Burnley Grammar School

If our cultural inheritance were the straitjacket Alan suggests at the end of his 28th January comment, many of us would not have made the transition from inhibited to confident. Where we are on that spectrum is a complex combination of culture and an individual's personality. But perhaps it's just easier to blame gym teachers.

Comment by Sarah 28th January 2025 at 2150 hrs

Oh please Sarah don't trot out the old "misogynist" trope. I had no women teachers, the only woman in our school was the lovely Mrs Fenemore. our school secretary, who I have spoken warmly about in the past, and was just about the only civilized adult in our school.

I dislike teachers who were or are unpleasant and dictatorial (and worse) and it is sad to see that the "I vas just obeying orders" and sticking to the rulebook operates even today, amongst men and women, who still have no conception of the damage they did. In my case it was all male teachers, two of whom had serious "problems" of a certain sort, and a couple more who had problems with the bottle..

Perhaps in your hurry to cast me as a dreadful woman hater, you missed what I wrote last week, so let me repeat what I said. I am NOT "Yours Truly" and "Yours Truly" is not me. All messages carry the reference number unique to our internet accounts -mine end with 252 - they are like National Insurance numbers - unique to the individual. You will see that "YT" has a different one.

This was done because of all the nonsense a few MEN tried to create a couple of years ago, when it was suggested I was at least five other posters. Showing the numbers was one way of proving their falsehoods to be untrue.

Hi Sarah,

I'm still not Alan. He's a tory by the sounds of things.

It wasn't my intention to be patronising. If you remember, in her initial post Jill appealed to posters to explain this issue to her. Which is what I was doing. If it came across as an overly simplistic explanation this was because she misses certain basic points that should need no explanation. I also partially defended her if you notice.

I have now seen this accusation several times from female respondents on this thread, that a women can post here and be as insensitive and blase as they please but if a male respondent takes them to task for it he is being 'attacking'. I don't think Alan is 'attacking' anyone. It's my impression he is angry about certain experiences from his schooldays and feels triggered when posters come across as dismissive of those experiences. It seems to me, from various posts by women here, that if a man dares to argue with a female poster, that the very act of arguing back makes him a villain, makes him 'attacking, 'patronising' or whatever. I gave some personal information from what was one of the worst years of my life. But your takeaway from my post was, I'm being patronising.

Also, as I remember her post, Julia was on the attack herself.

And Jill's initial post certainly came across as dismissive. But that didn't trigger you at all, did it?


Hi Anthony B,

Oh, boom boom, to paraphrase Basil Brush. Someone's been on the Lewis Carroll, I see.


Hi Alan,

So it's all Starmer's fault, is it? That was quick work. He's only been in the job seven months.

Before that, if you remember, we had fifteen years of successive tory administrations dismantling the public infrastructure, plundering the public purse, aiding and abetting corrupt businesses and individuals and running the UK into the ground like the bunch of asset strippers they are. If you don't like this country any more you really should remember who the real villains are.


Hi William,

You make a very good point. But I can't see the day that Brits decide it's okay to get naked with each other in any casual setting. In our culture we're too used to the shadow of inappropriate sexualisation cast into every area of our lives. It just makes it seem even more weird that in a nation where we perceive misdeeds here, there and everywhere we still expect kids of eleven to shower naked in front of each other.

Thank you, Jill, for your response and for kindly answering my questions.

Absolutely.

Yours Truly that was a highly patronising reply to Jill you gave her and you are really starting to sound uncannily similar to the way Alan takes people to task on these pages from time to time, something Julia has already noticed.

Infact Alan I've noticed you are prone to attacking women who come on here, you've done it with both Jill and Julia and mixed the two of them up in the process, and also had a go at Christine the Ofsted inspector as well. I think you take a dimmer view of the women than the men if they think similar to the men.

My favourite P.E teacher was a man called Mr Turtle. He tortoise very well.

Comment by: Mark on 28th January 2025 at 09:04



Not before 11, Mark, but all the bloody time after that. Scale of modesty I would say 8 or 9.


