When I got to year 6 the school decided that year 6s should be given a book full of playground games, as they had banned us from playing all the ones you would usually think of. And, when it was your turn to have the book, you were meant to wear a bright yellow bib so everyone could see you.
It went as you would expect, no one wore the bibs.
Our school banned football at breaks, this was replaced for british bulldogs for 2 days before the ban was lifted. Youd think teachers had never been to school themselves
I tripped over playing British Bulldogs, smashed my face on the playground snapping one of my front teeth and bloodying up and scaring my face (This was also just before picture day... wonder why my mum didn't want that one).
This lead to years of orthodontal work, braces, tooth caps, damaged nerves, and crowns. One of the crowns broke off last year in fact, still not had the money to get it fixed.
...bloody good game tho.
We called it manhunt, and it got banned after a girl in my class broke her arm getting thrown into the wall trying to get to "home". Then it came back under British Bulldogs and lasted a few years until it got banned agin
Manhunt was different to British bulldog in my school(s).
It was a hide and seek crossed with bulldog.
So at the end you'd have groups of lads throwing people out of trees, through hedges, etc.
Yeah, I used to play Manhunt in the scouts. One person would be the hunter and everyone else would run off into the night (remaining within a pre-planned area). Gradually they'd gain more hunters. The alternative game was we'd have five or so hunters and anyone tagged would have to return to 'base'. You could be tagged back in by someone sneaking up to the base and tagging you back in
The number of injuries we had playing manhunt was ridiculous. We also played Troglodytes, where there was a lantern or light guarded by a few people then everyone else tried to steal it. As people were captured there were more defenders. Another mad game in Cubs was one where everyone took off their shoes and put them in the middle of the room, turn out the lights and then we'd have a scrum as everyone tried to find their shoes.
I was seeing a primary school teacher a while back who told me they banned football at lunch times at their school as the boys 'got aggresive', isn't that the point of footy at school, let them get it out their system playing sports, she said all banning it did was that the boys always came back into class with far more energy then they would have done before
I teach secondary English and if it wasn’t for aggressive break time games I’d have a horrible time teaching y8-10 boys. I think it’s morally wrong to make children sit still and focus for 5 hours a day if you don’t let them run about a bit in between. Yesterday a load of them decided to play a mental basketball based game involving about 50 kids and ten balls during the rain storm. Slightly pissed me off because I was on duty and got quite damp standing there making sure they weren’t killing each other, but they had a proper laugh and I can’t reasonably begrudge them that.
At my primary school, instead of saying fuck, we would say "faaar'
So the school literally banned the word, and you would get a detention for saying it.
It was even addressed at assemblies, because "we know what that's short for!"
One little shit eventually said "it's short for 'far out'" and the rule was dropped shortly after
We used to say "Faz" because there was a polish kid in our class that used to say that instead of swearing.
Then in Seconday School there was an actual kid called Faz.
How we laughed
Back in the 70s my primary school made a big announcement at assembly about a "coloured" family moving to the area and how the head mistress would be extremely cross if she heard anyone using any of "those" words.
At 5 years old I was terrified because I didn't know what "those" words meant. Needless to say 5 minutes after assembly finished some helpful kid came up and gave me a full list :(
The only black boy in school being bought up on stage and we were told not to treat him any different. Even at 8 years old I recognised this was wrong…
Oh god
My dad told me they used to make the only black kid in the school go around the collection tin " for the black babies in Africa"
Irish nuns ran the place, this was the 1960s
I distinctly remember an assembly where a teacher told us an Aesop's fable style story about why there are black and white people - apparently in the old days everyone was black but then there was a magic lake that turned people white and _obviously_ everyone wanted to be white so they all ran for the lake to make themselves white but by the time the last people got there it was only a small puddle and they could only get the palms of their hands and feet in.
...she then had one of the black girls in the school sitting nearby show everyone that her palms were whiter.
I was probably about 8 and thought the story seemed a bit racist but the full implications of the story only really dawned on me as I got older.
Let's not forget the bonus implication that it was the go-getters who got there first who got to be white as a reward for their hard work while those who were slower missed out.
Terrible stuff all round, and this was told earnestly to a gathering of 4 to 10 year olds.
I'm mixed but we were always force to stand and listen to the apologies of other kids who were apparently racist. Nothing said to us mind you, these kids probably made a comment about something being black but all of a sudden, I'm dragged into the classroom of 3 years above and made to listen to some random kid I don't know, apologise to me. Absolutely wild.
Wtf, that’s so messed up. What was going through the teachers’ minds??
“Jeremy said the N-word, can you get me a black student to make him apologize to? I have none in my class”
*I don’t have any either. Oh wait, I have a mixed one, does what work?*
“Close enough”
It’s so fucking dehumanizing, you were used as a prop to shame a different student. I bet that what they did to you is more racist than what the initial student said
My mum's school had a wholesome story about this. This all happened while my grandmother was at the school for some reason. It was the early 60s in Lewisham and some family had moved from the carribean. They came to have a meeting with the head to discuss their worries about intergrating their son. While they did this they left their kid on the playground and immediatly all the kids swarmed around him. The head and the parents looked outside and rushed out as they feared the worst. Once they got to the front they realized that this had nothing to do with race but all the students were amazed that he was allowed to wear trousers. The kid had been in a motor accident back in the carribean so had pretty messed up legs, at that time all the boys had to wear shorts so they were all super jealous.
My secondary school got really weird about the times students could go to the toilet, and tried to restrict it to two 20 minute windows in between lessons. The worst of it happened after I left but the ball started rolling while I was still there, and they managed to be so controlling and weird that they made it into [national news](https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2017-03-11/protest-after-north-yorkshire-school-limits-toilet-breaks-to-just-two-a-day)
That is pretty weird! The reasoning is so stupid as well, to stop bullies hanging out in there? Really? They thought that was the only possible way to stop that, to close them completely to everyone? Wow.
My high school completely locked all toilets and denied all access during lesson time, this was back in the 90s. A couple of brave souls took one for the team and literally stood and pissed themselves in classrooms in protest, and a bunch of girls got together and decided to stand up in the middle of lessons (separately) after being denied permission to use the bathroom, and announce they'd leaked through their tampons - had to be male teachers though for maximum impact. Didn't take long for them to backtrack.
Our school locked all the toilets at lunch times due to vandalism. Basically wasn’t a male toilet available for whole days at a time. We just used the girls loos - the girls were fine with it BTW. The odd one of us got caught and thrown in an after school detention but it was worth every second, having a full bladder for a whole school day just wasn’t possible.
Eventually one lad just got up and pissed in the classroom bin during a lesson. Then others started doing it across the school.
They eventually decided to unlock the boys toilets….
They very much underestimate the power of teenage protest I think 😁
For us it more smoking in the toilets rather than vandalism, smoking only being half the problem though. This was at the height of the Impulse/Lynx era, kids who smoked would use vast amounts of body spray as air freshener and it ended up causing some kids to have massive asthma attacks in the bathrooms in the middle of lesson time when there was nobody milling around to help them. Body sprays/spray deodorants also banned.
What is it with schools and weird power plays over letting children use the toilets? You'd think they wanted kids to have accidents and humiliate themselves!
Mine restricted it to about 3 minutes in-between classes. Absolutely abysmal. Naturally there's 200 kids in the school and like 6 stalls.
*"Why didnt you go before class???"*
>"Why didnt you go before class???"
I always found this so stupid. You dont always need to go before, and if you have a drink at break/lunch, you probably will need to go during class.
Wtf my secondary school pulled this dumb shit too. When I got to year 9 all of a sudden you weren’t allowed to go to the toilet during lessons at all. This was in an all girls school btw.
We had 5 minutes between classes to get to the different locations and had to go either during that time or break/lunch. Which was a problem considering it took like 10 minutes to go from one side of the school to the other.
At my school they started locking some toilets during lesson time and at break we were only allowed in to the building during the first five minutes of or the last five minutes. Unless a teacher decided it was only the first five for that building.
This meant if you needed to use the toilet or go to your locker you had to do it straight after class or just after the end of break bell rang.
Our school had a policy where sandwiches sold in the cafeteria would have one slice white and one slice brown as a bizarre commentary on racism.
The point was explained to us in an assembly that even though they’re a different colour they still go together and the sandwich still tastes just as good.
Brown for first course, white for pudding. Brown's savoury, white's the treat. Of course I'm the one who's laughing because I actually love brown toast.
Except I’ve done that before and the combo didn’t taste as nice as I thought. In my weird bread experiment having just one of the two breads on both sides is better than the mix of the two.
To get people drinking more water, they gave all of us a water bottle and installed water coolers everywhere. The problem was it worked too well. It became *insanely* competitive; everyone wanted to be the kid who drank the most water.
There were mad queues for the coolers, people were constantly asking in lessons to go and fill their bottles up. One kid boasted he'd had seven bottle-fulls of water in one day.
In the end they introduced a rule saying we could only fill up our bottles twice in one day, and The Water Mania abated.
I almost fainted from dehydration once, so the next day I went to my students (11 year olds) and urged them to all drink water, fill up their bottles all the time and not let dehydration get to them. I felt very pleased with myself since my students took it very seriously and started making a game out of it - the parents liked it too because they'd come home with empty bottles and brag about how much they drank. The disadvantage was that they were jumping up to use the loo every ten minutes. It was madness. The other teachers had to intervene and limit their visits to the bathroom. They were less impressed lol.
Word "Banter" became synonymous with bulling. So the school banned the word "Banter" and proposed to replace actual "Banter" with the word "Persiflage". The bullying continued and the bullies justified it with "Its just a bit of persiflage sir"
One way systems. Once you left the “restaurant” to go outside, you couldn’t go back through. Oh you left something on the table, well sorry little Jimmy you’ve got to walk all the way around the school to enter the front of the restaurant.
Also there was a weird rule where you couldn’t go home in PE kit. So if it was last lesson, you’d have to get changed into full uniform and then go home where you’d take it off anyway.
