kit. I got caught out like this when I was 12 and discovered that I thought I had hated swimming, but in fact it was wearing the costume that I hated: swimming in the nude felt wonderful! Everybody actually agreed with me. I know, I made a point of asking everybody subsequently whom I knew had done so, whether they preferred going naked or wearing trunks, Not one person expressed a preference for clothing, although they continued to use it, solely because a large majority did so. I continued to do so frequently, and, a year later, when I grew out of my costume, I decided this was a silly reason, and did not replace it.

As to how frequent the practice of nude swimming for boys was in other schools, there are two points: one, when we had our first swimming lesson at the school, half the boys turned up with trunks, the other half walked into the pool area naked. The nudists had all gone to private preparatory schools, at every one of which boys were obliged to swim in the nude. The other half had gone to state-maintained primary schools where either no swimming was done, or where the wearing of a suit was compulsory, or expected. Each half had simply done what they thought was normal. I conclude that at private “prep” schools, at least in the north-west Surrey area, boys always swam in the nude, at least to the 1960s. The second point is that, when visiting other private schools in London, Surrey, and Sussex, as part of our fencing team for away matches, I asked them about the policy there on swimming. Nowhere was it banned, and at some it was either compulsory or de rigueur. We were once shown to the side of a small training pool at Dulwich College and were told there were no showers, but we could use the pool to freshen up afterwards. On being told we obviously had no swimming costumes, the senior boy guiding us said “We never wear them, and I don't see why you should have to, either.”, and left us to it. We all used the pool in the nude. It was bloody cold, though. I conclude that, well into the 1970s, most boys-only private schools in the region either allowed or generally adopted nude swimming, too.

I don't think boys have evolved into different creatures in the past 50 years. I learned at school that social nudity is actually not an imposition, it is genuine, and entirely non-sexual fun, giving a feeling of freedom, confidence, and empowerment. That these days it is drummed into them that it is a terrible perversion, and they should be ashamed of revealing their naked bodies to anyone, is a monstrous disservice to them, and to the truth.

While I'm at it, don't call this a reversion to Victorian standards. They were certainly guilty of dual standards for boys and girls, but they never objected to boys being naked together, or, indeed, in public places where male nudity was known to occur. Ladies' modesty could be protected quite sufficiently by their not frequenting such places. No: the “New Prudery” is far, far, worse than that, and it ought to be stamped out vigorously.