Comment by: Jill Paige on 28th January 2025 at 07:37



I apologise for ascribing those remarks to you wrongly, Jill. I apologise when I get things wrong, but the gravamen of my argument remains, whomever wrote the original

Comment by: William on 28th January 2025 at 09:26


We might be different if we were Finns, but we are not - for myself I wish that I was Australian and lived in a nice hot country and not this rainswept, miserable , Starmeresque dump of a country, but, sadly, we are stuck with what we have

Hi Jill,

The reason you have got the reaction you have is because you came across as very dismissive about something that some people had very real issues with. Is it not yet clear to you that some boys really did hate doing PE topless, whether you can understand it or not? They're the men posting on here about it forty years later when they could be doing something more worthwhile.

Of course nothing came to your attention from the boys unhappy about it. Your final remark in that paragraph that if any boy had resisted "who knows where it would have gone" says it all. The school would have got heavy with any boy refusing to take his top off and if you knew that as a teacher then the young boys you were teaching certainly did.

As regards not understanding a total unwillingness to remove tops well, what if the girls had been required to wear bikinis for PE? Do you think some of them might have been less than keen?

Just because children don't complain doesn't mean they accept what they are being made to do. At secondary I hated the Monday Games lessons with the grim football game and the inevitable communal shower afterwards. I never complained. I didn't complain because it would have drawn contempt from the other boys, at eleven I had already learned very thoroughly that school made you do things you found unpleasant and our PE teacher was anything but approachable.

But I was not fine with it. I was not fine with it to the extent that I went through a protracted period of either pulling sickies on Mondays or just truanting. But I never complained.

The vast majority of people just accept the conventional norms of the time. But conventional norms change over time because some aspect which was previously assumed to be acceptable and beneficial is found to be inappropriate and so they evolve. Naturally you thought nothing of it at the time. But this thread is showing you a different perspective on the issue now.

Alan, Your choice of language makes my point for me: "flaunt", "parade", "preserving modesty". The Finns just don't think like that, neither does the rest of northern Europe, Russia and large parts of the Far East.
Of course we are entitled to be different; but on 21st January you said that "For most people PE is a very small and insignificant part of their lives"; and yet these pages have been dominated recently by men who many years ago found even the exposure involved in bare-chested gym difficult. I am not being critical; I sympathise with them. But if they'd had a bit more of the Finnish attitude and agonised less about their modesty they might have found gym at school a less stressful experience.

Comment by: Alan on 27th January 2025.
'There is nothing wrong in wishing to preserve modesty'


Just refresh things will you Alan. Were you actually at a school with mandatory shirtless PE, and if so how much actual gym did you do this way and what things did you do shirtless, either in or out. Was it everything in the gym or just some things, and what about any times outside? Did you do any shirtless PE before you reached secondary school or was that where you began doing it? How modest would you say you are, on a count to ten if ten is extreme and zero is not at all? Thanks.

Well I didn't expect that kind of reaction from some quarters.

Matthew, I'm not aware of any particular set training I had in order to carry out a primary school PE lesson other than casual word of mouth discussion among others in school. So absolutely no formal training at all or certification. There was also no meaningful health and safety style formal training on accident reduction either, other than using common sense. The primary ages were 8 to 12 years, many of my class ages were 9's and 10's. I was only ever connected and employed by the one primary school.

As I said last time I was here, I knew boys rarely liked to speak about their problems and used to think I was quite accomplished in noticing anyone who might be bottling up any type of problem. Many times I would have to probe quite hard to get answers from some children until they finally gave me an answer, especially boys.

When I said that I it never crossed my mind that boys would be unhappy without a top on for the PE hour I can only say that nothing came to my attention that any ever were in a major way. I can certainly understand anyone being shy but a total unwillingness when asked to remove tops for PE was not apparent that I have any memory of. Had any of the boys I took for their PE hour ever spoken to me about such an unwillingness to do so then I imagine I would have talked it out and possibly engaged another more senior staff member and who knows where that might have ended up.

As others have already said, and in my defence, nobody can just start a new job anywhere and start rewriting the rules because they don't approve of certain aspects. The primary I taught at for a few years expected their boys to turn out for PE hour with a bare chest and feet and who was I to begin arguing about that. Besides, if I'm being fully honest I did not see that as anything other than within conventional norms for the time. I'll go further and say I probably did not even hold an opinion on it. I've rifled through my old document cases yesterday and found the primary school information from my time there and it reminded me that school then said boys do not wear tops in PE, phrased as 'Boys are only expected to wear shorts, no tops are required, and bare feet when indoors for PE'. This is in my formal teacher notes from those days around 1977. Infact the primary school did have showers installed in both the boys and girls changing room at that time but these were never ever used by anyone and no mention was ever made of doing so, which was probably reasonable and at least didn't add to the workload and time.