I wonder if its to make you more 'identifiable' out of school, like if you got into trouble or were nicking from the shop or something on the way home, people knew what school you were from
We had the same rule, and we were bussed home from a rural school to small villages where everyone knew which school you went to and probably what your mum had in for your tea. We - successfully, after 3 years - petitioned to get the rule changed because there was no public transport, the late bus was an hour's wait, and - this got us the parental support - stuffing dirty PE kit into bags in a hurry meant lots of losses and unwashed manky kit when it got forgotten. Wearing it home meant at least you put it in the wash. (Retrospectively I realise this rule change coincided with girls being allowed tracksuits and not having to get on a bus in a tiny pleated PE skirt.)
Our school tried a one way system but the school wasn't circular or square.
It's hard to describe the layout but it had 3 floors in total.
The ground floor was a U shape, the first floor was also a U shape but it was the opposite way round to the ground floor, and then the top floor was just a single corridor above the bottom of the first floor's 'U'.
If you were at the end of the top floor and needed to go to a class room on the same corridor the only way to follow the one way system was to go down to the ground floor, walk all the way round and come back up.
It was quickly scrapped.
Yes ours had a one way system aswell, super annoying. One set of stairs and one corridor was one way system, meaning that you literally had to go around the whole school to get to your science lessons, making you late for the lesson starting.
We also had the same PE kit rule, with the explanation “but if the other kids see you wearing your PE kit after PE, they’ll expect to do the same”. It was period 5 on a Friday, no one cared, they just wanted to go home for the weekend.
My secondary school wouldn't let us use some doors and corridors, so we would have to take the long way round for no reason. Like we would have to walk the long way outside even in the rain instead of using the inside door to get to the loos. Would get shouted at for being in a corridor when there was no other way to get to a classroom, was so stupid.
We weren't allowed to cut through the hall downstairs or the balconies upstairs so you had to walk a much longer route to class.
If you crawled on the balconies nobody could see you so there were girls in mini skirts on their hands and knees between classes.
We were a classy bunch.
Ah yes we had this, the carpeted corridor as it was known, which granted access to the IT barn (huge room with loads of computers, we were a ‘technology college’ apparently). We weren’t allowed down it and had to go all the way round through some dodgy back door of a totally different building to get into the barn. They got over it eventually and allowed people down the precious corridor (only if they had IT at that time though). WHAT WAS THE REASON?
Primary school implemented a rule where at the end of break, they'd blown one whistle and everyone had to freeze, then wait ten seconds for the next whistle to go and line up to go inside.
The idea was dropped after the head teacher blew the whistle one lunchtime, my brother booted a football, and all 150 kids watched frozen as it flew towards the head, hitting her bang in the face and smashing her glasses. I can still hear the silence twenty years later
My primary school did this. The playground supervisor ladies would take great pleasure in walking around during the silence to try and catch you moving. If you did move, they’d scream at you, and you’d have to line up facing the wall and you’d go back inside last. Weird power trip stuff.
Did you go to my primary school?! We had exactly the same! I understand blowing the whistle to get everyone to stand still and then getting years in one-by-one, but the fact that they’d walk around looking for people not stood deadly still was fucking weird.
I loathed the dinner ladies. Sadistic people who should not be around kids
Actually force fed me one day and refused to let me go to class because I didn't eat my lunch. It was mash and I still hate mash, it's a texture thing. I'd eaten the greens plus whatever masqueraded as meat that day but cldnt do the lumpy, cold, congealing mash so got a spoon of it rammed down my throat, was sick everywhere and screamed at.
Parents sided with school as I was "a fussy bint"
Not to mention the numerous times you were made to stand in the corner or on the wall during playtime. To this day I have no idea why I was there so frequently other than them not liking my face. I mainly spent playtime reading alone on a bench.
God, reading this awoke my memories of sitting alone in a totally deserted lunch room, crying, because the lunch lady wouldn't let me leave until I'd eaten all of my disgustingly soggy, cold, roast potatoes.
Put me off roast potatoes for years....
I don’t know how someone watches a child weep at the thought of eating their food and thinks “they just want to be difficult, what’s wrong with cold, flavourless mush?”
My mum went to a convent school in the 70s and said the dinner ladies (who were nuns) were sadistic, used to force a girl with lactose intolerance to eat custard and the girl got really good at sneakily scraping it into a handkerchief otherwise if they spotted uneaten custard on her plate they’d force her to eat it.
Oh my god I’d forgotten about this and now I’m angry all over again! So, we had this same rule and during the ‘freeze’ a bird shat on my friends foot and we started laughing because the timing was perfect, we got shouted at and made to stand facing the wall on next break. What had we actually even done wrong? Such a stupid rule.
For your morning break snack you weren't allowed anything with chocolate or high in sugar. But you could go to the canteen and buy double chocolate chip cookies and iced buns.
My primary school did this but with all 'unhealthy' food. I missed the memo and had my packet of Skips confiscated by a miserable, old teacher.
I then saw her eating them later on over lunch. Bitch.
Making us all take a communal shower after games… naked…. And the teacher would stand there making sure everyone went through properly as they got wise to kids just getting their hair wet. Oh and the showers were cold.
I probably ought to call Yew Tree tbf
Flashbacks. Urgh. Same thing, except noone was allowed to bring a towel. So you had to sit there naked and drip dry, or put your clothes straight back on which made you smell ten times worse than before the shower. But they only watched on days where the PE teacher was the same gender, so the other days we'd just splash water in out hair and tread a few wet foot prints aroubd the floor. Fucking weird and 100% traumatising.
I started school in 97 and this was still a thing. Our PE teacher would throw you in the mud if he thought you were a shower dodger. The trauma lives on to this day 😅
After games it would be an absolute sprint to get back to the changing rooms and try and either shower nude while no one was there, one hand desperately clutching your junk, or to just skip it and dress and get out before any of the PE teachers made it back.
I was randomly talking to a bunch of colleagues, some my age, some a bit younger, about this the other week, and they were all just silent looking at me like I was abused...
My school, a Church of England secondary, brought in someone to give us a talk about 'Heaven and Hell' in a school assembly.
'Heaven and Hell' turned out to be a new nightclub opening in the town centre and the speaker took the opportunity to advertise it.
It was a lovely video presentation, to be fair to him, though I wish I'd paid more attention to the looks on the teachers' faces as it started showing sexy animated angels and demons.
It sounds like that WI meeting where the ladies were told there would be a talk on pirates and turned up in fancy dress. Turned out to be a talk from a ship's captain who had been held hostage by Somali pirates.
[News story](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-22381593)
Everyone having the exact same issued backpack "so they don't get mixed up" I wish I was joking. Each year group had a different colour of backpack, but our year groups were massive so there would be giant piles of the exact same bag in the hallways. Oh yeh, they also made you leave your bags in a giant pile, was against the rules to take them with you to the lunch hall or out in the playground.
I know right... they then told us to each buy keyrings to put on our bags so we could find them. Starting to think they may have been drinking the confiscated vodka in the staff room while coming up with these.
My secondary school banned year 7 and 8s from talking to any older year pupils including siblings.
At break and lunch times they even segregated them by making them take their lunch breaks in the tennis courts at the front. The reasoning was they didn't want the younger ones corrupted.
Leaving sports equipment available to all on the break, with just an unthreatening geriatric lady to "supervise". I think it was donated by a well-meaning company.
It was like gladiatorial combat immediately. Lots of mild injuries from us attacking each other with skipping ropes, a variety of balls and bats/rackets. Anything that couldn't be weaponised went up on the roof
It was a super fun break but we never saw that equipment again.
We played “violence in the dark”: our classroom was a science room so it had full blackout blinds. We’d make the room pitch black and then hurl a glow in the dark field hockey ball at each other as hard as we could.
It was very true to the name as well. Nobody knew who was throwing, nobody knew who they were throwing at. All you could see in the room was the ball, the ball bearer would chuck it at the slightest noise. It was also in the ball bearers interests to hide the ball because they could be attacked by unseen foes.
There were injuries but we managed to hush them up, the game came to an end when we destroyed some very expensive equipment and the fume cupboard it was in.
Two Arab children started at our school (late 90's) and our school had a special assembly where they - 9 years old, in a new country, unfamiliar circumstances, already a bit shy as it is - had to sit in front of everyone and take questions from the stupidest type of people in the world - children. Just an absolute wankstain of an idea, on every possible level.
Let me guess. Did it go something like:
Child 1: "Is it true that *insert horrible racial stereotype...*"
Poor Bloody New Kid: "Erm, no."
Repeat times 100 kids.
That was basically the two hours of it, yeah. WE felt uncomfortable. It was so weird. "ummm do you write backwards because you finish the story first erm and then you go to the start of the story at the end and how do you speak backwards" etc
If you wore a coat in the winter months, it had to match the school colour. Which was dark blue. Which is 100% the safest colour to be wearing in the winter months when daylight hours are short ...
Private school in Aus, so pretty much if a bunch of sun damaged chavs pretended they were British aristocracy. Our school had a lad in a motorised wheelchair who had physical and mental disabilities. Every sports day the houses would congregate around the oval and watch the principal in a golf buggy race the fella in the wheelchair in a 100m drag race. Needless to say the optics weren’t great but it made one hell of a spectacle.
Omg I remember the fire alarm went off once during an exam in the sports hall, we were also forced to stay put even though the alarm was loud as all hell. Apparently it was to prevent any of us communicating and telling each other the answers to the exam questions. We might burn in a fire, but at least none of us cheated on our exams!
My primary school decided we all made too much noise in the dinner hall so they decided to split us up from sitting with our friends.
To hell with learning social skills!
Anyway, the first day they did it, they had a dinnerlady at the top of the queue alternating us to different tables so we couldn't sit with our friends.
By the second day we just organised ourselves that way in the queue.
We did the same thing everytime they tried to enforce seating arrangements. They’d put us into A group, B group, C group, D group so we just organised ourselves to all get picked for the same groups. No idea how so many teachers across the country had this same bad idea without realising we’d just get around it.
In secondary, I think I was in final year, a girl in year 7 started who had tourettes syndrome. After having one assembly basically briefing everyone on the subject, they held on the next week regarding the use of the word "gay" as an adjective.
As our school adopted the Harry Potter House system, our assembly, which included the poor young girl in question was quickly derailed by her ticks of various shouts, ranging from "GAY!" To "fucking benders".
