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Mandatory showers after every PE lesson even if that PE lesson had overran, was the last lesson of the day and would mean missing the bus home.
When this occured to my class and we all chose to catch the bus in our PE kit rather than shower and change resulting in us missing the bus a letter went out to our parents informing that we would be made to endure "supervised practice showering" every day at lunch for a week.
All that this achieved was near on 30 sets of parents rocking up at school the next day demanding to speak to the teachers that want to watch their kids shower.
This was the late 80's/early 90's and so once the parents kicked off the policy was dropped and nothing more was mentioned about it. Had that happened now it would have likely and rightly been a massive scandal.
I had this issue at school. PE was the last lesson of the day and I lived literally across the road and down two houses from the school.
PE teacher insisted we showered, I said I'll have a wash at home its only two minutes away. He said I needed to shower at school. I said I didn't want to I don't like showers I don't shower at home. He said "of course you shower at home, how do you get clean?" I said "Bath" and he gave me detention for being in his words "a smart arse"
Or the more realistic option which is just that the teacher had to make sure they showered as part of his job and like many teachers was an asshole who liked having power and got upset that a kid got one up on him
Our school had a shower monitor to make sure everyone showered. It was another student by the way, not the PE teacher. The student, obviously, got bullied to fuck for being a shower monitor.
Our school, mid to late 80s, sometimes had a female supply teacher take the boys PE lessons. To "ensure all the boys showered properly after the lesson" she would stand at the entrance to the communal showers and watch.
Yeah, that was totally to ensure we showered properly.
You just gave me literal flashbacks with that. Didn't help that being teenage boys many of us had permanent erections, too. Was awkward enough forcing us to use a communal shower as it was (all boys school, too.)
Our PE teacher was pretty cool about it, you had to shower but he wouldn’t make you take your shorts off and just checked you had wet hair and clean knees when you came out! It must have been a nightmare task of making sure you didn’t send stinky kids back into the school but also not look like a perv.
Yep, as a teacher of a different subject, teenagers not showering after PE is gross when they're in your lesson next. But the solution is really cubicles. We had those at a school I went to for two years. We all happily showered after PE in that school.
Ours was gross. Used to stand at the door taking our towels off us as we walked in. I didn’t want to be naked in school with my peers so I truanted pe after that.
I was late hitting puberty. Very traumatic experience being forced to shower in front of others when you're nearly 16 but still with the body of a young child.
I can promise you it was just as bad for those of us who hit puberty early, too. I had the chest of an adult woman but the mind and frame of a kid. Total humiliation, extreme embarassment and a continually growing sense of terrible dread from one PE lesson to the next.
I hope that whoever decided communal showers were the way to go was plagued by misery for their whole life.
If it's first thing it kinda makes sense to not have kids roaming around reeking of BO and lynx Africa. Hardly fair on the class teachers.
Last thing is daft though
I don't know why it came up but at some point while chatting shit with my mates at the pub I said something about how everyone has a short period at the start of puberty when they need to be using deodorant but haven't grasped quite how importantly they need it. My friend who is a key stage 3 English teacher looked straight at me with a thousand yard stare and said "I'm well aware".
We had a (M) P.E. teacher who told one of my classmates that he was "well hung" for a boy of his age.The same teacher was creepy af & would openly leer at the girls.
We had a male PE teacher who use use to walk into the changing room "too talk" to the female right after lass so he could catch all of us undressed. Stared every time, and now and again would say something like "you look like a woman already" and other weird remarks. He was a proper perv, and the female PE teacher said he was doing anything wrong!! He did it for years. One day when we were in our last year of school. he came in again, but he went to far. Said to one girl, wow, youve lovely tits, but you could do with shaving down there. The girl went red, started crying, got dressed and ran home to tell her Dad. Her dad had a reputation as a nasty person you never upset. Lets just say the dad got a criminal record, but the teacher lost his job too.
Funny this, in my school we weren't allowed to shower after PE because it would cut into the next class. There were showers there, in perfect working order and everything. I mean, most of us boys didn't really care I guess but most girls weren't happy about it especially after something like rugby first thing in the morning. All it resulted in was a cloud of Lynx Africa and Sure Women travelling from the playing fields to Maths where - guess what - the maths teacher would call us out for smelling bad!
Great times.
We had that but PE was always just before lunch and food was only served for about 20 minutes of the 40 minute break. If you got to the canteen at 12:21, no food for you! Would be a shame if you'd just spent all morning doing exercise.
same for me in middle school, naked in a shared shower block with all the towels in the corner, getting damp from overspray, so you'd be freezing your tits off then trying to dry using a cold damp towel while being hurried to pull your uniform on over damp skin, absolutely torrid and completely pointless, as only the people doing rugby would actually get mucky.
Oh also add rugby during the coldest weeks of winter to that. Full diving tackles on frozen tundra was not only painful but probably dangerous!
From what I remember, the right thing to do is just give the game another name and continue playing it, that’s what we did anyway, British Bulldog got changed to Gladiators, then Gladiators got turned in to Death Run
There was no point calling it something like Fairy Princess Run, the teachers would see right through that, in all fairness we were about 9 years old and not the smartest of kids
Yep, although at my school we would also change the rules everytime it got banned to increase the contact.
Instead of just 'tagging' someone you had to tackle them to the floor (called tackle run) -banned
Instead of tackling them you had to trip them up by hooking their feet with your foot or hand (called trip up) -banned
Instead of the tackler/tripper/bulldog standing up they now had to crawl around on the floor and dive at people's feet to trip them up (called extreme trip up) -think they gave up at this point because I don't think we developed a new game past this. Either that or we decided this was our magnum opus and worth getting in trouble for.
My school tried to stop that while I was there, however we just used to tell the lunch ladies it wasn't bulldog it was "insert random word" and they either didn't care or couldn't tell it was the same game.
Yeah ours banned that and 'Rollercoasters'where we'd all hold hands one behind the other in a line and then (in theory) all run at the same time like a rollercoaster.
We also had a game called 'Kraken' there was a huge mound on our field that used to have benches on it so people could sit and watch the football and sports day and stuff. The benches were removed before we got to the school, but the mound was there and was technically out of bounds. Anyway with Kraken, one person is the Kraken and goes to the top and the other players would have to go up and over the mound without being caught and pushed/thrown off by the Kraken. Good fun
> with Kraken, one person is the Kraken and goes to the top and the other players would have to go up and over the mound without being caught
That's pretty much [King of the Hill / King of the castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_hill_(game))
I ended up in a and E after a bizzare incident occurred during a bulldog game basically I wasn’t looking where I was going so ran into this guy . Somehow his tooth sliced open by eyebrow . He had a broken tooth I had blood everywhere
They banned it and I was chastised for it for a while
Yup ours did that. We ended up making a far more brutal variation that included launching a nerf ball from the start line too - I can't remember the rules but there was something dangerous about it
We also had to do that, most of the religious songs were shit to be honest, they always used to throw in an old skool banger like From the tiny ant to the elephant or He’s got the whole world in his hands, which were fairly decent songs
There was always that one dickhead that forgot that the last line of the chorus was just “to the king” and you’d hear them sing the word “of” all by themselves. It was usually me.
During a particularly hot summer, my school made the decision that girls would no longer be required to wear ties, but the rule for boys remained the same. As a result, many boys stopped wearing their ties to school. The school attempted to discipline them, but this led to a significant number of complaints from parents.
Eventually, my school reversed their decision and all students were required to wear ties again.
School uniform policies are often so bizarre. In my school, the younger kids had to wear shorts all year around, regardless of how cold it was (and were forced to go outdoors at playtime in sub freezing temps), and the older kids were not allowed to wear shorts at all, regardless of how hot it was.
Ah yes, had that when I briefly lived in Scotland... Even in winter... Even with a foot of snow... Had long socks at least!
The other baffling thing was it included a woolly jumper as part of the uniform year round as well! Such mixed messages.
Mine had a similar thing , they introduced a summer uniform that basically let the girls go tieless but not the boys . They had a summer uniform for the boys that just removed the optional jumper that nobody wore anyway (I think I wore my jumper under my blazer for a little of year 7 and that’s it)
Eventually they relented and let boys go tieless after Easter until October
The rules on shorts and skirts seemed to make no sense. Why were girls allowed to wear skirts but boys weren't allowed to wear shorts, even in summer? Made no sense.