I changed career later on Matthew to something related but not involving day to day contact with schoolchildren.


I did not make any comment on mammograms or doctors and have been incorrectly attributed to those comments. That was Julia. Teachers are used to attention to detail.

Comment by: William on 27th January 2025 at 11:13


"Simon Godley, I have also encountered in Scandinavia the hope that the British might shed some of their inhibitions about nudity. Certainly the attitude there is strikingly different. In Britain the association between nudity and sex is ingrained"


Not necessarily - it is just that some people like to flaunt themselves and others don't. If you want to be a naturist - that's fine, do it. They have clubs for it and there are nude beaches (I wouldn't recommend them in January though).

There is nothing wrong in wishing to preserve modesty, any more than there is nothing wrong in adults who wish to parade around in the buff, but I think that is a decision to be made in adulthood, just as smoking and drinking are. I just make the point that there are not as many nudists in this country as there are non-nudists.

Boys all called each other by our surnames (see mine above) at school in the seventies, I rarely if ever heard anyone use christian names at each other, is this anyone else's experience? I'm not sure why boys, including me, did this even within close friendships.

We expected this from teachers, the women called us by our christian name, no PE teacher did though and about half the male staff called boys by surname also. It was just a normal comprehensive school.

Hi Simon Godley,

Another interesting fact about Finland is that they have no school uniforms and no exams until the leaving year - and yet their school system regularly outperforms ours in international assessments. Just another indication that the UK's creaky education system needs to be radically overhauled.

Of course if any brave/naive soul suggested that it was time to abolish uniforms the usual daily mail-reading contingent would set up bleating about how the loony liberal lefties are corrupting our society, etc, et al, blah blah blah &C.

In a nation where it has always been the done thing for the so-called 'great and good' to send their own kids away to boarding schools as young as eight I suppose it's inevitable that the idea persists that school is something to be endured and survived rather than enjoyed, and that anything less would be mollycoddling children.

Hi Alan,

I can remember numerous smug, pompous teachers with an air of superiority from both my primary and secondary schools. I don't know why they felt that way given that teaching has always been a low-esteem, low-status profession. Maybe spending your working week with a group of young people who you know you can manipulate however you please just makes you that way. After all, power corrupts. Or perhaps they felt themselves superior to the working-class parents they met at parents' evenings. I also think, looking back, that my parents' generation were much more deferential than ours has been. I think older generations used to be in awe of teachers because they saw them as educated people. In contrast, having been through the university system myself, I know how teaching is viewed as the arse-end of the professional spectrum. "You'll end up as a teacher" was a commonly heard insult at my university.

You amaze me that schools were still addressing pupils by surname as recently as 2010. I had assumed that practice had died out years and decades ago. At my 1980s compo the only teacher I ever remember calling us by our surnames was the old-school PE teacher I have mentioned before.

You make a fair point about student teachers being able to remember what their own youth was like. But I would guess Jill most likely went to single-sex schools, since these were far more common in her time. Unless she had a brother, and in a sense even if she did, school-age boys would have been a foreign species to her. In which case she would naturally have taken her older, more experienced, male superior's directions for granted.

Jill hasn't responded to you at all, she's only put one comment here and she said nothing about doctors. However there was Julia who mentioned ladies health checks. So you are getting things all confused and accusing others of things they never even said, and have actually taken pot shots at not one but two women now without realising it I think.

So as our teachers were always fond of shouting to us if we were inattentive in class - PAY ATTENTION ALAN!

Comment by: Derek on 27th January 2025 at 02:52


Derek, I am sure that if Jill had been your teacher you would have presented her with a Pink Lady or Granny Smith every day.

The point is, this lady had presumably read at least a few of the comments on this board from men who felt uncomfortable during their school days from dictatorial teachers, and explained in detail why , and yet she still felt that there was no problem, or at least couldn't see one . Therefore she has learned nothing. She gave me one glib reply, about doctors, which was totally irrelevant, so forgive me from not presenting my Golden Delicious to her desk.