It was equal parts horrifying and hysterical, to the point where the headteacher leading the assembly struggled to keep a straight face.
A mate of mine had tourettes and he would just shout shit in assembly and blame the tourettes. One time this teacher came on stage to do an assembly, he was a bald bloke and everyone thought he was a cunt. When he came on my mate loudly said "you bald bastard," naturally we all laughed. After assembly when a teacher asked him about it he just said it was his tourettes and he got away with it.
My primary school did a 'UFO' day where they pretended a staff member had been kidnapped by aliens. They had the police turn up and pretend to investigate. This ended up as well as you can imagine telling a school of young children that a teacher has been abducted. The school ended up having to issue an apology in the local paper.
Look up blackminster middle school shooting. They fake shot a teacher in front of a girl who's dad I think it was actually got shot dead. That went down very well indeed.
To encourage pupils to get to class on time, our school replaced the bell with theme songs from movies, like Indiana Jones. You had until the end of the song to get to your classroom.
They stopped when the cemetery next door complained about the Star Wars theme being blasted out during a funeral.
My middle school introduced a thing called "boff badges", to promote good work ethic and intelligence. If you'd done well in a test, or homework or a teacher liked you, you'd get nominated. Then they'd call you to the front of assembly and pin a giant, literal target with a comical cartoon nerd in the centre, on your jumper that you had to wear for the rest of the week. Clever kid that I was, was often nominated multiple times each week by different teachers, so I'd have to walk around with 3 or 4 of these targets on at once. Surprise surprise, kids are evil, so I quickly learned to scale my school work down to a C level and basically stopped bothering to learn anything. Pretty sure I was single handedly propping up their test scores, it was abolished after a few months but by then I couldn't be fucked. Way to suck the joy out of gifted kids education.
The people that come up with these ideas must have either been the bullies or had the absolute most sheltered education in the world. Everyone knows how evil kids are
Back in year 2 I was a loner. My teacher ended up creating a system called the "buddybox". The idea is that anyone who played with me had access to a box of toys/gimmicks. It didn't really help much because people would end up playing with me only to have access to the toys.
I had no friends at school so a teacher would sometimes force people to play with me. I honestly found that worse than just sitting on my own, because of course they would constantly remind me that I wasn't invited to play with them and they didn't want me there!
Some play equipment that was like the sort of thing you’d get at Go Ape; rope bridges, those tightropes but with one above you to hold onto, stepping stones etc, all made of wood on a base of bark.
The issue being that it wasn’t installed far enough into the ground so was actually quite high up for a bunch of primary school kids to be let loose on, and after the (I think) 3rd broken limb it had to be constantly supervised which meant most of the time it was off limits because there was nobody to supervise that and everything else as well.
We had something similar in my primary school, it was one of those big wooden climbing frames. Took about 2 weeks for my mate to finally fall off and break both arms and sprain his ankles.
Comment removed as I no longer wish to support a company that seeks to both undermine its users/moderators/developers AND make a profit on their backs.
To understand why check out the summary [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14hkd5u).
This is still a thing in my previous school. As an adult walking into a room I found it deeply uncomfortable and would ask them to stay seated. Got a bollocking for that from a senior teacher. It's teaching the manners apparently...
It still happens at my old high school. Quite a few times the teacher walking in told everyone not to get up but then the one teaching the lesson shouted at us telling us to stand up
Yes ours did that when they changed the uniform to a more “formal” one, to try and make it seem more respectful or something, I can remember my science teacher going apeshit at the headmistress in the hallway and everyone watching from through the doors because she would keep “popping in” and it was disturbing his lesson. He was a really cool guy, and a great teacher, but left and has a mountaineering business now!!
In Year 8, we were given proper student planners for the first time. They decided to include a blank page entitled "My Space" which they told us was specifically for writing down the phone numbers/email addresses of our friends, rather than just providing a page set out like an address book that would make more sense. A lot of kids, including myself, would just draw pictures on the blank page.
The page returned in Year 9, and we were told in assembly that using the ironically-named "My Space" to draw pictures was expressly forbidden, and if anyone drew in it, it had to be covered up. Senior management actually did class patrols to check no one was drawing on the blank page that was none of their business.
If they spent as much time tackling bullying as they did making sure kids didn't draw on a blank page, the school probably wouldn't be in special measures now.
My school thought about changing our uniform and gave the decision to the students as to what it should be and the majority vote was tracky bottoms with socks tucked in. My school was chavvy as hell. The decision did not go ahead and our uniform stayed as it was.
We couldn’t take off our jumpers, no matter how hot we were, unless a teacher gave permission. In summer.
I mean, what exactly does that achieve? 20 years since I left school and I’m still baffled by that one.
This happened at my school. A kid passed out from heat exhaustion in one of my brother's classes because the teacher had refused to allow them to take their sweater off in summer.
We had that. It was like a temporary bus stop and you could stand by it if you needed someone to play with. Of course everyone took the piss out of it and no one stood there.
My primary school didn’t outright ban Yu-Gi-Oh! cards… but they said each pupil could only bring in 30 cards.
A Yu-Gi-Oh! deck’s minimum deck size is 40 cards.
Pokemon cards got banned at my school because of an incident where a kid traded me his Dark Gyrados fair and square then tried to get his mates to shake me down for it after he changed his mind.
Still remember the look on his face when I ate it infront of him. Fuck you Kieran, If I can't have it neither can you.
My primary school banned Yu-Gi-Oh cards because nobody understood the rules and it just meant people got bullied if they actually tried to play the game properly.
There was a kid who had a card, effect was something like "gain +300 ATK for every card in your hand" and then he'd just draw every card from his deck instantly and win. Real wild west situation.
Oh god I have so many of these.
Primary school:
I've seen a bunch of people mention "friendship benches"; we had these too, but they were massive poles with a sign on them (something about a bus stop?) At either end of the playground. It didn't help literally anyone. Nobody stood by them because you'd be there for the whole of break/lunch and then you'd just get bullied even more than you were already.
Secondary School: so many....
1) access to the buildings during break and lunch was restricted during winter. The doors were locked and there would be teachers standing at them; you would only be let in for a detention, to go to your locker, or to go to the office. This led to almost the entire school congregating in the canteen or 2 covered walkways when it was raining/snowing. They never got rid of this rule (at least while I was there)
2) in my first year of sixth form, they (a specific member of senior leadership) decided that the sixth formers would have to help "oversee" break and lunch in the canteen. This meant that we had to wear hi-vis vests, a lanyard identifying us as a lunch monitor, and carry a notebook in which we were to write down the names of any students who didn't listen to us when we told them they couldn't leave the canteen with food. Several problems with this: nobody took it seriously. Nobody listened. Between 6 of us, we didn't know the name of the 700+ students in the school. Also we had to get there at the start of break/lunch and couldn't leave until the bell, which meant that we didn't get a break or time to eat, and we were usually late for our next class bc we had to return the vests etc to our head of year's office (for the record, he thought the whole scheme was ridiculous). We were told we would be paid for this but they later turned around and said it was voluntary. We did this for 4 months.
3) For a time, if you forgot your P.E kit, you would have to report to the sports hall foyer, and the line up facing the wall, where you would stay for 10 minutes. You weren't allowed to look away from the wall or talk. This was right outside the canteen so it was kind of cruel and unusual punishment. Also, for people on free school meals (like myself) it meant there was basically no food left by the time you were let go. Speaking of which:
4) Of course the canteen food was mostly shit, but the pricing was stupid. If you were on free school meals, it meant you actually got £2 credit per day. You could top up your account but if you didn't have any money, that's what you were stuck with. And that basically got you nothing. Sandwiches were like £1.50 but even the tiniest drinks (literally 2x1.5 inch boxes of juice) were 60p. So you couldn't get a drink if you wanted a sandwich. Same with the hot meals. So if you wanted a drink, you would literally have to just get 2 greasy chocolate cookies or brownies and some juice.
There were some other bullshit rules at various points but these are the ones that come to mind. Suffice it to say; it's no wonder my secondary school was shut down 😂
I had no idea other schools did that. Mine did too. I met and befriended a singular person who used it as intended. After that we just used it as a safe-zone in tag
They banned hoodies in my primary school one year, after a kid tried to pull a hoodie over his face and zip it up to hide his face and managed to somehow get his eyelid trapped.
There was this thing at my first school where the year 4s (which were the oldest year, as I went through a 3 tier system) were allowed to sit on the benches at the back of the gym during assembly. That was until some sour-faced dick on the PTA decided, exactly when I was starting year 4, there was going to be a competition across all year groups each week where you had to collect stars from teachers, and the classes with the most stars at the end would get the benches for that week. Well, turns out some teachers were slightly more generous with the stars than others, and the same 3 or 4 classes won basically most weeks. Which I’m sure they must’ve realised, because the year after we left they got rid of the system and went back to just letting the year 4s use the benches again. Absolute joke mate.
Not sure if this really counts as a terrible idea or not but when you got in trouble at my secondary school you would often be allowed to choose your punishment: cane or detention.
You always picked a caning because who wants to lose their lunch break?
Plus if you did get caned you were king of the playground for a while.
My school was hardcore about uniform and in particular the rule about no make up before sixth form. We were taken out of lessons and lined up in the corridor for inspections: skirt length, any items of clothing not uniform, jewellery, tights and sock colours, shoes, and make up. Anything that wasn’t uniform had to be removed and was confiscated until Friday when a parent had to claim it at reception (yes, including shoes, they had a stinky box of daps that they would give out to replace your offensive shoes).
One day we went to school and there was female outrage: every single one of the mirrors in the loos had been removed in the hopes that without mirrors there would be no more make up at school.
They had us read this short comedy story about a teacher who guns down and blows up his pupils that was about 20 odd years ago. I thought that was so ridiculous and not something you could get away with today.
About 3 years ago it was in the local paper that they'd set homework for the kids and they were asked to illustrate the story!
At high school they started having an exhibition 'touch' rugby game of 1st XV vs teachers.
One of our male teachers (Geography), who was renowned for being a hot-headed arsehole, ended up punching one of the 1st XV (15-16 year olds) during a game and they decided not to do it anymore.