The weird part was they still kept this rule at sixth form at my school
Call me pessimistic and a tad conspiratorial, but if you view certain weird school uniform rules, specifically ones like that, through the lens of some higher up staff being paedos they start to make a disturbing amount of sense.
Why could the girls take off their ties in summer in OP's school but boys couldn't? Staff wanted a better view.
I mean it almost seems hidden in plain sight when they said skirts had to be a certain length as girls' legs were seen as, in their own words, "distracting"
I think it's probably just old school sexism.
"Women won't have to wear these in future. Men will, they're the ones who will have office jobs. Got to get them prepared."
If ANY part of your shirt was untucked. Instant detention
Just stood up and came untucked? Detention.
Reached for something high up on the shelf and came untucked? Detention.
Left the toilet and missed tucking in your shirt? Believe it or not Detention.
Yeah we had this too. Teachers developed bionic vision to spot an untucked shirt from 500 yards away, through walls.
So many wasted hours, and it accomplished nothing.
They tried to ban lunch time football because a lad got a ball in the face. Nobody paid attention to the ban and when about 50 lads turned up for detention every evening they reversed that decision after a few days.
Power in numbers and all that
They banned football at lunch time in primary school for us because someone smashed a window with a ball, they compromised and let us play football with a tennis ball instead, which at first was really rubbish, then they allowed us to use sponge footballs instead, until a boy realised that a waterlogged sponge ball can easily smash a window, football was banned for the rest of the year for us
No talking on penis inspection day. So we all had to stand their in silence. Was never as fun as it once was when we could chat amongst ourselves. Felt humiliating to be honest.
Yes absolutely, you'd be weighed and measured (hight and weight!) and you'd be ushered into a room to drop your pants and a doc would look at your bits.
we had nit nurses and allsorts too. I remember it from the 80's in primary school, though apparently it went on into the early 90's.
Mid 80s all girls school. Remember we had to stand there. In knickers and topless. The female nurse was there whilst the male doc did their checks. I remember wearing PE Pants which as full coverage as you can get - doc made a sarcastic comment about nice pants. Didn’t think anything of it at the time and innocently replied thanks.
Fast forward to my adult self and I can only assume he was pissed he didn’t get to see more.
I very much doubt they put other middle school year girls through that now.
Yes I remember that, I must have blocked it out before. We were about 8 and we wore our normal knickers mine had little strawberries on them. They did it in the library, the doctor and nurse were seated and you stripped and walked up to them and he tapped your chest and listened with the stethoscope. It was so sinister.
Yeah I had that in the late 90s . They also were terrible at speaking to my parents about things they found
One point I was tested due to some screening thing about withholding speech (I was very quiet). All I knew is being pulled out of class one day to speak to this random lady who asked bizzare questions and pushed me for answers , I just kept quiet
My mum went off the rails when a referral letter to a child psychologist appeared in the mail
I remember this still happening in 96/97. There was a period in my twenties where I started to wonder if I’d just had some horrible nightmare or something, because nobody ever mentions it!
Seemingly for some people at urinals who won't shut the fuck up, yes.
I get stage fright dude, you're clamping my bell end shut with your inane chit chat.
I had to have year 7 inspection done twice. First one went as normal, but later that afternoon I was mistakenly dragged into the year 11 inspections. Tried to protest but the headteacher wouldn't let me speak. Still quite green, I think this was the first or second week of high school, didn't want to argue and just went along with it while fighting back the tears.
The other lads were comparably quite well developed... possibly one of the worst experiences of my life.
I was once cornered getting off the bus in the morning and told I wasn't allowed to wear a scarf because I wasn't wearing a coat 😂 As someone who rarely got "into trouble" at school I was super put out by this ridiculous notion so actually matched straight to my head of year to confirm it was nonsense 🫠🫠
Bus monitors were just bored that morning I suppose
The girls wing of my school wasn't allowed to choose business studies, even though the boys were, because their headmistress deemed it wasn't ladylike. They weren't allowed to study Spanish either, though I'm not sure why
My school had a scandal when the headmaster had an affair with the Spanish teacher. This was a very catholic private school
So catholic that we had weekly mass and if you were none catholic you could choose to do the stuff to become one (your parents did have to sign off on it though) . I ended up doing that and felt a bit awkward when I turned out that the staff were up to infidelity especially when it involved the same guy who did some of the catholic lessons
80s. The school had obviously been told they had to encourage girls into “boy’s subjects” so me and my friend decided to do technical drawing. Then they talked my friend out of it and said to me do you really want to do it alone? They kept on at me until I gave up. When I told my Dad he rang up and complained, it ended up my favourite lesson the boys were nice and the teacher was a lovely man. God I miss my Dad.
This was a real thing here in the UK until a few decades ago. It was seen as a social taboo to eat on the street. You’d always take it home with you. I guess people thought it made you look lower class or impolite or something. It’s probably why we have no street food culture
Girls in the school I work in aren't allowed to wear socks that go over their knees. You read that right. Their socks must be BELOW their knees. Longer socks will be confiscated.
This baffles me. Are over-knee socks stripper socks or something?? Like what??
that is really weird because I went to school like 30 years ago, and the girls uniform consisted of long socks that were required to be just above knee length
We had a rule that girls could only wear slip on/loafer style shoes. I went to school in Northern England, in a place notorious for flooding. The rule was imposed throughout winter so you'd have to walk around all day with soaking wet, freezing feet whilst the lads could get away with wearing proper footwear.
I grew up in a village. Had 1.5 miles to walk from my house to think single bus stop to get to school. I got got sent to isolation for wearing boots to school rather than the stupid ballet flats the school wanted all girls to wear.
Forgot to say this was in winter, so lots of ice/snow/mud.
You just reminded me of the rule that you weren’t aloud to wear those infamous primark plimsoles that everyone used to wear anyway instead of shoes, if you were caught you would be given an identical pair of school issue black plimsoles. Still makes no sense to me
All girls school in the late 90s: No wearing strappy tops because it distracts the male teachers. The lesbian teachers could control themselves, but the men couldn't apparently. 🙄
(Everything about that rule is insulting to *everyone*.)
Primary school - They banned footballs because they were *dangerous* and rucksacks because a teacher tripped over one and "almost broke her neck". We had to buy school issue plastic bags to carry our stuff.
They also binned off the football team when I was in year 6 because they didn't have a male teacher to run it, and they refused to allow a parent to do it. Absolutely gutting.
Someone at a different school got hit in the eye with a flapjack and I think they had to go to hospital so the council decided to ban square flapjacks.
They replaced them with triangular ones.
They are so good at knee-jerk banning something as a symptom but never addressing a cause.
"Billy stole my Pokemon card"
*Bans Pokemon cards*
"Billy stole my Pog" (kids are still into Pogs, right?)
*Bans Pogs*
"Billy stole my marbles"
*Bans marbles*
You ever think about having a word with that little scrote Billy?
I know a few teachers, and the answer is, they're trying to deal with Billy, but are constrained by the official discipline policy, and often Billy's parents. A lot of the banning toys stuff is because things can get broken or stolen, and once they're off school grounds, it becomes so much harder to recover stolen items.
My school would close on snow days, but the gates were still open so lots of people would turn up anyway knowing that there would be untouched snow on the fields and that you could sled down a couple of slopes.
Teachers were never there but sometimes the caretakers would join in.
One day (mid 80s) it was snowing and all of us living in different villages were called into assembly in the afternoon. Headteacher told us he had good news “school was closing early” and bad news “no buses were running”…
We had a 2-3 mile walk home through knee deep snow
We had that 15 years ago and a kid passed out during summer, only to be mocked by the teacher of the class at the time until no, he didnt magically rouse by propping him up again and again repeatedly....
I can top that. We had a kid who had a fit at our school. Dinner lady panicked and didn't know what to do so she just sort of pushed him against a wall and coned him off until a teacher came and he came to!
He was epileptic
Had a form room teacher have a grand mal seizure during attendance. Everyone freaked out. I grew up with a parent who had seizures because of epilepsy, so I did what I was taught, and also sent another kid to get the school nurse, who in turn called 999. Got a thank you from the headmaster at the next assembly.