Simon Godley, I have also encountered in Scandinavia the hope that the British might shed some of their inhibitions about nudity. Certainly the attitude there is strikingly different. In Britain the association between nudity and sex is ingrained, despite the many instances nowadays of non-sexual nudity, such as skinny dips.
Finland came up five years ago in this discussion during a succession of positive exchanges about nudity in schools. On page 154 Paul refers to the Finns' preference for single sex swimming in Helsinki so that they can swim with nothing on.
Derek, I agree with you. It's not just teachers who have left the discussion. If you look back five years you can see just how different the chat was: more tolerant, with people's views being taken at face value and in good faith. It is easy to see why the more confident/positive side of the discussion rarely gets an airing now.

Comment by: Yours Truly on 26th January 2025 at 16:32

"..... I've always thought teachers ought to be much more thoroughly trained and qualified than they have ever had to be. After all, if you are teaching young children you are responsible for their pastoral care and this involves a lot more than teaching them a few subjects.....

.... a class of seven-year-olds will automatically take on trust whatever their teacher tells them. I can remember a number of teachers who were toweringly pompous and/or worse and relentlessly insisted on their own preferred view of the world. (I do not know whether a certain proportion of teachers in general have always been like this or if catholic schools in particular just tended to attract these types.) Such people are failing their duty of care and can actually be harmful......



......But I stand by my previous comment. Nobody expects a recent graduate in their early-twenties to be an expert in child psychology, which is why you look to senior, experienced teachers to provide them with insights into the issues facing the age-group they teach. But as someone who went through primary school in Jill's exact era I know from experience that was rarely ever the case."

I think that their air of superiority and smug pomposity is a built in "quality" of a teacher, whether it is a religious school or not. I think you are quite right that young children believe all they are told by an authority figure. One tribute I will pay to my collection of misfits and heavy drinkers that comprised our elderly teachers is that you would never have known what their political beliefs were - they were never discussed. These days it is only too obvious (which explains, I suppose, why they want to introduce voting for 16 year olds). It seems otiose, to go and cast your vote before going off to school to take part in rope climbing and running on the spot, and hearing what a marvellous man Mick Lynch is. I HOPE these students will start to realize the power they are given, though I doubt it.

In more busy days I used to employ teenagers on Saturdays to pack and despatch parcels etc and I was astonished to hear that school hadn't changed much from my day - still a load of hidebound teachers, dishing out castigation or praise, as they saw fit, still treating pupils as if they were in borstal. One lad I remember was amazed I called him by his forename, because all the teachers used surnames only - in 2010!

Considering that their behaviour can have a profound effect on pupils years after their intrusion, you would think they would be trained to understand the complexities of teenagers lives, and in fact, a teacher in their twenties should remember what it was like to be a teenager themselves, but this is a reflection on their desire to be obeyed and seen as important, just as much as the antique training methods still employed by teacher training colleges, where it is still 1956 and they believe teachers deserve deference and unquestioning obedience.
.

Why is it that anytime someone who has worked in education shows up on this forum that the attack dog suddenly goes for their ankles. The forum has already lost a handful of PE teachers who made it clear why they wished to no longer participate and now we have a lady called Jill who wrote something quite inoffensive who has taken an immediate hit from the usual suspect, yes you know who you are. Is it any wonder there's no follow up when somebody comes on with some honesty and takes their time to share some words here and gets her character and professionalism assassinated, just because many years ago she told some boys in the school to do a bit of PE without tops. So what? It's absolute madness to judge someone like that when you know nothing at all about the person in any meaningful way after just one paragraph written on here. For what it's worth I thought she sounded a very thoughtful person to even be thinking like she was now and all I will say to you Jill is you have nothing to reconsider about the issue you raised here and if I had been one of your former pupils at your primary school I would have had no problem with you as my teacher and I too was rather uneasy when doing PE as a shirtless skin in both primary and secondary schools. But I would not hold my own feelings on something like what PE kit I was made to wear against a primary school teacher from many years ago.

My own sister was a primary school teacher and if anyone thinks you can just turn up brand new at a school and start changing the rules of the game to suit yourself then that just shows how little understanding some people on here have. You go with school expectations and then maybe after a short time you can quietly bring in a few well meaning suggestions to the right people in the right places and take it from there. To turn up as a supply teacher at a new school that just happens to do shirtless PE when you've been told this, but to unilaterally decide you're not doing that is not how it works, even if you are not in favour personally.