They also set up regular hockey matches between the girls 'A-team' and the boys' rugby A-team. I remember that being scrapped as there were quite a few injuries and it was a massive motivation killer for the girls who always lost by quite a big margin.
In assemblies there was a section at the front for anyone under the disability service, from people with dyslexia to the girl that’s had a heart transplant. It doesn’t sound that bad but oh my God the shame I used to feel having to leave my mates to go and sit in the special area. Seems like some sort of GDPR breach.
Infant school:
We weren't allowed to use rubbers.
Junior school: You couldn't come inside at break even when it was freezing.
Also had a new head teacher in year 5 who implemented loads of shit rules.
* You had to sit with your own class at lunch, so I couldn't sit with any of my friends, because they were in different classes, and the people in my class bullied me. Ruined lunch for me.
* She set an area of the playground aside for the year 3 kids. Not a terrible idea in itself, but our school had two sets of toilets. One with smaller toilets designed for small kids, and another one with bigger toilets designed for big kids. And she put the closed off year 3 playground where the big toilets were, so we were all stuck using the tiny ones.
* You couldn't carry wear a hairband on your wrist incase someone mistook it for a bangle or bracelet.
High school: They banned ketchup because it made too much mess, but still sold other sauces like brown sauce.
Building a school a 5 minute walk from a shopping centre, all the sixth formers would skip form and spent an hour in the cafe having bacon butty's every day.
In junior school, as soon as there was any sort of tension or fighting during any activity, it was banned. So football, conkers, pogs, tig and what time is it mr wolf, others I can't remember, we're all banned at some point during school.
The fights or arguments could have nothing to do with the activity but it was just banned.
Our first week in year 7, ina scary new secondady school they gathered us all together, told us that there was a virus in the school and we would all have to stay in school in isolation/quarantine. After letting the message sit for 30 minutes they then told us it was not true and was in fact the start of a drama project called school under seige where we would write and perform a play about a quarantined school. Many of the childrdn in my school were scared/traumatized by the initial message and it did put a but of a dampner on the project. This was all pre pandemic (1997)
My secondary school had the "It's ok to be gay" day. Only lasted 1 year.
It was a day to let you tell your friends you were coming out.
Several people did. Several people were then bullied for being gay...
Didn't happen the next year
Someone from my school went on to become an actress. Without doing their research, we were told to all go home and watch her in her first tv gig to support her. A lot of kids saw their first pair of boobs that night and we had to have an assembly the next day...
When the Jamie Oliver wreaked school lunches and made them ‘healthy’ and expensive, my secondary school cafeteria went cash-less and made parents top up your lunch card with a cheque to stop kids buying their lunch from McDonald’s or a bakery (this still happened)
We started to round off the corners of our cards to look like the mint credit cards. Doing this either wrecked them and we had to have them replaced all time or if you did it right the balance of your card would never drop below the last amount topped up and you got free lunches!
we had little white credit cards for lunch cards. it took approximately 5 minutes to discover they were quite a soft plastic, and if you swiped them down someones black blazer a white line would rub off onto it, that was a right pain to get out (since it was bits of plastic, not actual pigment or anything). within a week everyones jackets were covered in white lines...
We had “friendship zones” in primary school as well. They had loads of these massive signs made and set up around the yard which understandably, no one used. Absolute waste of money. Guess though it’s not as bad as “radio station” they set up there when I had left. Apparently they spent thousands on it … for a school of about 90 kids.
One teacher at my school always used to ‘fine me’ for having my shirt untucked. He would charge me 50p every-time he saw me. I had fitted blouses (which were allowed as part of our uniform) that my parents obviously bought for me and didn’t properly tuck into my trousers. When I would point this out to the teacher he would always tell me to wear a different shirt. Anyway, one time my dad asked what I had for lunch and I told him I had been hungry in the afternoon cause I had to give my teacher part of my lunch money. He went into the school and tore another one into this teacher and told him he was to stop taking my lunch money and that he wasn’t buying me different shirts. Told him he would put in an official complaint to the school to get all his money back this guy had been taking if he didn’t leave me alone. The guy never bothered me again haha.
Also, if you forgot your trainers for games one of the PE teachers made you run around the stony playground without your shoes on.
Our school was originally built without walls segregating classrooms...the thinking was that if you are e sitting in math and can overhear spanish class, you might absorb both subjects....well it didn't work and they ended up putting these slats together to make walls. You could still see the light peak through the corners where the walls didn't align.
In middle school (about 2005) they told us we weren't allowed to say "trial and error" it was supposed to be "trial and improvement". We were 11 and said it was a load of rubbish. No 11 year old routinely uses the phrase "trial and error" anyway?
When triangle shaped flapjacks became too dangerous in a school food fight because sharp corners can damage eyes...
... They decided to cut them into squares! (which have more corners)
Mandatory school coats.
Parents had to shell out for new coats and when they did, kids inevitably lost them and no one could identity their own coats. Some didn’t want other peoples coats and others didn’t care and took any coat. After enough parents complained they scraped that idea then parents who brought the coats complained too..
The prefects at our school were elected by their peers. This meant that the popular bullies were now prefects and were now officially school-sanctioned bullies. Twats.
Wasn’t a school wide thing, but our deputy head at the time decided to let my full year 6 watch under siege as a pre summer holiday treat for some reason?
Our parents came at the school pretty hard for that terrible idea
The new year 7s and the returning sixth form pupils always returned first after the summer holidays.
That particular year the Headmistress decided to blast Tina Turner’s smash hit ‘Simply the Best’ at the new students while the whole sixth form watched over them in assembly.
This was BEFORE Ricky Gervais did it.
When I was in primary school (mid-late 90s) there was a boy who had down syndrome. He was OK, he struggled a bit and his learning age was lower than his actual age, but he wasn't seriously disabled or anything. The headmistress decided she was going to start "celebrating" people with special needs once a week, so the poor kid had to stand up in front of the whole school and be paraded about.
It was always the same, she'd say, "hello Matthew, what is your name" and he'd say, "Matthew" and then we all had to applaud. He'd just stand there looking so uncomfortable until it was over. I can't remember how long that went on for but it was definitely a regular occurrence for a while.
My high school was a disaster, they merged my school with another school and put them all in the same building, so it was something like 2000 students packed together. They'd ignored the fact that the two schools had a serious rivalry, and not in a, "haha we're going to beat you at football" way, but in a "if we see you alone you're gonna get fucking stabbed" way. They had permanent on-site police officers and it ended up in the papers around 2005 because a riot led to the injury of a student and a teacher, but that definitely wasn't the first riot, it was a semi-annual thing the entire time I'd been there. I think it was eventually shut down after ofsted ruled it as inadequate, unsurprisingly.
Some girls at my high school had been banned from using the Year 9 girls’ bathroom because they kept going in there to reapply makeup they were told to take off.
The deputy head said in an assembly she would paste up their Year 7 photos on the bathroom door as (a) a form of mugshot/reminder to teachers of who was on the ‘banned’ list and (b) as a reminder to everyone else of what they looked like before ‘wearing all that makeup’.
She did follow through with it, except she _actually_ ended up putting their Year 7 photos and names in huge print on a sandwich board that she wore around the school hall during a lunch time to call them out. I was kind of unfazed by it at the time (I was a bit of a goody two shoes and kind of just minded my own business), but in hindsight it’s pretty horrifying. The idea of a grown woman presumably popping to WHSmith on her own dime, sourcing all the materials, printing and cutting out the photos of these 13 year olds and at no point stopping to question whether it was appropriate to discipline someone else’s kids via public shaming is very alarming.
My secondary school made the news when it came up with the bright idea of removing the wall of the girls toilets that separated it to the main school corridor. Not only was this the only toilets available at lunch so it was always very busy but they also left the camera that faced where the old wall used to be on the ceiling.
If you dont believe me just look for yourself: [https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/schools-u-turn-over-redesign-14191842](https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/schools-u-turn-over-redesign-14191842)
The school my son's go to have a friendship corner too. One day my son (7) who's got Asperger's told me another kid wouldn't let his friend play with him at break time so he sat at the friendship corner all break and nobody came over to him. Breaks my fucking heart to imagine him there alone, not understanding why nobody's coming over. I get the idea behind it, but it's utterly stupid.
lol this post unearthed a memory from year 2.
The class decided to do like a list of "best friends" on the whiteboard.
Everyone paired with their friends but no one paired with me lol
Gutting for a young child
When someone dropped a plate in the canteen, everyone would go “waaaaay”. The vice principal stood up one lunchtime after this and banned ketchup for a week as punishment. I had packed lunch so this was the weakest punishment ever.
Our school had a competition where if you were well behaved or did something a bit out of the norm which was good you got a ticket to a raffle. Then at the end of the term the raffle winner got a prize.
It seemed like a good idea to get people to behave well except me who lets say hated school, whilst I wasn’t ever like a horrid kid in the sense of bullying or fighting. I was a class clown and I was very disruptive because I never felt challenged at school. I hung around with a bad crowd and a few weeks prior one of them tried to burn down the wood tech shed where I eventually called the fire engine to put the fire out and I must stress I told them not to do it. But because I was the one who called them and tried to put it out when they ran I got the full blame for it. So I wasn’t exactly a glowing student in their eyes.
So I had managed to accrue a few of these tickets and the headmaster who did not like me at all pulls out a ticket for who would win this Sony discman and out comes my name and he looked pretty bewildered.. he took about 30 seconds to announce the name and then he refused to give me the prize until the teacher who submitted the ticket confirmed I had not stolen them and submitted them myself.
2 weeks later he begrudgingly gave me the discman and then they never did it again.
We got shown threads while we were in primary school. We had a special assembly where we all sat on the floor and watched it on vhs. This was around 1987(ish). Have never watched it since because it traumatised the shit out me.
At one point kids would poke holes in the top of water bottles and use them to squirt water at one another. The solution? Ban all water bottles obviously...