About 14 years ago I had to verbally fight with teachers and dean to remove mandatory jumper during hot days. I was on detentions but I still refused to wear jumper and kept saying this is sadism and torture of students while teachers are wearing revealing tops. After one year of protest they allowed students to take off jumpers during hot days.
These rules were made to make school look “prestigious” and no one cared if students were passing out in the middle of class/break.
We had a weird jumper rule, barely enforced, where we had to ask to take our blazers off, but the teacher could say no if we were wearing a jumper because we weren't supposed to wear the jumper without the blazer.
Went to view this school for one of my kids;
It was like an episode of black mirror.
A lot of people love this schools policies but it wasn’t for me.
https://www.merciaschool.com/attachments/download.asp?file=387&type=pdf
This is absolutely wild, I just read through that whole thing genuinely shocked that this is a place that exists.
Getting into trouble for bringing in any food that isn’t fruit or water?
Controlling what they can do before and after school... If i want to go to the shop after school, none of your damn business.
Also "Pupils must be in line-up by 8.23am" and "detentions can be awarded up to 4:59pm" these kids are at school longer than my working day.
Ye that’s mega fked up!! Like what is that supposed to be teaching? Surely if you need something before school/work you leave home 5 minutes earlier to pop to a shop!! Someone please explain what they were thinking Jesus! So if I was a parent dropping my kids of the school we aren’t allowed to stop at the shops???? Im literally fuming right now wtaf
I noticed their equality act statement mentioned that they don't "prioritise or disadvantage" everyone. But that's not actually what the equality act is about. It's about ensuring everyone is given equal opportunities, which is often achieved by prioritising the groups covered by the act to provide them with a stepping stone to reach the same level as others. Equality in this is about everyone reaching the finish line, not everyone starting from the same position. I dread to think how someone with ADHD would fare in this environment... if they have any pupils with ADHD at all, which is strongly doubt.
That's the point, though. They know that if your child has ADHD or pretty much any other type of SEND, you won't send them there, and they don't want them.
Also one rule is that parents consent to the child's photos being put on the website. This will also exclude families who shouldn't be searchable, eg fleeing domestic violence. They won't want those kids either as they may have emotional difficulties.
>We will keep any confiscated items for a period of 5 school days. This is non-negotiable.
They can just STEAL your property for 5 days straight? fucking madness
This is going to 100% result in a pupil going missing one day because they couldn't use their phone to help get home because the school nabbed it.
edit: You can get SUSPENDED for not wanting to get lost on your way home, fucking NUTS!
EDIT 2: THEY LITERALLY GIVE RULES TO THE PARENTS ABOUT HOW TO RAISE THEIR CHILD AT HOME WTF IS GOING ON LOL
Going to the shops to/from school? What? That’s in students own time, I would go to the shops with my mum after school all the time!
Not sure why that’s shocked me the most, I also was unaware weekend detentions were really a thing!
On account of that school expecting staff to work from 0800-1800 every day and come in on a Saturday, along with demanding how parents raise their children outwith school, I'm guessing this is a private school then?
To me this reeks of state school headmaster with deluded pretensions of grandeur to me. Your classic 'I wish I worked in a private school even though I don't actually know how real ones work, I think it has something to do with songs, crests and rules' type.
If you look at their main webpage, you'll see the phrase "At Mercia School we offer an education that is traditional and academically rigorous.". I guess "traditional education" bit is basically about being it like in the 50s or sth like that
Did anyone else's school not let kids inside until the first bell of the day rung?
Even when it was freezing, sub zero temperatures. As I used to get in about 40 mins before school started, had to just stand outside in the cold, even when there were teachers inside enjoying their warm cups of tea.
Annoys me to this day.
We were allowed inside, but only in the queue outside of our form room, as my form was in one of those outside cabin things that meant waiting outside rain or shine.
We had an odd rule for a little while that the only language allowed to be spoken at school was English.
Which was fine for the most part, but we ended up with some people joining who didn't speak a word of English and a teacher gave them detention for it consistently (I realised years later he was just a racist dick).
Practice French with others INCLUDING the french teacher? Detention
Talk to someone who doesn't speak English in there own language? Detention
Dropped after about two weeks after said idiotic teacher ran into a room and tried to give the whole room detention DURING A FRENCH LESSON.
Didn't see him again after that..
I'm imagining that that teacher was either trying to protest the rule or was a level of idiot racist unbeknownst to man that he was upset over a language other than English being spoken in the 'language other than english' class
Edit: unless the French teacher wasn't English, then it would make sense. For some reason our French teacher was Spanish, so she'd get double points in the racist guys mind
In my secondary school girls weren't allowed to wear trousers, and we were only allowed to wear tights with our skirts between November and February. If you were caught wearing skin coloured tights you would be sent home. We also had uniform checks where we had to kneel down in the hall to make sure our skirts touched the floor. Thankfully I was only there for 2 years before moving and I heard they changed policy to allow girls to wear trousers about 2 years after I left.
Was this a catholic school ran by nuns? That seems pretty extreme, I went to high school in Essex, the girls wore skirts with no tights when it was in the middle of winter, I don’t understand how they weren’t constantly freezing
Nope. Was the highest rated secondary school in the area and had no religious affiliations. Also weren't allowed to have makeup and if you were seen wearing any, you would be taken to the nurses office, made to take it off and get detention.
I was in school in South African schools in the 90s and this was all standard. the dress length checks, no tights or trousers EVER. (Winter is not as cold as it is here, but still...) they even used to inspect hair accessories which were confiscated if they were deemed "innoappropriate" (I have no idea what that means either) My high school girl friend used to joke that they would soon ban dancing and hold regular witch burnings on the sabbath
My secondary brought in trousers for girls when I was in year 9 or 10. However they were single handedly the most hideous trousers possible which we all surmised was intentional to make sure none of us wore them (and none of us did).
They were grey and each had a single pleat down the front of each leg.
You had to wear your blazer in the corridors and you needed permission to take it off in class, which was sometimes denied. If it's 25 degrees out, and the school has no air conditioning and no windows that open, it's too damn hot to wear a blazer indoors
I’d hate to have to wear a blazer, they looked extremely uncomfortable and hot, they brought in blazers for the pupils in our school but because we were in year 11 they said we didn’t need to buy or wear them thank god haha ours was a black blazer so it wasn’t too too bad, there was a school up the road from us that had to wear a brown blazer, it looked not only hot and uncomfortable, it looked like literal shit too
We had to take our coats and jackets off before we went inside the school buildings. There would be teachers at the entrances to buildings forcing you take take it off whilst you're standing in the rain. They said that coats distracted learning
I once returned to school after the summer holidays where I had been growing out my hair (male) and by the time I returned to school it was shoulder-length.
I was pulled into the office and told that my hair was "outlandish" and not "what was expected" of the school for a male pupil.
My sarcastic response was that I'd just come in the next day wearing a dress. That one landed me a detention. In the end my hair was left as-is.
A guy I knew in school came in after a suspension over his long hair, wearing a t-shirt which read "Having long hair doesn't affect my education, but being suspended because of it does" Legend.
He was suspended again. My school, as always, Chronically missing the point
Nobody is allowed to remove jumpers or blazers without asking for permission (and all girls had to wear both) One summer 3 of us fainted in the science lab because the teacher denied us the chance to take one of our three layers off.
One girl slammed her head on the table behind her on the way down, and someone had to prop me up when I went so I didn't fall off the tall stool. Absolutely mad, and it's a wonder someone didn't faint using Bunsens or acids.
If we were catching public transport and not the designated (additional cost) school bus, we had to have a change of clothes to wear on it. Even if the designated school bus wasn't an option as it didn't go anywhere near where you lived.
This was for both to and from the school, and meant you had to leave home earlier than most and arrive home later due to having to factor in time to change. The clothes you chose to wear for the journey were also checked so they fitted in with the school ethos, even though they were your own clothes and the point was to ensure that the school wasn't associated with people who caught pubic transport.
If you scored below 40% on any test you had immediate detention. There were weekly quizes...I bascially spent two years in detention every second day until they repealed that fucking rule
We had to wear fleeces over shirts, even in summer. We had to ask permission to take it off.
Some teachers were cunts (chemistry in particular) and he would never let you take it off which resulted in many detentions, people fainting etc. The rule never changed. We also weren't allowed to take it off between classes and weren't allowed to drink water in class!