I was at school for the whole of the 1970s and did shirtless skins PE throughout those years many times because the teachers told me to do it that way, and although I was uneasy about it in the early days and became a bit more so again in secondary school I also knew that it was all rather normal and expected of us and I'm certainly not going to take any of my ex teachers to task over such a thing. Shirtless PE, like showers after PE with nothing on, was the most normal thing in the world of schools in the 1970s and while it could make you uneasy you would still accept it as quite normal and an okay thing to be doing and nothing very dreadful if you had a modicum of intelligence.

Just try and give these teachers a break when they appear on here. I appreciated Jill's honesty, shouldn't others.

Yours Truly, thank you for your thoughtful and kind response to me. Thank you, too, Alan, for all your reflections. Perhaps Jill Paige has not looked back at the discussion.

Hi Alan,

They do say that an MP is the highest-paying position for which you need no relevant qualifications, experience or any level of insight. And I've always thought teachers ought to be much more thoroughly trained and qualified than they have ever had to be. After all, if you are teaching young children you are responsible for their pastoral care and this involves a lot more than teaching them a few subjects.

The big difference is that nobody trusts politicians, we all know not to believe what they say, whereas a class of seven-year-olds will automatically take on trust whatever their teacher tells them. I can remember a number of teachers who were toweringly pompous and/or worse and relentlessly insisted on their own preferred view of the world. (I do not know whether a certain proportion of teachers in general have always been like this or if catholic schools in particular just tended to attract these types.) Such people are failing their duty of care and can actually be harmful.

As regards Jill, it doesn't sound so much like she can't understand it as that she is unwilling to believe it. You make a very good point that even if she had never realised about boys being shy before, having read various male respondents on here by now she should already have been beginning to change her mind. And it is disconcerting to think that somebody now presumably retired never before realised that boys can have body issues.

But I stand by my previous comment. Nobody expects a recent graduate in their early-twenties to be an expert in child psychology, which is why you look to senior, experienced teachers to provide them with insights into the issues facing the age-group they teach. But as someone who went through primary school in Jill's exact era I know from experience that was rarely ever the case.

Comment by: Yours Truly on 25th January 2025 at 18:19


I sometimes think schoolteachers are analogous to politicians - they come into our lives for a few years to cause misery and mayhem then they push off to pastures new, or we leave them, they still not understanding a thing about what it is they are supposed to be the fount of all knowledge about and even less about the lives they meddle with.

Whether the woman we are discussing was merely obeying orders or not, even today - having presumably read some of our experiences - by her own admission - she still doesn't understand the problem. Typical teacher/politician response.!

Finland is the number one happiest nation of people in the world and many of them spend a lot of their time naked with their families and friends steaming away in sauna rooms, many homes have them. I know about this, I've been there on visits to friends and done this myself with them. They are remarkably chilled about themselves and their bodies. Yet when I first went there a few years ago as a British person they laughed at my awkwardness at the home I stayed at of theirs in a place called Oulu, which is beside the northern end of the Baltic, halfway up western Finland. I was invited to use the facilities with them and had to take a deep breath to do so, a refusal would have been seen as very rude. It was their teenage children, boy and girl, their parents, me and my wife, although my son declined. British children don't do this with their old folks, but the Finns think nothing of getting it all out. They even do it with their neighbours, another evening I was there this happened while we went sightseeing alone without them. There are also children at just the age of six and seven there who go to kindergartens and do such things with adults too, and take communal showers at that age in the schools and kindergartens without segregation by genders at those ages too. There is even a civilian or military requirement to serve a set number of days for those over eighteen and under sixty of national service to the country and yet they are so happy and I've felt this every time I've been over there, which is six times now. Every time I've visited I've been invited to join them in their Finnish ways, remove everything. They are so chilled and uncomplicated about it and told me if I went to stay at any of their neighbours even as a stranger I would probably be given similar hospitality. So what can we learn from the Finns and what can they teach us bashful Brits about ourselves?

My own school situation back here at home many years ago was broadly in line with many here in terms of requirements and I never saw myself as awkward but my Finnish friends in Oulu found out about our British reserve, and made me feel wonderful and helped knock some of it out of me, even if they couldn't do so to my son.

Hi Matthew S,

I had long begun to think it was only me who had had these acute inhibitions, and I was admittedly an over-sensitive child. So thank you for reminding me that other children had similar anxieties.

Children develop at different rates in different areas and this should be respected. I don't think any child that young should be made to something they feel uncomfortable with. And in any case, there was never any practical reason for boys to have to take PE classes without tops on.