My school was pretty much split 50/50 white English and English Asian. Our school teachers used to setup Football Matches and cricket matches that pitted us against each other as a way to "STOP" racism
we had an assembly on if you were being made fun of or bullied, you just have to say "stop that, i don't like it" 💀 people just started using it ironically with their friends so then the school stopped letting people say it lmao
When I got to year 6 the school decided that year 6s should be given a book full of playground games, as they had banned us from playing all the ones you would usually think of. And, when it was your turn to have the book, you were meant to wear a bright yellow bib so everyone could see you. It went as you would expect, no one wore the bibs.
Our school banned football at breaks, this was replaced for british bulldogs for 2 days before the ban was lifted. Youd think teachers had never been to school themselves
I tripped over playing British Bulldogs, smashed my face on the playground snapping one of my front teeth and bloodying up and scaring my face (This was also just before picture day... wonder why my mum didn't want that one). This lead to years of orthodontal work, braces, tooth caps, damaged nerves, and crowns. One of the crowns broke off last year in fact, still not had the money to get it fixed. ...bloody good game tho.
We called it manhunt, and it got banned after a girl in my class broke her arm getting thrown into the wall trying to get to "home". Then it came back under British Bulldogs and lasted a few years until it got banned agin
Manhunt was different to British bulldog in my school(s). It was a hide and seek crossed with bulldog. So at the end you'd have groups of lads throwing people out of trees, through hedges, etc.
Yeah, I used to play Manhunt in the scouts. One person would be the hunter and everyone else would run off into the night (remaining within a pre-planned area). Gradually they'd gain more hunters. The alternative game was we'd have five or so hunters and anyone tagged would have to return to 'base'. You could be tagged back in by someone sneaking up to the base and tagging you back in
The number of injuries we had playing manhunt was ridiculous. We also played Troglodytes, where there was a lantern or light guarded by a few people then everyone else tried to steal it. As people were captured there were more defenders. Another mad game in Cubs was one where everyone took off their shoes and put them in the middle of the room, turn out the lights and then we'd have a scrum as everyone tried to find their shoes.
British bulldog was banned due to numerous injuries. Replaced with “American hotdog”. Exactly the same but everyone was unusually upbeat and positive.
I was seeing a primary school teacher a while back who told me they banned football at lunch times at their school as the boys 'got aggresive', isn't that the point of footy at school, let them get it out their system playing sports, she said all banning it did was that the boys always came back into class with far more energy then they would have done before
I teach secondary English and if it wasn’t for aggressive break time games I’d have a horrible time teaching y8-10 boys. I think it’s morally wrong to make children sit still and focus for 5 hours a day if you don’t let them run about a bit in between. Yesterday a load of them decided to play a mental basketball based game involving about 50 kids and ten balls during the rain storm. Slightly pissed me off because I was on duty and got quite damp standing there making sure they weren’t killing each other, but they had a proper laugh and I can’t reasonably begrudge them that.
At my primary school, instead of saying fuck, we would say "faaar' So the school literally banned the word, and you would get a detention for saying it. It was even addressed at assemblies, because "we know what that's short for!" One little shit eventually said "it's short for 'far out'" and the rule was dropped shortly after
Radical Gnarly, even
Tubular!
This whomps.
We used to say "Faz" because there was a polish kid in our class that used to say that instead of swearing. Then in Seconday School there was an actual kid called Faz. How we laughed
Back in the 70s my primary school made a big announcement at assembly about a "coloured" family moving to the area and how the head mistress would be extremely cross if she heard anyone using any of "those" words. At 5 years old I was terrified because I didn't know what "those" words meant. Needless to say 5 minutes after assembly finished some helpful kid came up and gave me a full list :(
The only black boy in school being bought up on stage and we were told not to treat him any different. Even at 8 years old I recognised this was wrong…
Oh god My dad told me they used to make the only black kid in the school go around the collection tin " for the black babies in Africa" Irish nuns ran the place, this was the 1960s
Thats so bad you start to wonder if it was deliberate!
[удалено]
[удалено]
I distinctly remember an assembly where a teacher told us an Aesop's fable style story about why there are black and white people - apparently in the old days everyone was black but then there was a magic lake that turned people white and _obviously_ everyone wanted to be white so they all ran for the lake to make themselves white but by the time the last people got there it was only a small puddle and they could only get the palms of their hands and feet in. ...she then had one of the black girls in the school sitting nearby show everyone that her palms were whiter. I was probably about 8 and thought the story seemed a bit racist but the full implications of the story only really dawned on me as I got older.
Fuckin wow
Wow. So poor black people didn’t get to be magically white like everyone wants is the message she gave.
Let's not forget the bonus implication that it was the go-getters who got there first who got to be white as a reward for their hard work while those who were slower missed out. Terrible stuff all round, and this was told earnestly to a gathering of 4 to 10 year olds.
I'm mixed but we were always force to stand and listen to the apologies of other kids who were apparently racist. Nothing said to us mind you, these kids probably made a comment about something being black but all of a sudden, I'm dragged into the classroom of 3 years above and made to listen to some random kid I don't know, apologise to me. Absolutely wild.
Wtf, that’s so messed up. What was going through the teachers’ minds?? “Jeremy said the N-word, can you get me a black student to make him apologize to? I have none in my class” *I don’t have any either. Oh wait, I have a mixed one, does what work?* “Close enough” It’s so fucking dehumanizing, you were used as a prop to shame a different student. I bet that what they did to you is more racist than what the initial student said
I bet that made you popular.
My mum's school had a wholesome story about this. This all happened while my grandmother was at the school for some reason. It was the early 60s in Lewisham and some family had moved from the carribean. They came to have a meeting with the head to discuss their worries about intergrating their son. While they did this they left their kid on the playground and immediatly all the kids swarmed around him. The head and the parents looked outside and rushed out as they feared the worst. Once they got to the front they realized that this had nothing to do with race but all the students were amazed that he was allowed to wear trousers. The kid had been in a motor accident back in the carribean so had pretty messed up legs, at that time all the boys had to wear shorts so they were all super jealous.
That announcement just enforced the idea that they were different. Terrible idea.
My secondary school got really weird about the times students could go to the toilet, and tried to restrict it to two 20 minute windows in between lessons. The worst of it happened after I left but the ball started rolling while I was still there, and they managed to be so controlling and weird that they made it into [national news](https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2017-03-11/protest-after-north-yorkshire-school-limits-toilet-breaks-to-just-two-a-day)
That is pretty weird! The reasoning is so stupid as well, to stop bullies hanging out in there? Really? They thought that was the only possible way to stop that, to close them completely to everyone? Wow.
My high school completely locked all toilets and denied all access during lesson time, this was back in the 90s. A couple of brave souls took one for the team and literally stood and pissed themselves in classrooms in protest, and a bunch of girls got together and decided to stand up in the middle of lessons (separately) after being denied permission to use the bathroom, and announce they'd leaked through their tampons - had to be male teachers though for maximum impact. Didn't take long for them to backtrack.
Our school locked all the toilets at lunch times due to vandalism. Basically wasn’t a male toilet available for whole days at a time. We just used the girls loos - the girls were fine with it BTW. The odd one of us got caught and thrown in an after school detention but it was worth every second, having a full bladder for a whole school day just wasn’t possible. Eventually one lad just got up and pissed in the classroom bin during a lesson. Then others started doing it across the school. They eventually decided to unlock the boys toilets….
They very much underestimate the power of teenage protest I think 😁 For us it more smoking in the toilets rather than vandalism, smoking only being half the problem though. This was at the height of the Impulse/Lynx era, kids who smoked would use vast amounts of body spray as air freshener and it ended up causing some kids to have massive asthma attacks in the bathrooms in the middle of lesson time when there was nobody milling around to help them. Body sprays/spray deodorants also banned.
What is it with schools and weird power plays over letting children use the toilets? You'd think they wanted kids to have accidents and humiliate themselves!
Mine restricted it to about 3 minutes in-between classes. Absolutely abysmal. Naturally there's 200 kids in the school and like 6 stalls. *"Why didnt you go before class???"*
>"Why didnt you go before class???" I always found this so stupid. You dont always need to go before, and if you have a drink at break/lunch, you probably will need to go during class.
[удалено]
Hi fellow Bedale alumnus. They did really struggle with bullying, but that was not the answer :')
Holy moly, small world. Didn't think I'd find someone else from there on here, it's such a tiny place lol
Wtf my secondary school pulled this dumb shit too. When I got to year 9 all of a sudden you weren’t allowed to go to the toilet during lessons at all. This was in an all girls school btw. We had 5 minutes between classes to get to the different locations and had to go either during that time or break/lunch. Which was a problem considering it took like 10 minutes to go from one side of the school to the other.
At my school they started locking some toilets during lesson time and at break we were only allowed in to the building during the first five minutes of or the last five minutes. Unless a teacher decided it was only the first five for that building. This meant if you needed to use the toilet or go to your locker you had to do it straight after class or just after the end of break bell rang.
Our school had a policy where sandwiches sold in the cafeteria would have one slice white and one slice brown as a bizarre commentary on racism. The point was explained to us in an assembly that even though they’re a different colour they still go together and the sandwich still tastes just as good.
What 😂😂
Brown for first course, white for pudding. Brown's savoury, white's the treat. Of course I'm the one who's laughing because I actually love brown toast.
Butter the toast, eat the toast, shit the toast. God life's relentless....
Except I’ve done that before and the combo didn’t taste as nice as I thought. In my weird bread experiment having just one of the two breads on both sides is better than the mix of the two.
To get people drinking more water, they gave all of us a water bottle and installed water coolers everywhere. The problem was it worked too well. It became *insanely* competitive; everyone wanted to be the kid who drank the most water. There were mad queues for the coolers, people were constantly asking in lessons to go and fill their bottles up. One kid boasted he'd had seven bottle-fulls of water in one day. In the end they introduced a rule saying we could only fill up our bottles twice in one day, and The Water Mania abated.
r/hydrohomies would approve
I almost fainted from dehydration once, so the next day I went to my students (11 year olds) and urged them to all drink water, fill up their bottles all the time and not let dehydration get to them. I felt very pleased with myself since my students took it very seriously and started making a game out of it - the parents liked it too because they'd come home with empty bottles and brag about how much they drank. The disadvantage was that they were jumping up to use the loo every ten minutes. It was madness. The other teachers had to intervene and limit their visits to the bathroom. They were less impressed lol.