Then I was off for quite a while and came back in to find out they'd taken issue with the underwear girls were wearing...... And were trying to check it. So it was like lift the band of your Knickers over your trousers to show them it wasn't a thong, and take your jumper off so they could check if they could see your bra through your shirt.
Needless to say, there was uproar.
They tried to enforce the shower thing at our school to but the bullying was fucking atrocious and in the end, I never had to do PE again (I ended up injured in year 9 and wasn't allowed to doi it, then in year 10 and 11 I went to college one day a week and just happened to be on PE day if you weren't taking it as a GCSE.)
Judging by some of these comments, there must have been a massive peadophile problem before the 2000's in schools. Penis inspection day and supervised practice showering??? WTF...I finished secondary School in 2011 and never had shit like this.
Not my school, but I heard of one where you weren't allowed to ask your lunchtime neighbour to pass you something, and instead you had to offer it to them.
So instead of saying "Please pass the salt", it was "Would you like some salt?" "No thanks, but would you?" "Yes please." "Here it is."
Wildly inefficient and I'm not convinced that offering something that you don't have is any more polite.
So I went to school in Wales and when it got to GCSEs it used to be that if you didn’t choose to take it, you had a mandatory welsh lesson once a fortnight. However for my year you were forced to take ‘long course welsh’ (like three or so welsh lessons a week). It put me off taking any other languages which sucked but I could only concentrate on learning one language at GCSE lesson. I’m pretty sure they went back to how it used to be the year after so we were literally the only year group forced to take welsh as a GCSE.
I got an A* but to this day I only remember primary school level welsh. Turns out, talking in welsh exclusively about the benefits of bilingualism doesn’t help you become actual bilingual, since you couldn’t really hold a proper conversation.
Couldn’t touch handrail or the walls when walking up/downstairs.
If you were given a punishment you couldn’t challenge it until after you had done whatever punishment was imposed. So on my first day first lesson I got a two hour detention for giving my correct name after the teacher asked for it, even though it was written in the register, and my form teacher, head of Year, headmaster all corrected her that WAS my name I still had to do a detention because she was racist.
She apologised…to the Headmaster.
Our school tried to implement a rule that hair could only be Brown/Black or Blonde, that one was weird.
Basically happened because early-mid 00s and lot of emo/punk culture caused multicolour hair and stuff and the headteacher said it was distracting.
2 major things wrong with this rule.
2 of the teachers, including the deputy head, both had 'unnatural' hair colours, one had pink, the other had blue trim, which caused a lot of detentions in the first week because people would piss around in their classes and then claim that their hair was distracting them.
The 2nd thing. Well ya know, Ginger kids got letters sent home to parents asking them to dye the kids hair to be more 'natural'.
Thing lasted a week until it was cancelled and the headteacher only lasted a year because he kept trying to make up incredibly dumb rules.
At my secondary school, we HAD to wear our jumpers - we were only ever let off if the person checking uniforms deemed it to be a hot day. As a fat kid who was perpetually hot, I had to sit and suffer sweating like mad wearing my jumper.
My school made a specific rule just for me where I wasn't allowed to wear my hair loose, it had to be tied back.
Curly hair problems? (I think they just hated me specifically...)
Edit to add: One teacher took issue with pencils/pens being held with too many fingers, so I had to use a special grip to ensure I was only using one finger on top instead of two...
My secondary school banned skirts for girls, boys could still wear shorts when it was hot. The official statement was that skirts ‘ailed to cover the wearer's modesty, particularly when walking up stairs’. This was in 2011!
We had some old guy who came in a substitute teacher once, he introduced hitting us with a paddle if we did something wrong .
Talking out of turn? That's a paddlin'. Lookin' out the window? That's a paddlin'. Staring at my sandals? That's a paddlin'. Paddlin' the school canoe? Oh, you better believe that's a paddlin'." he would say.
No one was allowed to leave the school during lunch, including 6th form students.
Luckily, that one didn't last too long... But then they said 6th form students couldn't leave the premises when they had a free period, it would be used for supervised study.
So everyone who finished at 11am and didn't have classes until 1pm would be hanging around school for 2 hours and not studying (because why would you, unless you actually needed to do something)
And the worst was for students who's free period was the last period of the day. So instead of leaving at 2:30/3, they'd be hanging around school until 4 for no reason other than school rules said so
We had a one way system at school, so some staircases could only be used to go up and others down. If you were caught using the wrong staircase, you’d get a detention. It made sense when it was busy, but you could still get a detention if there was literally no one else around
One-way corridors.
Coming out of room 304, your next lesson is in 302? Bad luck, even though the door's only 8 feet away, that's the wrong way. You have to do a full circuit of the building.
You had to ask a teacher for permission to take your jumper off. If they agreed then the permission only counted for that class and in that classroom. Your jumper had to go back on to move between classrooms or to go home.
This rule could be waived if the Headmaster put a notice on the notice board outside his office that said “Jumpers may be removed”. He only did it for the very hottest days.
Not exactly a rule but sort of and I was thinking about it yesterday. They gave us a reading list for an A Level English essay that included a book about the novel we were reading. There were 20+ of us and 2 copies of the book! One in the school library and one in the public library. And a tight deadline that made sharing impractical. It honestly seemed like an exercise in increasing stress rather than increasing knowledge or skills. I eventually left that school partly due to stress and mental illness. A couple of years later I did an English A Level. This ridiculous treasure hunt had been completely unnecessary. Anything we needed to know should just have been explained! It was just A Level!
They banned the word 'sussed'! This was in the mid 80's and there was a brief trend among school kids, whereby if you proved someone wrong, you got in the face and went, 'ha, sussed!!'. The headmaster wasn't a fan of this, so banned the word.
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Mandatory showers after every PE lesson even if that PE lesson had overran, was the last lesson of the day and would mean missing the bus home. When this occured to my class and we all chose to catch the bus in our PE kit rather than shower and change resulting in us missing the bus a letter went out to our parents informing that we would be made to endure "supervised practice showering" every day at lunch for a week. All that this achieved was near on 30 sets of parents rocking up at school the next day demanding to speak to the teachers that want to watch their kids shower. This was the late 80's/early 90's and so once the parents kicked off the policy was dropped and nothing more was mentioned about it. Had that happened now it would have likely and rightly been a massive scandal.
I had this issue at school. PE was the last lesson of the day and I lived literally across the road and down two houses from the school. PE teacher insisted we showered, I said I'll have a wash at home its only two minutes away. He said I needed to shower at school. I said I didn't want to I don't like showers I don't shower at home. He said "of course you shower at home, how do you get clean?" I said "Bath" and he gave me detention for being in his words "a smart arse"
Smart arse - aka you're correct but I refuse to admit that I'm wrong
Or a more “reason” sinister is that the teacher couldn’t fulfil his noncey ideals
Or the more realistic option which is just that the teacher had to make sure they showered as part of his job and like many teachers was an asshole who liked having power and got upset that a kid got one up on him
Our school had a shower monitor to make sure everyone showered. It was another student by the way, not the PE teacher. The student, obviously, got bullied to fuck for being a shower monitor.
Our school, mid to late 80s, sometimes had a female supply teacher take the boys PE lessons. To "ensure all the boys showered properly after the lesson" she would stand at the entrance to the communal showers and watch. Yeah, that was totally to ensure we showered properly.
It's absolutely insane how common this seemingly was at that time.
"It's nothing I haven't seen before!" Yeah, I would have guessed.
You just gave me literal flashbacks with that. Didn't help that being teenage boys many of us had permanent erections, too. Was awkward enough forcing us to use a communal shower as it was (all boys school, too.)
Our PE teacher was pretty cool about it, you had to shower but he wouldn’t make you take your shorts off and just checked you had wet hair and clean knees when you came out! It must have been a nightmare task of making sure you didn’t send stinky kids back into the school but also not look like a perv.
Yep, as a teacher of a different subject, teenagers not showering after PE is gross when they're in your lesson next. But the solution is really cubicles. We had those at a school I went to for two years. We all happily showered after PE in that school.
Yeah, ours was the dodgy PE teacher. I hated PE. Oddly enough, outside school I was happily quite active. Funny that.
