1. Scratchy gym knickers made out of the most synthetic of fabrics were regulation. If you were lucky, your school uniform dictated navy or black – for the less fortunate out there it was bottle green or, god forbid, red - which didn’t do anyone any style favours! These were worn for cross country, which in itself was a form of teenage torture – topped with probably the most shocking experience for any 13-year-old girl – communal showers! 2. If you did French or German at school, you would have used the room called the Language Lab. It housed enormous reel-to-reel tape recorders that looked like Enigma machines and were just as difficult to understand. You’d also probably be using the textbook Beiberswald, featuring Herr and Frau Fiedler. (Well, you would if you were doing German – in French there was an equivalent family with a dog called Nero!) 3. Everyone – even 15-year-old boys – had to do Country Dancing. Was there a more excruciating moment than the bit when your teacher said: ‘OK, everyone find a partner’? And the scrum to ‘bag’ Susan Taylor was like being in John Lewis on Black Friday. If you WEREN’T Susan Taylor, this could be a very depressing 5 minutes ending with possibly the smelliest boy in your class being your partner. Or worse, they simply ran out of boys and you had to be partnered with another girl. 4. Swimming lessons involved a coach ride miles away to the local pool where you all spent ages messing around on the high diving board. This was a potentially lethal game with little thought for health and safety, as none of you were Tom Daley and instead simply pushed each other off a platform 200m in the air. Someone always had to wear a verucca sock. 5. You walked to get there. There were none of these 4x4 car-park-pile-ups you see these days at schools. Rain or shine, your mum kicked you out of the door at 8am to walk to school. You liked it, though, as it was an excuse to meet your mates, stop off at the newsagents for a 10p mix-up and sometimes a Slush Puppie on the way home. 6. Girls all wanted to wear over-the-knee socks. Your mum didn't like them, and she’d have liked them even less if she saw how you accessorised them by rolling your skirt over on its waistband so the hem finished a full 5 inches above the socks. This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. 7. You had a ’Forever Friends’ pencil tin. It featured one or two of those irritating bears that were EVERYWHERE in the 80s. In it, you kept your Forever Friends pencils, pencil sharpner and rubber, plus a note from that boy you fancied that he passed you in Double Chemistry!8. The boys would get into physical fights in the playground. Everyone else would stand around in a circle shouting ‘scrap, scrap, scrap’. A teacher would eventually break them up with the weary knowledge that two more boys would do exactly the same thing the next day. And the next. 9. School discos were the highlight of your calendar year. You’d be in an V-back dress or maybe a ra-ra. The boy you liked would possibly be wearing a leather tie with piano keys on it, and you all waited for Phil Collins to come on so you could use it as excuse to slow dance. The lights went on at around 8pm, but it felt like you’d been at an all-night-rave! 10. Bike sheds were not, repeat, NOT for housing bikes. Not even remotely.
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by Mark Nobes, chief editor We all like to look back at the days we spent at primary and secondary school from time to time, although some of the memories would be better erased from of our brains forever! On this page, I will ramble on about any memory from the 70s and 80s school life that suddenly pops up in my head, and knowing that we all had very different experiences, I hope that you will be able to relate to a few of them, at least. The Teachers There are so many memories of teachers lurking in my brain (good and bad!) that I'm finding it hard to know where to start. To get the ball rolling, I am now thinking back to my time at my local comprehensive school. The first image that has popped up is one of the trendy, liberal vegetarian French teacher who wore shoulder-length hair which rested on his dark green velvet jacket. He also drove an eco-friendly Citroen 2CV and was one of many "new wave" younger teachers who were offering a new style of teaching. At every given opportunity, he would slot in sentences about buddhism, John Lennon and Jean Michel Jarre during our French lesson. His lessons were certainly unique, and he would also reward us with sweets for being good after each lesson. On one occasion, we even played Boules in the playing fields. The older teachers were reluctant to use the newer teaching methods which were making their presence felt during the 80s. They refused to move out of the 70s, brylcreeming their hair and wearing 70s style sideburns and large-collared shirts. They would also call you by your surname in a patronising manor. I'm pretty certain that I had a much nicer experience with the younger teachers and found their teaching methods a whole lot more engaging, allowing me to achieve better exam results as a result. Of course, there were exceptions, but overall this was my experience, at least.
