Burnley Grammar School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barney on 22nd August 2022 at 15:56

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aidan on 22nd August 2022 at 13:45

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

Andy talking to himself.

Aidan on 22nd August 2022 at 13:45

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

Alan on 22nd August 2022 at 15:43

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This quote literally makes no sense.



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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Mail - 24 January 1981

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

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

By Andrew Loudon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This quote literally makes no sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here from Hansard.

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

Good find Tony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can almost feel the low expectations that school must have had for all its children.

Apparently Mr. Corkish got sacked for his trouble -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litherland_High_School

Shocking that a genuinely decent teacher got dismissed for raising the bad behaviour of a bunch of really violent ones.

Litherland '81 sounds like the kind of place where 90% of the teachers must have actually disliked the sight of children. Good man Alan Corkish, at least you cared and did something.

1800 beatings per year. School is off for 12 weeks or so, leaving 40 weeks. Roughly 200 days out of 365. So in 200 days 1800 beatings. That's 9 beatings per day, as the film said literally one every 45 minutes. If that headmaster was the only one carrying out these slipperings/canings then he must have been attending to that almost full time every day of the year. How interessting that he wasn't named in that clip. It's a Dickensian level of brutality I would never have believed so recently without that film. If you're beating somebody with a slipper for not having a pen in class then I'd like to know what you have left for genuine troublemaker pupils and proper misbehaviour short of suspension or expulsion.

What a miserable and demoralising school that sounds. The culture of any institution is set from the top. Did the head teacher think he was running some kind of zero tolerance regime there? I mean, a beating for walking on the wrong side of the corridor! 1800 beatings in a year for just 400 boys. That's not a zero tolerance strict regime that's a failing school to put it bluntly, or worse. Whatever it was it did not work did it. I can scarcely believe that level of physical punishment is from an early 1980's secondary school in England. Good for that teacher and those parents who could see sense and what was going on. It sounds like staff morale must have been rock bottom too and the pupils bore the brunt. Totally miserable and shameful. I hope whoever ran that place was out on their ear not long afterwards. They looked decent kids and they deserved far better. That school looks like the kind of place that must have badly affected or even wrecked the life chances for so many able youngsters.

This from as recently as just 1981. You have to be concerned about any school behaving like this and wonder what lies behind it. Take a look;

Litherland High School, Liverpool in 1981.

https://youtu.be/lPIbcT8kjGU

Many thanks for your quite prompt reply to my question Alan.

A shame the discussion gets derailed now and again. I'm quite fascinated why your opinions fire things up on here. But I haven't read everything so maybe I missed something you said earlier on. In that case I'm sure someone here will show me what all the fuss is about with you.

My own father used to almost brag to me about how often he was caned in school by a black robed and hatted headmaster at his desk in his office and thought it did him good!

I still haven't had an answer to the point I made and question I asked on 18th August 2022 at 12:32

Just a lot of bluster and excuse. I still can't see anything there that was said which was untrue.

Paul J.

Nobody has created a narrative that abuse is everywhere, not even Alan. I think to suggest such is a caricature of that posters opinions, and I certainly don't agree with everything he says or the way he states it, in the same way I don't with his arch rival on here.

One thing I will say is that the threshold for the definition of "abuse" has been lowered considerably in recent years compared to thirty plus years ago. But we should not be placing todays threshold for such things onto those years thirty plus ago.

I liked Chris C's comment and endorse that in reply to your question to me.