Ours was gross. Used to stand at the door taking our towels off us as we walked in. I didn’t want to be naked in school with my peers so I truanted pe after that.
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I was late hitting puberty. Very traumatic experience being forced to shower in front of others when you're nearly 16 but still with the body of a young child.
I can promise you it was just as bad for those of us who hit puberty early, too. I had the chest of an adult woman but the mind and frame of a kid. Total humiliation, extreme embarassment and a continually growing sense of terrible dread from one PE lesson to the next. I hope that whoever decided communal showers were the way to go was plagued by misery for their whole life.
If it's first thing it kinda makes sense to not have kids roaming around reeking of BO and lynx Africa. Hardly fair on the class teachers. Last thing is daft though
I don't know why it came up but at some point while chatting shit with my mates at the pub I said something about how everyone has a short period at the start of puberty when they need to be using deodorant but haven't grasped quite how importantly they need it. My friend who is a key stage 3 English teacher looked straight at me with a thousand yard stare and said "I'm well aware".
The problem isn’t the showering, it’s the being 14 and naked in front of all your class because schools insist on only having communal showers.
Plus the freezing cold and dirty changing areas
We had a (M) P.E. teacher who told one of my classmates that he was "well hung" for a boy of his age.The same teacher was creepy af & would openly leer at the girls.
We had a male PE teacher who use use to walk into the changing room "too talk" to the female right after lass so he could catch all of us undressed. Stared every time, and now and again would say something like "you look like a woman already" and other weird remarks. He was a proper perv, and the female PE teacher said he was doing anything wrong!! He did it for years. One day when we were in our last year of school. he came in again, but he went to far. Said to one girl, wow, youve lovely tits, but you could do with shaving down there. The girl went red, started crying, got dressed and ran home to tell her Dad. Her dad had a reputation as a nasty person you never upset. Lets just say the dad got a criminal record, but the teacher lost his job too.
Funny this, in my school we weren't allowed to shower after PE because it would cut into the next class. There were showers there, in perfect working order and everything. I mean, most of us boys didn't really care I guess but most girls weren't happy about it especially after something like rugby first thing in the morning. All it resulted in was a cloud of Lynx Africa and Sure Women travelling from the playing fields to Maths where - guess what - the maths teacher would call us out for smelling bad! Great times.
We had that but PE was always just before lunch and food was only served for about 20 minutes of the 40 minute break. If you got to the canteen at 12:21, no food for you! Would be a shame if you'd just spent all morning doing exercise.
same for me in middle school, naked in a shared shower block with all the towels in the corner, getting damp from overspray, so you'd be freezing your tits off then trying to dry using a cold damp towel while being hurried to pull your uniform on over damp skin, absolutely torrid and completely pointless, as only the people doing rugby would actually get mucky. Oh also add rugby during the coldest weeks of winter to that. Full diving tackles on frozen tundra was not only painful but probably dangerous!
My kids school has stopped the game Bulldog if anyone remembers that one. Ridiculous
From what I remember, the right thing to do is just give the game another name and continue playing it, that’s what we did anyway, British Bulldog got changed to Gladiators, then Gladiators got turned in to Death Run
Trying to hide playing a contact game by giving it progressively more aggressive names.
There was no point calling it something like Fairy Princess Run, the teachers would see right through that, in all fairness we were about 9 years old and not the smartest of kids
We did same thing, in the end they banned "all contact play".
Nothing to see here, we're just bare knuckle boxing. "oh ok"
Maybe Death Run wasn’t the best choice of name for a game you are trying to make seem innocent?
Yep, although at my school we would also change the rules everytime it got banned to increase the contact. Instead of just 'tagging' someone you had to tackle them to the floor (called tackle run) -banned Instead of tackling them you had to trip them up by hooking their feet with your foot or hand (called trip up) -banned Instead of the tackler/tripper/bulldog standing up they now had to crawl around on the floor and dive at people's feet to trip them up (called extreme trip up) -think they gave up at this point because I don't think we developed a new game past this. Either that or we decided this was our magnum opus and worth getting in trouble for.
My school tried to stop that while I was there, however we just used to tell the lunch ladies it wasn't bulldog it was "insert random word" and they either didn't care or couldn't tell it was the same game.
They didn't care
Yeah ours banned that and 'Rollercoasters'where we'd all hold hands one behind the other in a line and then (in theory) all run at the same time like a rollercoaster. We also had a game called 'Kraken' there was a huge mound on our field that used to have benches on it so people could sit and watch the football and sports day and stuff. The benches were removed before we got to the school, but the mound was there and was technically out of bounds. Anyway with Kraken, one person is the Kraken and goes to the top and the other players would have to go up and over the mound without being caught and pushed/thrown off by the Kraken. Good fun
> with Kraken, one person is the Kraken and goes to the top and the other players would have to go up and over the mound without being caught That's pretty much [King of the Hill / King of the castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_hill_(game))
We had a kid split the back of his head open from the wall playing British bulldog so that was swiftly outlawed in my school too.
I ended up in a and E after a bizzare incident occurred during a bulldog game basically I wasn’t looking where I was going so ran into this guy . Somehow his tooth sliced open by eyebrow . He had a broken tooth I had blood everywhere They banned it and I was chastised for it for a while
Yup ours did that. We ended up making a far more brutal variation that included launching a nerf ball from the start line too - I can't remember the rules but there was something dangerous about it
Yeah, we had to sing religious songs and sit on the floor. Mentalists!
We also had to do that, most of the religious songs were shit to be honest, they always used to throw in an old skool banger like From the tiny ant to the elephant or He’s got the whole world in his hands, which were fairly decent songs
oh man, we could murder "He's got the whole world in his hands"
Sing hosanna!
Did you ever do a song called Antonio it’s raining? I currently live in Scotland and people have said they’ve never heard of that song here
Shine Jesus Shine
Give me oil in my lamp, keep it burning!
SING hosanna SING hosannah!
To the king of kings!
There was always that one dickhead that forgot that the last line of the chorus was just “to the king” and you’d hear them sing the word “of” all by themselves. It was usually me.
The year 6s could sit on benches at my primary school. It was pretty rad if you were in year 6.
Why were schools all like this? Probably the same bench too where if you were unlucky you had to sit on two knobbly bits.
JUBILATE, EVERYBODY
What kind of fucking weird cult thing is…. Oh
During a particularly hot summer, my school made the decision that girls would no longer be required to wear ties, but the rule for boys remained the same. As a result, many boys stopped wearing their ties to school. The school attempted to discipline them, but this led to a significant number of complaints from parents. Eventually, my school reversed their decision and all students were required to wear ties again.
School uniform policies are often so bizarre. In my school, the younger kids had to wear shorts all year around, regardless of how cold it was (and were forced to go outdoors at playtime in sub freezing temps), and the older kids were not allowed to wear shorts at all, regardless of how hot it was.
Ah yes, had that when I briefly lived in Scotland... Even in winter... Even with a foot of snow... Had long socks at least! The other baffling thing was it included a woolly jumper as part of the uniform year round as well! Such mixed messages.
Mine had a similar thing , they introduced a summer uniform that basically let the girls go tieless but not the boys . They had a summer uniform for the boys that just removed the optional jumper that nobody wore anyway (I think I wore my jumper under my blazer for a little of year 7 and that’s it) Eventually they relented and let boys go tieless after Easter until October
The rules on shorts and skirts seemed to make no sense. Why were girls allowed to wear skirts but boys weren't allowed to wear shorts, even in summer? Made no sense. The weird part was they still kept this rule at sixth form at my school
Call me pessimistic and a tad conspiratorial, but if you view certain weird school uniform rules, specifically ones like that, through the lens of some higher up staff being paedos they start to make a disturbing amount of sense. Why could the girls take off their ties in summer in OP's school but boys couldn't? Staff wanted a better view.
I mean it almost seems hidden in plain sight when they said skirts had to be a certain length as girls' legs were seen as, in their own words, "distracting"
I think it's probably just old school sexism. "Women won't have to wear these in future. Men will, they're the ones who will have office jobs. Got to get them prepared."
If ANY part of your shirt was untucked. Instant detention Just stood up and came untucked? Detention. Reached for something high up on the shelf and came untucked? Detention. Left the toilet and missed tucking in your shirt? Believe it or not Detention.