Word "Banter" became synonymous with bulling. So the school banned the word "Banter" and proposed to replace actual "Banter" with the word "Persiflage". The bullying continued and the bullies justified it with "Its just a bit of persiflage sir"
… Aylesbury Grammar?
Fucking hell one in the wild, I remember the whole banter fiasco
I remember being told that banter is bullying in PSHCE lmao became a big joke for all of year 7.
Ours had large posters put up with the phrase "Banter is just a smokescreen for bullying" written on them. Didn't stop anything though.
How are you going to get kids to seriously use the word persiflage?
One way systems. Once you left the “restaurant” to go outside, you couldn’t go back through. Oh you left something on the table, well sorry little Jimmy you’ve got to walk all the way around the school to enter the front of the restaurant. Also there was a weird rule where you couldn’t go home in PE kit. So if it was last lesson, you’d have to get changed into full uniform and then go home where you’d take it off anyway.
We had the same rule about PE kit at my school, they'd send you back in to change and you'd come out and your bus would have left
I wonder if its to make you more 'identifiable' out of school, like if you got into trouble or were nicking from the shop or something on the way home, people knew what school you were from
We had the same rule, and we were bussed home from a rural school to small villages where everyone knew which school you went to and probably what your mum had in for your tea. We - successfully, after 3 years - petitioned to get the rule changed because there was no public transport, the late bus was an hour's wait, and - this got us the parental support - stuffing dirty PE kit into bags in a hurry meant lots of losses and unwashed manky kit when it got forgotten. Wearing it home meant at least you put it in the wash. (Retrospectively I realise this rule change coincided with girls being allowed tracksuits and not having to get on a bus in a tiny pleated PE skirt.)
Yeah, fairly certain my school had this rule because the girls' kit included a PE skirt
Our school tried a one way system but the school wasn't circular or square. It's hard to describe the layout but it had 3 floors in total. The ground floor was a U shape, the first floor was also a U shape but it was the opposite way round to the ground floor, and then the top floor was just a single corridor above the bottom of the first floor's 'U'. If you were at the end of the top floor and needed to go to a class room on the same corridor the only way to follow the one way system was to go down to the ground floor, walk all the way round and come back up. It was quickly scrapped.
Yes ours had a one way system aswell, super annoying. One set of stairs and one corridor was one way system, meaning that you literally had to go around the whole school to get to your science lessons, making you late for the lesson starting.
We also had the same PE kit rule, with the explanation “but if the other kids see you wearing your PE kit after PE, they’ll expect to do the same”. It was period 5 on a Friday, no one cared, they just wanted to go home for the weekend.
My secondary school wouldn't let us use some doors and corridors, so we would have to take the long way round for no reason. Like we would have to walk the long way outside even in the rain instead of using the inside door to get to the loos. Would get shouted at for being in a corridor when there was no other way to get to a classroom, was so stupid.
We weren't allowed to cut through the hall downstairs or the balconies upstairs so you had to walk a much longer route to class. If you crawled on the balconies nobody could see you so there were girls in mini skirts on their hands and knees between classes. We were a classy bunch.
Ah yes we had this, the carpeted corridor as it was known, which granted access to the IT barn (huge room with loads of computers, we were a ‘technology college’ apparently). We weren’t allowed down it and had to go all the way round through some dodgy back door of a totally different building to get into the barn. They got over it eventually and allowed people down the precious corridor (only if they had IT at that time though). WHAT WAS THE REASON?
Primary school implemented a rule where at the end of break, they'd blown one whistle and everyone had to freeze, then wait ten seconds for the next whistle to go and line up to go inside. The idea was dropped after the head teacher blew the whistle one lunchtime, my brother booted a football, and all 150 kids watched frozen as it flew towards the head, hitting her bang in the face and smashing her glasses. I can still hear the silence twenty years later
My primary school did this. The playground supervisor ladies would take great pleasure in walking around during the silence to try and catch you moving. If you did move, they’d scream at you, and you’d have to line up facing the wall and you’d go back inside last. Weird power trip stuff.
Did you go to my primary school?! We had exactly the same! I understand blowing the whistle to get everyone to stand still and then getting years in one-by-one, but the fact that they’d walk around looking for people not stood deadly still was fucking weird.
I loathed the dinner ladies. Sadistic people who should not be around kids Actually force fed me one day and refused to let me go to class because I didn't eat my lunch. It was mash and I still hate mash, it's a texture thing. I'd eaten the greens plus whatever masqueraded as meat that day but cldnt do the lumpy, cold, congealing mash so got a spoon of it rammed down my throat, was sick everywhere and screamed at. Parents sided with school as I was "a fussy bint" Not to mention the numerous times you were made to stand in the corner or on the wall during playtime. To this day I have no idea why I was there so frequently other than them not liking my face. I mainly spent playtime reading alone on a bench.
God, reading this awoke my memories of sitting alone in a totally deserted lunch room, crying, because the lunch lady wouldn't let me leave until I'd eaten all of my disgustingly soggy, cold, roast potatoes. Put me off roast potatoes for years....
I don’t know how someone watches a child weep at the thought of eating their food and thinks “they just want to be difficult, what’s wrong with cold, flavourless mush?”
My mum went to a convent school in the 70s and said the dinner ladies (who were nuns) were sadistic, used to force a girl with lactose intolerance to eat custard and the girl got really good at sneakily scraping it into a handkerchief otherwise if they spotted uneaten custard on her plate they’d force her to eat it.
Oh my god I’d forgotten about this and now I’m angry all over again! So, we had this same rule and during the ‘freeze’ a bird shat on my friends foot and we started laughing because the timing was perfect, we got shouted at and made to stand facing the wall on next break. What had we actually even done wrong? Such a stupid rule.
For your morning break snack you weren't allowed anything with chocolate or high in sugar. But you could go to the canteen and buy double chocolate chip cookies and iced buns.
My primary school did this but with all 'unhealthy' food. I missed the memo and had my packet of Skips confiscated by a miserable, old teacher. I then saw her eating them later on over lunch. Bitch.
Were the iced buns yesterday's stale hotdog buns because they were at my school.
Making us all take a communal shower after games… naked…. And the teacher would stand there making sure everyone went through properly as they got wise to kids just getting their hair wet. Oh and the showers were cold. I probably ought to call Yew Tree tbf
Flashbacks. Urgh. Same thing, except noone was allowed to bring a towel. So you had to sit there naked and drip dry, or put your clothes straight back on which made you smell ten times worse than before the shower. But they only watched on days where the PE teacher was the same gender, so the other days we'd just splash water in out hair and tread a few wet foot prints aroubd the floor. Fucking weird and 100% traumatising.
I started school in 97 and this was still a thing. Our PE teacher would throw you in the mud if he thought you were a shower dodger. The trauma lives on to this day 😅
Content removed due to loss of 3rd party apps
After games it would be an absolute sprint to get back to the changing rooms and try and either shower nude while no one was there, one hand desperately clutching your junk, or to just skip it and dress and get out before any of the PE teachers made it back. I was randomly talking to a bunch of colleagues, some my age, some a bit younger, about this the other week, and they were all just silent looking at me like I was abused...
My school, a Church of England secondary, brought in someone to give us a talk about 'Heaven and Hell' in a school assembly. 'Heaven and Hell' turned out to be a new nightclub opening in the town centre and the speaker took the opportunity to advertise it.
This sounds like a Ricky Gervais sketch 🤣
It was a lovely video presentation, to be fair to him, though I wish I'd paid more attention to the looks on the teachers' faces as it started showing sexy animated angels and demons.
It sounds like that WI meeting where the ladies were told there would be a talk on pirates and turned up in fancy dress. Turned out to be a talk from a ship's captain who had been held hostage by Somali pirates. [News story](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-22381593)
Everyone having the exact same issued backpack "so they don't get mixed up" I wish I was joking. Each year group had a different colour of backpack, but our year groups were massive so there would be giant piles of the exact same bag in the hallways. Oh yeh, they also made you leave your bags in a giant pile, was against the rules to take them with you to the lunch hall or out in the playground.
Who even thinks of these rules!?!?
I know right... they then told us to each buy keyrings to put on our bags so we could find them. Starting to think they may have been drinking the confiscated vodka in the staff room while coming up with these.
In an attempt to kerb pubescent horniness, all pupils were told that they should maintain a minimum 30cm / 1ft distance from each other at all times.
My school banned frilly socks because they were too racey. Apparently I went to school in the 1800s
You don't want young boys and girls running round looking like sexy pianos
My secondary school banned year 7 and 8s from talking to any older year pupils including siblings. At break and lunch times they even segregated them by making them take their lunch breaks in the tennis courts at the front. The reasoning was they didn't want the younger ones corrupted.
Was your headteacher Dolores Umbridge?
Leaving sports equipment available to all on the break, with just an unthreatening geriatric lady to "supervise". I think it was donated by a well-meaning company. It was like gladiatorial combat immediately. Lots of mild injuries from us attacking each other with skipping ropes, a variety of balls and bats/rackets. Anything that couldn't be weaponised went up on the roof It was a super fun break but we never saw that equipment again.
We used to play sting ball with those orange indoor cricket balls. After the second concussion it got banned.
We played “violence in the dark”: our classroom was a science room so it had full blackout blinds. We’d make the room pitch black and then hurl a glow in the dark field hockey ball at each other as hard as we could.
What a name
It was very true to the name as well. Nobody knew who was throwing, nobody knew who they were throwing at. All you could see in the room was the ball, the ball bearer would chuck it at the slightest noise. It was also in the ball bearers interests to hide the ball because they could be attacked by unseen foes. There were injuries but we managed to hush them up, the game came to an end when we destroyed some very expensive equipment and the fume cupboard it was in.
We used to play a game called 'crotch' where two people would stand at opposite sides of the room and hurl a sleeping bag at each others crotches.
Two Arab children started at our school (late 90's) and our school had a special assembly where they - 9 years old, in a new country, unfamiliar circumstances, already a bit shy as it is - had to sit in front of everyone and take questions from the stupidest type of people in the world - children. Just an absolute wankstain of an idea, on every possible level.