It's not my intention to be critical of Jill, I am making a wider point about how delicate very young children are. Teachers really do need to be ultra-aware of the potential issues present in the children they teach. These can be potentially innumerable - there was a recent poster here who said that after a spiteful comment from his PE teacher about having 'rounded shoulders', whatever that is supposed to mean, he developed a complex about his shoulders that lasted years. I used to panic when it rained when I was in primary school because I remembered one first year infants teacher letting us out to go home and, on finding heavy rain outside, casually remarking, "Oh no. You can't go home yet!" I thought they could just keep me at school forever and that terrified me.

Really all teachers need to be qualified psychologists. Young children are so sensitive and credulous that an off-the-cuff remark here leads to major preoccupations there. It is literally like the butterfly effect.

Jill was only following the directions of her senior teacher, which is what she was expected to do. He was the one who ought to have been more aware. As a supply teacher she presumably was on something like what we nowadays call a zero-hours contract and if she even had wanted to complain or criticise the school need not ever have called her again.

Even so I found her total unawareness that maybe some boys might not have been okay with being made to do PE half naked startling. I think there is this assumption that persists to this day that boys are just more sturdy and more robust than girls and that, as a corollary of that, they are just less sensitive than girls and feel emotions less deeply and therefore need less consideration. This is simply not so. I state this from my own life experience.

At least you were allowed to wear shorts for your PE lesson. For our infants PE classes it was strictly underwear only. If any boy or girl had brought a pair of shorts into school they wouldn't have been allowed to wear them. There again we were allowed to keep our vests on. My primary school seemed to take no account of the dignity of the children in their charge. Contrary to what people thought, or do think, children do have a sense of dignity.

My primary school, and especially the infants, was big on getting us out of our clothes. In fact they always seemed to be coming up with more reasons for why we needed to undress, from PE in our vest and pants to the nativity play to full medical exams and even, in one instance, to to a school trip in public, down a local park.

At least your teacher was kind to you when you asked. If I had asked my teacher the same request I would most likely have been told off for not already knowing how to take my own vest off or shouted at.

Hello, Jill Paige.

Thank you for kindly giving your recollections.

Don't mind my asking, but out of curiosity, when you say you had no PE training as a young supply teacher in the 1970s and '80s, were you told how to use the equipment or did the senior teacher suggest how to reduce the possibility of accidents? How old were the primary-aged children you taught?

I don't think you can be blamed, if you don't mind my giving an opinion, for not realising, as a young supply teacher, that boys showing no outward unhappiness might object to doing PE with no tops on. As you say, boys may keep such things to themselves. Especially when inexperienced, you couldn't have known what was in their heads.

I remember - readers may think this foolishly young, but still it is true - leaving the classroom for my first PE lesson, not quite five, and the pang of discomfort as I became very conscious of my chest being bare in front of the other children.

I remember the tangled logic of the way I responded clearly. At the start of subsequent PE lessons, I got changed into my PE shorts, my vest still on, and went up to my Reception teacher, a kind lady, and asked her to take my vest off for me. She helpfully did so. I was consciously thinking: if the other children don't see me take my vest off myself, they won't think I'm doing this to myself willingly. A way of clinging to self-respect, you see. I'm sure she had no idea I was embarrassed - a sensitive teacher, she would have offered some reassurance otherwise.
Incidentally, this was in 1989.

I had greater problems doing PE bare-chested later on, more at the anticipation of it than the taking part. School swimming was a delight - perhaps the pleasure of it distracted from any embarrassment, and we were in the water most of the time.

Jill, please excuse my going on at too great length - did you go into full-time teaching later on?

You write some very well written and thoughtful posts "Yours Truly" and so have many people here recently, I hope I do too, it's nice to see. I shouldn't read too much into the comment remarking on your own views mirroring Alan's, he's used to those accusations, that's why these IP numbers appeared about a year ago. It did seem to clean up the forum rather rapidly from what I can make out when I dip in again for a catch up once in a while.

William, when it comes to schooldays I think many of the negatives often linger longer in the minds for people than the positives and people feel more inclined to comment about negative things than positive things in this world. Look at the state of twitter/x to prove that point, or the fact that journalists say bad news sells papers and makes people watch the TV news. So it is with forums such as this, and the amount of people who didn't feel they had positive times or treatment in school.