School Dinners Nobody can reminisce about their school days without mentioning the dinners. Many kids hated them, of course, but I have some fond memories of the meals served-up at primary school during the 70s. My favourite dish was chicken fricassee which came with a gorgeously crispy, over-fried triangle of white bread. There was no choice of menu in those days and you simply ate what you were given. Fortunately, the school cooks quickly learned that I hated carrots and rhubarb and used to leave them off my plate, although their actions did come with a warning; "Shush! Don't say a word to the teachers." Ice cream was always served up once a week for pudding, and there was great excitement when the cooks started to unravel the hundreds of rolls of white ice cream wrapped in what looked like tracing paper. They would serve it with delicious chocolate custard which caused the ice cream to quickly melt into it. The contrasting hot and cold temperatures would leave a wonderful sensation in your mouth. Other delights included spotted dick and apple sponge, both of which came with a generous serving of vanilla custard. However, my favourite pud was chocolate sponge with pink custard - scrumptious! Unfortunately, I had a very different experience with school dinners at secondary school. If you didn't join the queue early then you would have no choice but to eat the cold left-overs that no one else wanted. I didn't really look forward to the prospect of over-boiled broccoli covered in cold baked beans, so I decided to start taking a packed lunch instead. A small group of us used to congregate in "the sandwich hall" which was actually the old, out-of-use school canteen. My favourite sandwich filling was cheese and coleslaw, although my Mum used to try and add a different filling each day. These included cheese spread, sandwich spread or anything she could find that could be easily spread onto a few slices of Mother's Pride. Sometimes there was corned beef or Spam which actually tasted half decent with some pickle. By the end of the week, my Mum was running out of ideas and it always seemed to be a simple jam or lemon curd sandwich on a Friday. To accompany my sandwiches there would often be some kind of rectangular, chocolate-covered biscuit such as a Penguin or United bar, with a packet of crisps. My parents were often hard-up, so Snaps were a popular choice because they cost just 3p, and I was particularly fond of tomato flavour. Sometimes, there was a Tip-Top drink which was like a chemical-laden orange squash that came in a small, crushable plastic carton. I was really beginning to miss my primary school days when we used to receive a free mini bottle of milk with a straw. Occasionally, I would find a piece of fruit in my Adidas school bag, although if it was a banana, somehow, I always managed to forget to eat it. Inevitably, a disgusting odour would fill the house every Sunday evening. After frantically searching for the source of the smell, my Mum would discover the banana rotting away in the bottom of my bag. My packed lunch became slightly more exciting in February. There would be an additional delight such as a bourbon or custard cream, or one of those round, two-layered shortbread biscuits with raspberry jam in the centre which looked like a posh version of a jammy dodger. Why february? Well, these were the last remaining biscuits in the Rover tin which my gran had bought us for Christmas day. I also remember discovering a slice of Christmas cake in my box just before we broke up for the Easter holidays. It was wrapped in tin foil, so I could sneakily break off small pieces from it to avoid the embarrassment of telling anyone what I was actually eating!  Remember drinking R.White's lemonade? The Tuck Shop About halfway though my time at comprehensive school, there was an announcement in the photocopied school magazine that a small group of sixth formers were volunteering to start a tuck shop. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and on its opening day most of the school decided to join the queue at the same time, causing the head teacher to almost have a heart attack! However, there were many disappointed faces when we actually saw the paltry choice that was on offer - mini cookies, iced gems and a small selection of Golden Wonder crisps, and you could choose any flavour as long as it was cheese and onion. The drinks selection included a few stacks of cans such as Panda Pops and Top Deck shandy. As time went on, the tuck shop became more well-stocked, with luxurious items such as pickled onion Space Raiders and BIG D salted peanuts adorning the once half-empty shelves. Thinking back to primary school again, I remember one day when my best friend "sneaked in" a couple og bottles of ginger beer and we hid in the toilets to drink them. We truly believed we were consuming an alcoholic beverage and would be severely punished if we were caught. Looking back, I'd imagine that our head teacher would simply have found the whole thing highly amusing had he caught us. Punishment Well, kids have got it pretty easy these days haven't they? Here I'm tempted to use the old cliche "when I was a lad..." because things really were different several decades ago. "Stand in the corner with your hands on your head facing the wall" was a typical punishment for disrupting the class. This one