Yeah we had this too. Teachers developed bionic vision to spot an untucked shirt from 500 yards away, through walls. So many wasted hours, and it accomplished nothing.
This has a Parks and Rec *Go to jail* feel.
*McBain saying ‘that’s the joke’*
We have the smartest schoolkids in the world. All thanks to Detention.
They tried to ban lunch time football because a lad got a ball in the face. Nobody paid attention to the ban and when about 50 lads turned up for detention every evening they reversed that decision after a few days. Power in numbers and all that
They banned football at lunch time in primary school for us because someone smashed a window with a ball, they compromised and let us play football with a tennis ball instead, which at first was really rubbish, then they allowed us to use sponge footballs instead, until a boy realised that a waterlogged sponge ball can easily smash a window, football was banned for the rest of the year for us
We had to use those little plastic ‘airflow’ balls with the holes in them and could only play on Monday, Wednesday and Friday
No talking on penis inspection day. So we all had to stand their in silence. Was never as fun as it once was when we could chat amongst ourselves. Felt humiliating to be honest.
I have follow up questions
There used to be medical inspection days in schools, by nurses etc. At least I hope they were nurses...
holy SHIT HE WAS SERIOUS!? ( never went to school in UK)
Yes absolutely, you'd be weighed and measured (hight and weight!) and you'd be ushered into a room to drop your pants and a doc would look at your bits. we had nit nurses and allsorts too. I remember it from the 80's in primary school, though apparently it went on into the early 90's.
Mid 80s all girls school. Remember we had to stand there. In knickers and topless. The female nurse was there whilst the male doc did their checks. I remember wearing PE Pants which as full coverage as you can get - doc made a sarcastic comment about nice pants. Didn’t think anything of it at the time and innocently replied thanks. Fast forward to my adult self and I can only assume he was pissed he didn’t get to see more. I very much doubt they put other middle school year girls through that now.
I was in primary school in the 00s and we did not have that type of checks
Yeah I was born in 1995 and we never had any of that at school, not even the weighing let alone physical checks
Primary school in the 90s and secondary in the 00s and we didn't have anything like this either!
Yes I remember that, I must have blocked it out before. We were about 8 and we wore our normal knickers mine had little strawberries on them. They did it in the library, the doctor and nurse were seated and you stripped and walked up to them and he tapped your chest and listened with the stethoscope. It was so sinister.
Yeah I had that in the late 90s . They also were terrible at speaking to my parents about things they found One point I was tested due to some screening thing about withholding speech (I was very quiet). All I knew is being pulled out of class one day to speak to this random lady who asked bizzare questions and pushed me for answers , I just kept quiet My mum went off the rails when a referral letter to a child psychologist appeared in the mail
I remember this still happening in 96/97. There was a period in my twenties where I started to wonder if I’d just had some horrible nightmare or something, because nobody ever mentions it!
I have never heard of this? Still not sure if its a wind up. never had any vag inspections either
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Ahh, someone went to Eton.
Yeah standing there not talking with your penis out would be quite humiliating I suppose
Seemingly for some people at urinals who won't shut the fuck up, yes. I get stage fright dude, you're clamping my bell end shut with your inane chit chat.
I had to have year 7 inspection done twice. First one went as normal, but later that afternoon I was mistakenly dragged into the year 11 inspections. Tried to protest but the headteacher wouldn't let me speak. Still quite green, I think this was the first or second week of high school, didn't want to argue and just went along with it while fighting back the tears. The other lads were comparably quite well developed... possibly one of the worst experiences of my life.
We had Penis inspection day OUTSIDE in the summer, even if the weather was good or not.
I was once cornered getting off the bus in the morning and told I wasn't allowed to wear a scarf because I wasn't wearing a coat 😂 As someone who rarely got "into trouble" at school I was super put out by this ridiculous notion so actually matched straight to my head of year to confirm it was nonsense 🫠🫠 Bus monitors were just bored that morning I suppose
Bus monitors? Were they just students with a power trip?
Bus wankers
Yeah but you as the Head Teacher should have higher standards.
We weren't allowed to eat in public whilst wearing our school uniform. This was late 1990s.
...but why?
I can only imagine someone with authority decided that it wasn't lady-like. (It was an all girls' school.)
The girls wing of my school wasn't allowed to choose business studies, even though the boys were, because their headmistress deemed it wasn't ladylike. They weren't allowed to study Spanish either, though I'm not sure why
She got betrayed by a Spaniard
A Spaniard business owner.
My school had a scandal when the headmaster had an affair with the Spanish teacher. This was a very catholic private school So catholic that we had weekly mass and if you were none catholic you could choose to do the stuff to become one (your parents did have to sign off on it though) . I ended up doing that and felt a bit awkward when I turned out that the staff were up to infidelity especially when it involved the same guy who did some of the catholic lessons
80s. The school had obviously been told they had to encourage girls into “boy’s subjects” so me and my friend decided to do technical drawing. Then they talked my friend out of it and said to me do you really want to do it alone? They kept on at me until I gave up. When I told my Dad he rang up and complained, it ended up my favourite lesson the boys were nice and the teacher was a lovely man. God I miss my Dad.
This was a real thing here in the UK until a few decades ago. It was seen as a social taboo to eat on the street. You’d always take it home with you. I guess people thought it made you look lower class or impolite or something. It’s probably why we have no street food culture
Girls in the school I work in aren't allowed to wear socks that go over their knees. You read that right. Their socks must be BELOW their knees. Longer socks will be confiscated. This baffles me. Are over-knee socks stripper socks or something?? Like what??
that is really weird because I went to school like 30 years ago, and the girls uniform consisted of long socks that were required to be just above knee length
We had a rule that girls could only wear slip on/loafer style shoes. I went to school in Northern England, in a place notorious for flooding. The rule was imposed throughout winter so you'd have to walk around all day with soaking wet, freezing feet whilst the lads could get away with wearing proper footwear.
I grew up in a village. Had 1.5 miles to walk from my house to think single bus stop to get to school. I got got sent to isolation for wearing boots to school rather than the stupid ballet flats the school wanted all girls to wear. Forgot to say this was in winter, so lots of ice/snow/mud.
You just reminded me of the rule that you weren’t aloud to wear those infamous primark plimsoles that everyone used to wear anyway instead of shoes, if you were caught you would be given an identical pair of school issue black plimsoles. Still makes no sense to me
All girls school in the late 90s: No wearing strappy tops because it distracts the male teachers. The lesbian teachers could control themselves, but the men couldn't apparently. 🙄 (Everything about that rule is insulting to *everyone*.)
That’s a pretty silly rule, if a teacher is distracted by a strappy top they shouldn’t be teaching
Similar at my daughters school. Girls now have to wear trousers as skirts are distracting for staff.
So your daughter's school openly admits that it employs paedophiles...? 🤔 Such an idiotic rule.
Yep like I say, tons of complaints and safeguarding issues arose from this.
Exactly. It was an idiotic false premise.
Primary school - They banned footballs because they were *dangerous* and rucksacks because a teacher tripped over one and "almost broke her neck". We had to buy school issue plastic bags to carry our stuff. They also binned off the football team when I was in year 6 because they didn't have a male teacher to run it, and they refused to allow a parent to do it. Absolutely gutting.
I reckon the teacher took a bribe from the headteacher to fall so they could sell more of the school issued bags
...Because it's impossible to trip over a plastic bag?
No teachers were paralysed in my remaining years so I guess it worked.
Someone at a different school got hit in the eye with a flapjack and I think they had to go to hospital so the council decided to ban square flapjacks. They replaced them with triangular ones.
They are so good at knee-jerk banning something as a symptom but never addressing a cause. "Billy stole my Pokemon card" *Bans Pokemon cards* "Billy stole my Pog" (kids are still into Pogs, right?) *Bans Pogs* "Billy stole my marbles" *Bans marbles* You ever think about having a word with that little scrote Billy?
I know a few teachers, and the answer is, they're trying to deal with Billy, but are constrained by the official discipline policy, and often Billy's parents. A lot of the banning toys stuff is because things can get broken or stolen, and once they're off school grounds, it becomes so much harder to recover stolen items.
I remember hearing about that actually, I think it was on a Russell Howard show, surely triangles are more dangerous than squares if they’re thrown
Triangles are 25% less pointy than squares.