William you've mentioned the ebb and flow of anxious versus non anxious people posting. Aspects of school always made me anxious and I became a very body conscious person by about 11 or 12, but I will not go as far to say I regard my own comments as negative, they are just my own sometimes anxious thoughts about school and its ways from a boy at the time who simply wasn't at all relaxed or comfortable to remove his top or get naked, certainly at first. I so wish I had been, with easy to come confidence. Therein lied the problem for boys like me at schools like mine and other places. Going barechested always made me nervous at school after the age of 11 even though we were always doing it. It was the context I think. So many times I found it totally unnecessary and I especially disliked being told I had to do it at secondary school so much and thought it downright unfair in some situations like sports days and drama classes. Yet at my middle school I did a lot of mixed swimming at the age of 10 and 11 and don't remember any overly unusual problems doing so and was pleased to swim. I definitely changed my attitude to this kind of thing pre and post puberty. Perhaps that shouldn't surprise anyone. I've always valued my own personal privacy and give it up sparingly and in situations of my choosing, although I won't go as far as some have on here and suggest that being made to be barechested or to shower at school was an invasion of privacy, it's close but not quite over the line maybe, even when being forced to spend the sports day afternoon barechested among all the hordes visiting school on such days or having a photo taken like that, although I would have liked to have given my own permission for photos that were taken of me while in my school mandated barechested shorts only PE attire, and my class photo ended up in the local press, the Bucks Standard. Many adult people like to consent to photos when clothed never mind being a child/teenager and wearing just one item, the shorts/trunks.

This brings me to my drama teacher, who I met for the first time since 1987 back at the start of last November at a reunion. I also met a former PE teacher of mine then too. I think I already mentioned him a couple of months back so won't intentionally repeat that. I met others too in various subjects as well as old pupils, some not seen since the 80's.

My drama teacher was actually far more interesting than the PE teacher to try and get a handle on. My drama teacher was a relief stand in PE teacher sometimes, often taking rugby in PE during winter months. Those who read here a lot may recall what I've previously said, that nearly half the drama afternoons (double periods) I did in school over nearly 3 years to summer 1984 were done barechested in a mixed class situation, and he put me on the school stage 3 times in a role where I didn't have a top on, either the whole time or partly in one case. There were also 7 other times I did something similar with my clothing on just to make quite clear.

I had a chat with this gentleman who took my drama classes during the early 80's for a couple of years, along with others. I made sure to confront aspects of his teaching in a polite questioning manner which attracted follow up comments from others with me who were part of the same I did. He was a young teacher at the time, barely 70 even now. He was completely unapologetic about his teaching methods however and admitted that he probably thought eveyone was the same as him in his views. He considered our drama classes to be exercises in confidence building and bringing people out of themselves into a sense of discovery. I threw a comment he had once use back then about "using our bodies to discover ourselves" or something like that. Most irritating of all was how he described drama classes as places where he expected to be able to draw out inner confidence that he knew was there but was hiding unseen. He knew for example that lots of people, boys and girls, were not confident when asked to perform or play roles or dance and it was his job to change that. Under questions about the extent of our own drama being conducted barechested half the time he cited this as one tool in his confidence building technique, and admitted to me and those listening who had been subjected to such classes of his that he deliberately liked to push people well beyond their comfort zones and if he identified those he saw as lacking confidence he would push them further forward in many ways, including in my own case and others giving me a barechested role on a stage in front of my the rest of school, and a complete all boys cast barechested role in front of parents once. He rattled on about confidence and belief in oneself. I said that this didn't work and just made things worse in many cases and that I regularly came into his drama afternoons apprehensive, and did he not understand how it felt to be a 13 year old boy forced to spend the afternoon in a drama studio among not just boys like in PE much of the time but up close with girls in our class that age too. Not too much comment about that came out. We often did touchy feely stuff with them with our shirts off, our school blazers, ties and shirts were often made to come off on arrival for the next 2 hours of so, plus our shoes and socks, often just left with dark grey long trousers on, a really awkward feel weird look, worse than just shorts actually which at least felt natural, although sometimes we wore shorts if asked to bring some or changing into various clothing in the drama wardrobe for stuff we did.