may still be as relevant today, but there were several forms of punishment for bad behaviour that certainly have since been banned, one of which included a wrap across the knuckles with a ruler. The other was the cane, although, as far as I am aware this was never used at either of my school's and was merely used as just a deterrent. Perhaps, the most popular choice (with the teachers!) was 100 lines. During the school break you would occasionally find yourself repeatedly writing "I must not throw paper aeroplanes across the classroom as it could severely injure someone" for what seemed an eternity, on several pieces of lined paper that the teacher had given you. When you handed them in, the teacher would screw them up into a tight ball and simply throw them into the bin. All your hard work was destroyed in an instant, but that was the idea, of course! Anyone not paying attention in class would often find a piece of chalk flying towards them and clipping their ear, and a long session of double-maths would result in the teacher running out of chalk. If that didn't work then you would find the blackboard duster/eraser landing on your desk, hopefully missing your head! I remember one instance at primary school where most of the boys in the class (including myself) were being very disruptive. The teacher became absolutely furious and decided to send all of the boys into the playground. She then asked the girls to stand in a line outside and made all the boys march around the playground and also up and down the corridors as the girls watched on, most of them were trying to hide their giggles by placing their hands over their mouths. This was humiliation at its finest, but it really did the trick! I suspect that if any teacher tried this today they would, no doubt, be suspended. I really enjoyed these lessons because they were an opportunity to express my artistic side, although woodwork really wasn't my forté. Nonetheless, every week I would waste a couple of hours working on utterly useless items for use around the home. I remember proudly presenting my parents with a wooden stand for the kettle. My Mum reluctantly took the unusual-looking, hexagon-shaped object from my hand with a puzzled look on her face and replied "Oh lovely, that will be really useful". I also managed to construct a rather unstable-looking spice rack, and a pencil case with a "sliding" lid, both of which were pretty much unusable, which brings me on to the next subject...
Everyone had a pencil case of some sort, and mine contained all manner of things that were hardly ever used. There was a 180 degree protractor, a compass, and a triangular ruler thingymajig (called a set square, apparently) which rarely saw light of day. The shatterproof ruler was kept separately in my bag as it wouldn't fit into the pencil case. It's main use was bending it over the edge of the desk to flick rolled-up pieces of paper at the girls with. I remember actually deciding to use the ruler on one occasion for drawing lines. This was in an art lesson which turned out to be a big mistake. The art teacher started shouting at me and told me that I should be drawing lines freehand. I was left wondering just when can I use my ruler? Remember those combi erasers (we just called them "rubbers") which had a grey and a white end? The softer, white end was for rubbing out pencil, and the rough, grey end was, supposedly, for ink. However, when I tried to use the rough end it used to simply rub a hole into the page of my exercise book, much to the amusement of my friends. The Industrial Pencil Sharpener These were just called "games" at my school which was quite confusing as there often weren't any games, just a torturous exercise routine. And there was I thinking that we may be able to spend a couple of hours on the school's ZX81 playing 3D Monster Maze. One activity I really hated was the dreaded cross-country run. Unfortunately, my secondary school just happened to have one of the toughest courses in the country. I remember that on one occasion someone discovered a shortcut through a gap in the hedge near the start of the course, and a small group of us decided to take the short run across a field which led us to near the other end of the course. We hid behind some trees for about half an hour and amused ourselves by telling each other dirty jokes. Eventually, the first cluster of sweaty, red-faced runners passed us on the nearby pathway, which is when we decided to jump back onto the course and run the 50 yards to the finish.At primary school "games" took place in the school hall. The main activity involved balancing and walking along the long and narrow wooden benches which we simply turned upside-down. We would also throw soft, multi-coloured balls at each other and spin hula hoops around our waists. On sunnier days we would venture outside for a game of rounders.I could probably ramble on forever more about the many memories from my school days. But I have selected those that were more prominent in my memory and I hope you enjoyed reading about them. I believe they were some of the best years of my life, although, at the time it didn't always feel like it. If I had to choose between adulthood and childhood then the latter would most definitely be my choice. |
What was Education like in the 1980s UK
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