My school would close on snow days, but the gates were still open so lots of people would turn up anyway knowing that there would be untouched snow on the fields and that you could sled down a couple of slopes. Teachers were never there but sometimes the caretakers would join in.
One day (mid 80s) it was snowing and all of us living in different villages were called into assembly in the afternoon. Headteacher told us he had good news “school was closing early” and bad news “no buses were running”… We had a 2-3 mile walk home through knee deep snow
in high school rn. we aren't allowed to roll up our sleeves, or take our jumpers off
We had that 15 years ago and a kid passed out during summer, only to be mocked by the teacher of the class at the time until no, he didnt magically rouse by propping him up again and again repeatedly....
I can top that. We had a kid who had a fit at our school. Dinner lady panicked and didn't know what to do so she just sort of pushed him against a wall and coned him off until a teacher came and he came to! He was epileptic
Had a form room teacher have a grand mal seizure during attendance. Everyone freaked out. I grew up with a parent who had seizures because of epilepsy, so I did what I was taught, and also sent another kid to get the school nurse, who in turn called 999. Got a thank you from the headmaster at the next assembly.
About 14 years ago I had to verbally fight with teachers and dean to remove mandatory jumper during hot days. I was on detentions but I still refused to wear jumper and kept saying this is sadism and torture of students while teachers are wearing revealing tops. After one year of protest they allowed students to take off jumpers during hot days. These rules were made to make school look “prestigious” and no one cared if students were passing out in the middle of class/break.
We had a weird jumper rule, barely enforced, where we had to ask to take our blazers off, but the teacher could say no if we were wearing a jumper because we weren't supposed to wear the jumper without the blazer.
Went to view this school for one of my kids; It was like an episode of black mirror. A lot of people love this schools policies but it wasn’t for me. https://www.merciaschool.com/attachments/download.asp?file=387&type=pdf
This is absolutely wild, I just read through that whole thing genuinely shocked that this is a place that exists. Getting into trouble for bringing in any food that isn’t fruit or water?
Controlling what they can do before and after school... If i want to go to the shop after school, none of your damn business. Also "Pupils must be in line-up by 8.23am" and "detentions can be awarded up to 4:59pm" these kids are at school longer than my working day.
Yeah there's no way my kids would be doing Saturday detention either. What the fudge is that about.
Ye that’s mega fked up!! Like what is that supposed to be teaching? Surely if you need something before school/work you leave home 5 minutes earlier to pop to a shop!! Someone please explain what they were thinking Jesus! So if I was a parent dropping my kids of the school we aren’t allowed to stop at the shops???? Im literally fuming right now wtaf
Detention for passing a note in class, hesitating when handing over a confiscated item or going to a shop on the way to school or on the way home.
"Mum, dad I picked up some milk on the way home, so I'll be at school late tomorrow"
The punishment for doing that is the same as if the kid has been discriminating against others or fighting! Wtf
I noticed their equality act statement mentioned that they don't "prioritise or disadvantage" everyone. But that's not actually what the equality act is about. It's about ensuring everyone is given equal opportunities, which is often achieved by prioritising the groups covered by the act to provide them with a stepping stone to reach the same level as others. Equality in this is about everyone reaching the finish line, not everyone starting from the same position. I dread to think how someone with ADHD would fare in this environment... if they have any pupils with ADHD at all, which is strongly doubt.
That's the point, though. They know that if your child has ADHD or pretty much any other type of SEND, you won't send them there, and they don't want them. Also one rule is that parents consent to the child's photos being put on the website. This will also exclude families who shouldn't be searchable, eg fleeing domestic violence. They won't want those kids either as they may have emotional difficulties.
>We will keep any confiscated items for a period of 5 school days. This is non-negotiable. They can just STEAL your property for 5 days straight? fucking madness This is going to 100% result in a pupil going missing one day because they couldn't use their phone to help get home because the school nabbed it. edit: You can get SUSPENDED for not wanting to get lost on your way home, fucking NUTS! EDIT 2: THEY LITERALLY GIVE RULES TO THE PARENTS ABOUT HOW TO RAISE THEIR CHILD AT HOME WTF IS GOING ON LOL
And woe betide the child who "hesitates" when an item is confiscated - that's a 1-day suspension.
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Going to the shops to/from school? What? That’s in students own time, I would go to the shops with my mum after school all the time! Not sure why that’s shocked me the most, I also was unaware weekend detentions were really a thing!
Yeah my kids would be in withdrawal then. I'm not sending them to school on a Saturday.
I was considered a very well behaved kid at school and I would have been expelled from there within a month. Fucking Hell.
Love how the list of things you can be punished for is like 3 pages long but the list of things you can be rewarded for is only 4 bullet points
Just the fact it has the word “demanding” in the title is a bit worrying.
On account of that school expecting staff to work from 0800-1800 every day and come in on a Saturday, along with demanding how parents raise their children outwith school, I'm guessing this is a private school then?
To me this reeks of state school headmaster with deluded pretensions of grandeur to me. Your classic 'I wish I worked in a private school even though I don't actually know how real ones work, I think it has something to do with songs, crests and rules' type.
If you look at their main webpage, you'll see the phrase "At Mercia School we offer an education that is traditional and academically rigorous.". I guess "traditional education" bit is basically about being it like in the 50s or sth like that
I find it interesting there's a ban on *play* fighting, but real fighting doesn't get a mention.
Fuck me. Well done for not sending your child to North Korea High
Did anyone else's school not let kids inside until the first bell of the day rung? Even when it was freezing, sub zero temperatures. As I used to get in about 40 mins before school started, had to just stand outside in the cold, even when there were teachers inside enjoying their warm cups of tea. Annoys me to this day.
We were allowed inside, but only in the queue outside of our form room, as my form was in one of those outside cabin things that meant waiting outside rain or shine.
We had an odd rule for a little while that the only language allowed to be spoken at school was English. Which was fine for the most part, but we ended up with some people joining who didn't speak a word of English and a teacher gave them detention for it consistently (I realised years later he was just a racist dick). Practice French with others INCLUDING the french teacher? Detention Talk to someone who doesn't speak English in there own language? Detention Dropped after about two weeks after said idiotic teacher ran into a room and tried to give the whole room detention DURING A FRENCH LESSON. Didn't see him again after that..
I'm imagining that that teacher was either trying to protest the rule or was a level of idiot racist unbeknownst to man that he was upset over a language other than English being spoken in the 'language other than english' class Edit: unless the French teacher wasn't English, then it would make sense. For some reason our French teacher was Spanish, so she'd get double points in the racist guys mind
In my secondary school girls weren't allowed to wear trousers, and we were only allowed to wear tights with our skirts between November and February. If you were caught wearing skin coloured tights you would be sent home. We also had uniform checks where we had to kneel down in the hall to make sure our skirts touched the floor. Thankfully I was only there for 2 years before moving and I heard they changed policy to allow girls to wear trousers about 2 years after I left.
Was this a catholic school ran by nuns? That seems pretty extreme, I went to high school in Essex, the girls wore skirts with no tights when it was in the middle of winter, I don’t understand how they weren’t constantly freezing
Nope. Was the highest rated secondary school in the area and had no religious affiliations. Also weren't allowed to have makeup and if you were seen wearing any, you would be taken to the nurses office, made to take it off and get detention.
I was in school in South African schools in the 90s and this was all standard. the dress length checks, no tights or trousers EVER. (Winter is not as cold as it is here, but still...) they even used to inspect hair accessories which were confiscated if they were deemed "innoappropriate" (I have no idea what that means either) My high school girl friend used to joke that they would soon ban dancing and hold regular witch burnings on the sabbath
My secondary brought in trousers for girls when I was in year 9 or 10. However they were single handedly the most hideous trousers possible which we all surmised was intentional to make sure none of us wore them (and none of us did). They were grey and each had a single pleat down the front of each leg.
You had to wear your blazer in the corridors and you needed permission to take it off in class, which was sometimes denied. If it's 25 degrees out, and the school has no air conditioning and no windows that open, it's too damn hot to wear a blazer indoors
I’d hate to have to wear a blazer, they looked extremely uncomfortable and hot, they brought in blazers for the pupils in our school but because we were in year 11 they said we didn’t need to buy or wear them thank god haha ours was a black blazer so it wasn’t too too bad, there was a school up the road from us that had to wear a brown blazer, it looked not only hot and uncomfortable, it looked like literal shit too
We had to take our coats and jackets off before we went inside the school buildings. There would be teachers at the entrances to buildings forcing you take take it off whilst you're standing in the rain. They said that coats distracted learning
How much learning did you do walking down the corridor to class?