I was always surprised when I had an older middle aged lady for the final year of my drama in secondary school and she carried on in much the same way as he had done. I had not expected that. He was the head of drama and I have now found out that she acted under his general guidance and did so quite remarkably closely and so in my third year it carried on the same as the first two. He was completely unrepentant about his time at our school and said he wouldn't have changed a thing and would do the same now. There was no hint about how he must have affected so many boys over the years at school like this and even though I explained the effect of these lessons and the way he did them on us, and even handed him a printed copy of a couple of my history posts here from way back, there was no sense of genuine understanding other than a "sorry if you felt like that" and a clear indication that he thought he was right.

Someone with me had a PE lesson before lunch followed by a drama class afterwards and mentioned going from one class to the next and not wearing a top sometimes because they went from the gym to the drama studio which meant shirtless at school after 10.50am until leaving time at 3.35pm except for lunch hour. I said at least you got tow such lessons out the way on the same day and mentioned my three PE classes and drama being on separate days meaning 4 shirtless school days at some point. The drama teacher found this amusing. I told him he didn't make anyone more confident with his methods and quite the reverse but he seemed to be one of those types who was set in his ways and thought he knew best even when presented with evidence to the contrary.

There was somebody else once who wrote on here about having to do barechested drama lessons in school, so if you are still reading I'd love to hear a bit more of your own experience on that and from anyone else who faced the same.

Hi William,

Yes we did swim and I was fine with that. Again it was all about the context. It was better than football. Anything was better than football. And unlike rounders or shot-putting it was teaching us an actual useful skill.

I do agree with you that there has to be a certain amount of compulsion in education, otherwise all too many young people would never try anything that seemed challenging.

Yours Truly, Thank you for your comment. I do see your point about settings and I had no wish to sound unsympathetic, but did you swim at school and how did you feel about it?
I was exactly the sort of shy and fussy boy who would have opted out of showers and gym given the chance. For me, not being given the choice worked, because I had to cope with it and found that I could. It was a lesson learned, which gradually made me more resilient and confident.
I don't think there was a "no pyjamas" rule; it was the boys' choice.

Hi Julia,

I am not Alan. He is someone else. If you are suggesting we are the same person, well, you'll have to explain to me the benefit of posting the same things multiple times under different aliases, because I can't see any.

Your point is irrelevant since mammograms, smear tests and prostate exams are necessary medical procedures carried out on consenting adults, unlike school PE practices. .

If Alan and I came across as a bit curt - and I hope I was not - it was because the Jill's first paragraph seemed very dismissive in an 'I can't see the problem therefore there is no problem' kind of way. And it seemed like such an obvious point that I was surprised I had to make it to anybody. I do also feel that her 'everything in the right proportions' comment was misguided. Would anybody anywhere expect teenage girls to do PE in bikinis?


Hi Alan,

I hadn't even noticed the user ID signatures. That is a good point.

Maybe I should just choose a name. I just tend to want to keep myself to myself and online pseudonyms are just a part of that. But perhaps you're right and it's time for a change. I am nobody special and I have nothing to hide.


Hi William,

But this is the exact point, isn't it? One view - the school's - did indeed prevail. And if you found yourself at odds with it, well, that was just your tough luck.

It all depends on context. Most people of both genders are quite happy to hit the beach in next to nothing. We associate beaches with holidays, leisure, fun, sea, sun, etc. The school environment, with its challenges, obligations and trials, carries a very different set of associations. What feels fine in one setting does not feel the same in another.

I have no doubt many boys were fine with the topless kit. Some of them have posted as much on this thread. But then many more were not. The point is, people should have the choice. There was a recent poster on here from, I think, the Czech Republic, who stated that at his school there is no set PE kit and the boys just wear what they feel comfortable in. He did indeed say that some of them do it in nothing but shorts, but this is through their own free choice. There is no pressing, practical reason for any school to demand a specific PE kit, as long as what the pupils wear meets safety standards. Really this whole PE kit thing is just another part of this British obsession with making children and young people wear uniforms.

I had heard before of private boys' schools that had nude swimming sessions but the no-pyjamas rule is a new one on me. What is wrong with wearing pyjamas, for God's sake? Everything I have heard about UK public and prep schools has led me to conclude that depersonalisation and degradation were viewed as essential elements in the moulding of boys. Those men you mention developed confidence despite their experiences, not because of them.

The older I get and the more I hear about the bizarre customs and practices that pertained in those places the more grateful I feel for having been born poor and working-class.

You might want to re-read Jill's final paragraph. In it she concedes that she just never realised that there were boys for whom topless PE was an issue and makes the very salient point that boys are very reluctant to talk about their problems - I know I was.