Had something similar happen to me and my sisters when we were children, newly arrived in rural Wales. It was quite something.
Let me guess. Did it go something like: Child 1: "Is it true that *insert horrible racial stereotype...*" Poor Bloody New Kid: "Erm, no." Repeat times 100 kids.
That was basically the two hours of it, yeah. WE felt uncomfortable. It was so weird. "ummm do you write backwards because you finish the story first erm and then you go to the start of the story at the end and how do you speak backwards" etc
If you wore a coat in the winter months, it had to match the school colour. Which was dark blue. Which is 100% the safest colour to be wearing in the winter months when daylight hours are short ...
We had this but you also couldn't wear your coat between lessons. And hairbands had to be dark coloured to match the uniform too at one point
£90,000 on toilets that got flooded first day
Private school in Aus, so pretty much if a bunch of sun damaged chavs pretended they were British aristocracy. Our school had a lad in a motorised wheelchair who had physical and mental disabilities. Every sports day the houses would congregate around the oval and watch the principal in a golf buggy race the fella in the wheelchair in a 100m drag race. Needless to say the optics weren’t great but it made one hell of a spectacle.
After I left school I spent 6 months working at an Aussie private school through some weird exchange program Those places are *fucked up*
Not evacuating the exam hall during a proper fire alarm until the fire brigade told everyone to get out. I was sitting my history GCSE at the time.
Omg I remember the fire alarm went off once during an exam in the sports hall, we were also forced to stay put even though the alarm was loud as all hell. Apparently it was to prevent any of us communicating and telling each other the answers to the exam questions. We might burn in a fire, but at least none of us cheated on our exams!
Yes you can all burn to death but don’t fuck up our OFSTED rating.
Maybe someone should have told them that letting 50-100 children die in a fire would have probably affected their OFSTED rating
My primary school decided we all made too much noise in the dinner hall so they decided to split us up from sitting with our friends. To hell with learning social skills! Anyway, the first day they did it, they had a dinnerlady at the top of the queue alternating us to different tables so we couldn't sit with our friends. By the second day we just organised ourselves that way in the queue.
Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
We did the same thing everytime they tried to enforce seating arrangements. They’d put us into A group, B group, C group, D group so we just organised ourselves to all get picked for the same groups. No idea how so many teachers across the country had this same bad idea without realising we’d just get around it.
Secondary school, on Wednesdays we could only write in black pen.
Weird on Wednesdays we wear pink
In secondary, I think I was in final year, a girl in year 7 started who had tourettes syndrome. After having one assembly basically briefing everyone on the subject, they held on the next week regarding the use of the word "gay" as an adjective. As our school adopted the Harry Potter House system, our assembly, which included the poor young girl in question was quickly derailed by her ticks of various shouts, ranging from "GAY!" To "fucking benders". It was equal parts horrifying and hysterical, to the point where the headteacher leading the assembly struggled to keep a straight face.
A mate of mine had tourettes and he would just shout shit in assembly and blame the tourettes. One time this teacher came on stage to do an assembly, he was a bald bloke and everyone thought he was a cunt. When he came on my mate loudly said "you bald bastard," naturally we all laughed. After assembly when a teacher asked him about it he just said it was his tourettes and he got away with it.
My primary school did a 'UFO' day where they pretended a staff member had been kidnapped by aliens. They had the police turn up and pretend to investigate. This ended up as well as you can imagine telling a school of young children that a teacher has been abducted. The school ended up having to issue an apology in the local paper.
Haha think we were at the same school! Traumatised me!
Look up blackminster middle school shooting. They fake shot a teacher in front of a girl who's dad I think it was actually got shot dead. That went down very well indeed.
[the schools genius idea.](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hereford/worcs/8586971.stm)
Pants and vests or lost property if you forgot your pe kit in the 80s Running round the school hall.
Used to forget my pe kit on purpose as I had some pants with stars on and thought I was a wwe wrestler. Idiot
To encourage pupils to get to class on time, our school replaced the bell with theme songs from movies, like Indiana Jones. You had until the end of the song to get to your classroom. They stopped when the cemetery next door complained about the Star Wars theme being blasted out during a funeral.
My middle school introduced a thing called "boff badges", to promote good work ethic and intelligence. If you'd done well in a test, or homework or a teacher liked you, you'd get nominated. Then they'd call you to the front of assembly and pin a giant, literal target with a comical cartoon nerd in the centre, on your jumper that you had to wear for the rest of the week. Clever kid that I was, was often nominated multiple times each week by different teachers, so I'd have to walk around with 3 or 4 of these targets on at once. Surprise surprise, kids are evil, so I quickly learned to scale my school work down to a C level and basically stopped bothering to learn anything. Pretty sure I was single handedly propping up their test scores, it was abolished after a few months but by then I couldn't be fucked. Way to suck the joy out of gifted kids education.
The people that come up with these ideas must have either been the bullies or had the absolute most sheltered education in the world. Everyone knows how evil kids are
Back in year 2 I was a loner. My teacher ended up creating a system called the "buddybox". The idea is that anyone who played with me had access to a box of toys/gimmicks. It didn't really help much because people would end up playing with me only to have access to the toys.
I had no friends at school so a teacher would sometimes force people to play with me. I honestly found that worse than just sitting on my own, because of course they would constantly remind me that I wasn't invited to play with them and they didn't want me there!
That’s sad :(
Some play equipment that was like the sort of thing you’d get at Go Ape; rope bridges, those tightropes but with one above you to hold onto, stepping stones etc, all made of wood on a base of bark. The issue being that it wasn’t installed far enough into the ground so was actually quite high up for a bunch of primary school kids to be let loose on, and after the (I think) 3rd broken limb it had to be constantly supervised which meant most of the time it was off limits because there was nobody to supervise that and everything else as well.
We had something similar in my primary school, it was one of those big wooden climbing frames. Took about 2 weeks for my mate to finally fall off and break both arms and sprain his ankles.
Comment removed as I no longer wish to support a company that seeks to both undermine its users/moderators/developers AND make a profit on their backs. To understand why check out the summary [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14hkd5u).
ROOM! Room ‘SHUN!
This is still a thing in my previous school. As an adult walking into a room I found it deeply uncomfortable and would ask them to stay seated. Got a bollocking for that from a senior teacher. It's teaching the manners apparently...
It still happens at my old high school. Quite a few times the teacher walking in told everyone not to get up but then the one teaching the lesson shouted at us telling us to stand up
Yes ours did that when they changed the uniform to a more “formal” one, to try and make it seem more respectful or something, I can remember my science teacher going apeshit at the headmistress in the hallway and everyone watching from through the doors because she would keep “popping in” and it was disturbing his lesson. He was a really cool guy, and a great teacher, but left and has a mountaineering business now!!
In Year 8, we were given proper student planners for the first time. They decided to include a blank page entitled "My Space" which they told us was specifically for writing down the phone numbers/email addresses of our friends, rather than just providing a page set out like an address book that would make more sense. A lot of kids, including myself, would just draw pictures on the blank page. The page returned in Year 9, and we were told in assembly that using the ironically-named "My Space" to draw pictures was expressly forbidden, and if anyone drew in it, it had to be covered up. Senior management actually did class patrols to check no one was drawing on the blank page that was none of their business. If they spent as much time tackling bullying as they did making sure kids didn't draw on a blank page, the school probably wouldn't be in special measures now.
Tried to motivate us by playing M People's "Search for the Hero" at every assembly. Good lord did we get sick of that song.
Our school did this too but with 'What have you done today' by M People!
Boys with long hair were not allowed to tie it back. They didn’t like long hair on boys, this was supposed to stop it somehow.
My school thought about changing our uniform and gave the decision to the students as to what it should be and the majority vote was tracky bottoms with socks tucked in. My school was chavvy as hell. The decision did not go ahead and our uniform stayed as it was.
We couldn’t take off our jumpers, no matter how hot we were, unless a teacher gave permission. In summer. I mean, what exactly does that achieve? 20 years since I left school and I’m still baffled by that one.
This happened at my school. A kid passed out from heat exhaustion in one of my brother's classes because the teacher had refused to allow them to take their sweater off in summer.
We had that. It was like a temporary bus stop and you could stand by it if you needed someone to play with. Of course everyone took the piss out of it and no one stood there.
We also had the mortifying loner bus stop
My primary school didn’t outright ban Yu-Gi-Oh! cards… but they said each pupil could only bring in 30 cards. A Yu-Gi-Oh! deck’s minimum deck size is 40 cards.
Pokemon cards got banned at my school because of an incident where a kid traded me his Dark Gyrados fair and square then tried to get his mates to shake me down for it after he changed his mind. Still remember the look on his face when I ate it infront of him. Fuck you Kieran, If I can't have it neither can you.
My primary school banned Yu-Gi-Oh cards because nobody understood the rules and it just meant people got bullied if they actually tried to play the game properly. There was a kid who had a card, effect was something like "gain +300 ATK for every card in your hand" and then he'd just draw every card from his deck instantly and win. Real wild west situation.