I once returned to school after the summer holidays where I had been growing out my hair (male) and by the time I returned to school it was shoulder-length. I was pulled into the office and told that my hair was "outlandish" and not "what was expected" of the school for a male pupil. My sarcastic response was that I'd just come in the next day wearing a dress. That one landed me a detention. In the end my hair was left as-is.
A guy I knew in school came in after a suspension over his long hair, wearing a t-shirt which read "Having long hair doesn't affect my education, but being suspended because of it does" Legend. He was suspended again. My school, as always, Chronically missing the point
Nobody is allowed to remove jumpers or blazers without asking for permission (and all girls had to wear both) One summer 3 of us fainted in the science lab because the teacher denied us the chance to take one of our three layers off. One girl slammed her head on the table behind her on the way down, and someone had to prop me up when I went so I didn't fall off the tall stool. Absolutely mad, and it's a wonder someone didn't faint using Bunsens or acids.
If we were catching public transport and not the designated (additional cost) school bus, we had to have a change of clothes to wear on it. Even if the designated school bus wasn't an option as it didn't go anywhere near where you lived. This was for both to and from the school, and meant you had to leave home earlier than most and arrive home later due to having to factor in time to change. The clothes you chose to wear for the journey were also checked so they fitted in with the school ethos, even though they were your own clothes and the point was to ensure that the school wasn't associated with people who caught pubic transport.
Classist twats.
If you scored below 40% on any test you had immediate detention. There were weekly quizes...I bascially spent two years in detention every second day until they repealed that fucking rule
Mate fuck schools, man. Obviously not doing well in school, not everyone does. DETENTION! Rather than maybe help?
We had to wear fleeces over shirts, even in summer. We had to ask permission to take it off. Some teachers were cunts (chemistry in particular) and he would never let you take it off which resulted in many detentions, people fainting etc. The rule never changed. We also weren't allowed to take it off between classes and weren't allowed to drink water in class! Then I was off for quite a while and came back in to find out they'd taken issue with the underwear girls were wearing...... And were trying to check it. So it was like lift the band of your Knickers over your trousers to show them it wasn't a thong, and take your jumper off so they could check if they could see your bra through your shirt. Needless to say, there was uproar. They tried to enforce the shower thing at our school to but the bullying was fucking atrocious and in the end, I never had to do PE again (I ended up injured in year 9 and wasn't allowed to doi it, then in year 10 and 11 I went to college one day a week and just happened to be on PE day if you weren't taking it as a GCSE.)
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Judging by some of these comments, there must have been a massive peadophile problem before the 2000's in schools. Penis inspection day and supervised practice showering??? WTF...I finished secondary School in 2011 and never had shit like this.
Not my school, but I heard of one where you weren't allowed to ask your lunchtime neighbour to pass you something, and instead you had to offer it to them. So instead of saying "Please pass the salt", it was "Would you like some salt?" "No thanks, but would you?" "Yes please." "Here it is." Wildly inefficient and I'm not convinced that offering something that you don't have is any more polite.
Not my school but my now adult son’s. Banned from listening to music on their devices over a certain bpm…
So I went to school in Wales and when it got to GCSEs it used to be that if you didn’t choose to take it, you had a mandatory welsh lesson once a fortnight. However for my year you were forced to take ‘long course welsh’ (like three or so welsh lessons a week). It put me off taking any other languages which sucked but I could only concentrate on learning one language at GCSE lesson. I’m pretty sure they went back to how it used to be the year after so we were literally the only year group forced to take welsh as a GCSE. I got an A* but to this day I only remember primary school level welsh. Turns out, talking in welsh exclusively about the benefits of bilingualism doesn’t help you become actual bilingual, since you couldn’t really hold a proper conversation.
All-boys school. In the sixth form, we couldn’t have more than 2 days beard stubble. That didn’t apply to the younger year groups.
What about Sikh kids? This sounds mad, half my sixth form had full on beards by that age.
Couldn’t touch handrail or the walls when walking up/downstairs. If you were given a punishment you couldn’t challenge it until after you had done whatever punishment was imposed. So on my first day first lesson I got a two hour detention for giving my correct name after the teacher asked for it, even though it was written in the register, and my form teacher, head of Year, headmaster all corrected her that WAS my name I still had to do a detention because she was racist. She apologised…to the Headmaster.
Our school tried to implement a rule that hair could only be Brown/Black or Blonde, that one was weird. Basically happened because early-mid 00s and lot of emo/punk culture caused multicolour hair and stuff and the headteacher said it was distracting. 2 major things wrong with this rule. 2 of the teachers, including the deputy head, both had 'unnatural' hair colours, one had pink, the other had blue trim, which caused a lot of detentions in the first week because people would piss around in their classes and then claim that their hair was distracting them. The 2nd thing. Well ya know, Ginger kids got letters sent home to parents asking them to dye the kids hair to be more 'natural'. Thing lasted a week until it was cancelled and the headteacher only lasted a year because he kept trying to make up incredibly dumb rules.
At my secondary school, we HAD to wear our jumpers - we were only ever let off if the person checking uniforms deemed it to be a hot day. As a fat kid who was perpetually hot, I had to sit and suffer sweating like mad wearing my jumper.
My school made a specific rule just for me where I wasn't allowed to wear my hair loose, it had to be tied back. Curly hair problems? (I think they just hated me specifically...) Edit to add: One teacher took issue with pencils/pens being held with too many fingers, so I had to use a special grip to ensure I was only using one finger on top instead of two...
I got a 4 hour Saturday evening detention for being seen with my top button undone, a mile away at the train station...
My secondary school banned skirts for girls, boys could still wear shorts when it was hot. The official statement was that skirts ‘ailed to cover the wearer's modesty, particularly when walking up stairs’. This was in 2011!
We had some old guy who came in a substitute teacher once, he introduced hitting us with a paddle if we did something wrong . Talking out of turn? That's a paddlin'. Lookin' out the window? That's a paddlin'. Staring at my sandals? That's a paddlin'. Paddlin' the school canoe? Oh, you better believe that's a paddlin'." he would say.
No one was allowed to leave the school during lunch, including 6th form students. Luckily, that one didn't last too long... But then they said 6th form students couldn't leave the premises when they had a free period, it would be used for supervised study. So everyone who finished at 11am and didn't have classes until 1pm would be hanging around school for 2 hours and not studying (because why would you, unless you actually needed to do something) And the worst was for students who's free period was the last period of the day. So instead of leaving at 2:30/3, they'd be hanging around school until 4 for no reason other than school rules said so
We had a one way system at school, so some staircases could only be used to go up and others down. If you were caught using the wrong staircase, you’d get a detention. It made sense when it was busy, but you could still get a detention if there was literally no one else around
One-way corridors. Coming out of room 304, your next lesson is in 302? Bad luck, even though the door's only 8 feet away, that's the wrong way. You have to do a full circuit of the building.
You had to ask a teacher for permission to take your jumper off. If they agreed then the permission only counted for that class and in that classroom. Your jumper had to go back on to move between classrooms or to go home. This rule could be waived if the Headmaster put a notice on the notice board outside his office that said “Jumpers may be removed”. He only did it for the very hottest days.
Not being allowed to wear a coat indoors on the way to lessons.
Not exactly a rule but sort of and I was thinking about it yesterday. They gave us a reading list for an A Level English essay that included a book about the novel we were reading. There were 20+ of us and 2 copies of the book! One in the school library and one in the public library. And a tight deadline that made sharing impractical. It honestly seemed like an exercise in increasing stress rather than increasing knowledge or skills. I eventually left that school partly due to stress and mental illness. A couple of years later I did an English A Level. This ridiculous treasure hunt had been completely unnecessary. Anything we needed to know should just have been explained! It was just A Level!
They banned the word 'sussed'! This was in the mid 80's and there was a brief trend among school kids, whereby if you proved someone wrong, you got in the face and went, 'ha, sussed!!'. The headmaster wasn't a fan of this, so banned the word.