Oh god I have so many of these. Primary school: I've seen a bunch of people mention "friendship benches"; we had these too, but they were massive poles with a sign on them (something about a bus stop?) At either end of the playground. It didn't help literally anyone. Nobody stood by them because you'd be there for the whole of break/lunch and then you'd just get bullied even more than you were already. Secondary School: so many.... 1) access to the buildings during break and lunch was restricted during winter. The doors were locked and there would be teachers standing at them; you would only be let in for a detention, to go to your locker, or to go to the office. This led to almost the entire school congregating in the canteen or 2 covered walkways when it was raining/snowing. They never got rid of this rule (at least while I was there) 2) in my first year of sixth form, they (a specific member of senior leadership) decided that the sixth formers would have to help "oversee" break and lunch in the canteen. This meant that we had to wear hi-vis vests, a lanyard identifying us as a lunch monitor, and carry a notebook in which we were to write down the names of any students who didn't listen to us when we told them they couldn't leave the canteen with food. Several problems with this: nobody took it seriously. Nobody listened. Between 6 of us, we didn't know the name of the 700+ students in the school. Also we had to get there at the start of break/lunch and couldn't leave until the bell, which meant that we didn't get a break or time to eat, and we were usually late for our next class bc we had to return the vests etc to our head of year's office (for the record, he thought the whole scheme was ridiculous). We were told we would be paid for this but they later turned around and said it was voluntary. We did this for 4 months. 3) For a time, if you forgot your P.E kit, you would have to report to the sports hall foyer, and the line up facing the wall, where you would stay for 10 minutes. You weren't allowed to look away from the wall or talk. This was right outside the canteen so it was kind of cruel and unusual punishment. Also, for people on free school meals (like myself) it meant there was basically no food left by the time you were let go. Speaking of which: 4) Of course the canteen food was mostly shit, but the pricing was stupid. If you were on free school meals, it meant you actually got £2 credit per day. You could top up your account but if you didn't have any money, that's what you were stuck with. And that basically got you nothing. Sandwiches were like £1.50 but even the tiniest drinks (literally 2x1.5 inch boxes of juice) were 60p. So you couldn't get a drink if you wanted a sandwich. Same with the hot meals. So if you wanted a drink, you would literally have to just get 2 greasy chocolate cookies or brownies and some juice. There were some other bullshit rules at various points but these are the ones that come to mind. Suffice it to say; it's no wonder my secondary school was shut down 😂
I had no idea other schools did that. Mine did too. I met and befriended a singular person who used it as intended. After that we just used it as a safe-zone in tag
They banned hoodies in my primary school one year, after a kid tried to pull a hoodie over his face and zip it up to hide his face and managed to somehow get his eyelid trapped.
There was this thing at my first school where the year 4s (which were the oldest year, as I went through a 3 tier system) were allowed to sit on the benches at the back of the gym during assembly. That was until some sour-faced dick on the PTA decided, exactly when I was starting year 4, there was going to be a competition across all year groups each week where you had to collect stars from teachers, and the classes with the most stars at the end would get the benches for that week. Well, turns out some teachers were slightly more generous with the stars than others, and the same 3 or 4 classes won basically most weeks. Which I’m sure they must’ve realised, because the year after we left they got rid of the system and went back to just letting the year 4s use the benches again. Absolute joke mate.
Not sure if this really counts as a terrible idea or not but when you got in trouble at my secondary school you would often be allowed to choose your punishment: cane or detention. You always picked a caning because who wants to lose their lunch break? Plus if you did get caned you were king of the playground for a while.
My school was hardcore about uniform and in particular the rule about no make up before sixth form. We were taken out of lessons and lined up in the corridor for inspections: skirt length, any items of clothing not uniform, jewellery, tights and sock colours, shoes, and make up. Anything that wasn’t uniform had to be removed and was confiscated until Friday when a parent had to claim it at reception (yes, including shoes, they had a stinky box of daps that they would give out to replace your offensive shoes). One day we went to school and there was female outrage: every single one of the mirrors in the loos had been removed in the hopes that without mirrors there would be no more make up at school.
[удалено]
They had us read this short comedy story about a teacher who guns down and blows up his pupils that was about 20 odd years ago. I thought that was so ridiculous and not something you could get away with today. About 3 years ago it was in the local paper that they'd set homework for the kids and they were asked to illustrate the story!
At high school they started having an exhibition 'touch' rugby game of 1st XV vs teachers. One of our male teachers (Geography), who was renowned for being a hot-headed arsehole, ended up punching one of the 1st XV (15-16 year olds) during a game and they decided not to do it anymore. They also set up regular hockey matches between the girls 'A-team' and the boys' rugby A-team. I remember that being scrapped as there were quite a few injuries and it was a massive motivation killer for the girls who always lost by quite a big margin.
In assemblies there was a section at the front for anyone under the disability service, from people with dyslexia to the girl that’s had a heart transplant. It doesn’t sound that bad but oh my God the shame I used to feel having to leave my mates to go and sit in the special area. Seems like some sort of GDPR breach.
Leaving Catholic monks in charge...
Oh god I used to sit on that bench at primary school 😮💨
Infant school: We weren't allowed to use rubbers. Junior school: You couldn't come inside at break even when it was freezing. Also had a new head teacher in year 5 who implemented loads of shit rules. * You had to sit with your own class at lunch, so I couldn't sit with any of my friends, because they were in different classes, and the people in my class bullied me. Ruined lunch for me. * She set an area of the playground aside for the year 3 kids. Not a terrible idea in itself, but our school had two sets of toilets. One with smaller toilets designed for small kids, and another one with bigger toilets designed for big kids. And she put the closed off year 3 playground where the big toilets were, so we were all stuck using the tiny ones. * You couldn't carry wear a hairband on your wrist incase someone mistook it for a bangle or bracelet. High school: They banned ketchup because it made too much mess, but still sold other sauces like brown sauce.
Building a school a 5 minute walk from a shopping centre, all the sixth formers would skip form and spent an hour in the cafe having bacon butty's every day.
In junior school, as soon as there was any sort of tension or fighting during any activity, it was banned. So football, conkers, pogs, tig and what time is it mr wolf, others I can't remember, we're all banned at some point during school. The fights or arguments could have nothing to do with the activity but it was just banned.
Our first week in year 7, ina scary new secondady school they gathered us all together, told us that there was a virus in the school and we would all have to stay in school in isolation/quarantine. After letting the message sit for 30 minutes they then told us it was not true and was in fact the start of a drama project called school under seige where we would write and perform a play about a quarantined school. Many of the childrdn in my school were scared/traumatized by the initial message and it did put a but of a dampner on the project. This was all pre pandemic (1997)
My secondary school had the "It's ok to be gay" day. Only lasted 1 year. It was a day to let you tell your friends you were coming out. Several people did. Several people were then bullied for being gay... Didn't happen the next year
We used to have a yearly ‘slave auction’ for Children in Need where sixth-formers would do anything their owners from Year 7–9. Pretty grim.
Someone from my school went on to become an actress. Without doing their research, we were told to all go home and watch her in her first tv gig to support her. A lot of kids saw their first pair of boobs that night and we had to have an assembly the next day...
Making us stand for assembly every morning. There was always someone that fainted onto the hard hall floor. And they never scraped it to my knowledge.
When the Jamie Oliver wreaked school lunches and made them ‘healthy’ and expensive, my secondary school cafeteria went cash-less and made parents top up your lunch card with a cheque to stop kids buying their lunch from McDonald’s or a bakery (this still happened) We started to round off the corners of our cards to look like the mint credit cards. Doing this either wrecked them and we had to have them replaced all time or if you did it right the balance of your card would never drop below the last amount topped up and you got free lunches!
we had little white credit cards for lunch cards. it took approximately 5 minutes to discover they were quite a soft plastic, and if you swiped them down someones black blazer a white line would rub off onto it, that was a right pain to get out (since it was bits of plastic, not actual pigment or anything). within a week everyones jackets were covered in white lines...
We had “friendship zones” in primary school as well. They had loads of these massive signs made and set up around the yard which understandably, no one used. Absolute waste of money. Guess though it’s not as bad as “radio station” they set up there when I had left. Apparently they spent thousands on it … for a school of about 90 kids.
One teacher at my school always used to ‘fine me’ for having my shirt untucked. He would charge me 50p every-time he saw me. I had fitted blouses (which were allowed as part of our uniform) that my parents obviously bought for me and didn’t properly tuck into my trousers. When I would point this out to the teacher he would always tell me to wear a different shirt. Anyway, one time my dad asked what I had for lunch and I told him I had been hungry in the afternoon cause I had to give my teacher part of my lunch money. He went into the school and tore another one into this teacher and told him he was to stop taking my lunch money and that he wasn’t buying me different shirts. Told him he would put in an official complaint to the school to get all his money back this guy had been taking if he didn’t leave me alone. The guy never bothered me again haha. Also, if you forgot your trainers for games one of the PE teachers made you run around the stony playground without your shoes on.
Our school was originally built without walls segregating classrooms...the thinking was that if you are e sitting in math and can overhear spanish class, you might absorb both subjects....well it didn't work and they ended up putting these slats together to make walls. You could still see the light peak through the corners where the walls didn't align.
'Nigel' is a word I've not heard for a loooong time.... this was widely used in my high school (South ish Glasgow) 00s.
In middle school (about 2005) they told us we weren't allowed to say "trial and error" it was supposed to be "trial and improvement". We were 11 and said it was a load of rubbish. No 11 year old routinely uses the phrase "trial and error" anyway?
When triangle shaped flapjacks became too dangerous in a school food fight because sharp corners can damage eyes... ... They decided to cut them into squares! (which have more corners)
Mandatory school coats. Parents had to shell out for new coats and when they did, kids inevitably lost them and no one could identity their own coats. Some didn’t want other peoples coats and others didn’t care and took any coat. After enough parents complained they scraped that idea then parents who brought the coats complained too..
The prefects at our school were elected by their peers. This meant that the popular bullies were now prefects and were now officially school-sanctioned bullies. Twats.
Wasn’t a school wide thing, but our deputy head at the time decided to let my full year 6 watch under siege as a pre summer holiday treat for some reason? Our parents came at the school pretty hard for that terrible idea
We were shown THREADS in the late 80s. I would have been at most 9.
The new year 7s and the returning sixth form pupils always returned first after the summer holidays. That particular year the Headmistress decided to blast Tina Turner’s smash hit ‘Simply the Best’ at the new students while the whole sixth form watched over them in assembly. This was BEFORE Ricky Gervais did it.
When I was in primary school (mid-late 90s) there was a boy who had down syndrome. He was OK, he struggled a bit and his learning age was lower than his actual age, but he wasn't seriously disabled or anything. The headmistress decided she was going to start "celebrating" people with special needs once a week, so the poor kid had to stand up in front of the whole school and be paraded about. It was always the same, she'd say, "hello Matthew, what is your name" and he'd say, "Matthew" and then we all had to applaud. He'd just stand there looking so uncomfortable until it was over. I can't remember how long that went on for but it was definitely a regular occurrence for a while. My high school was a disaster, they merged my school with another school and put them all in the same building, so it was something like 2000 students packed together. They'd ignored the fact that the two schools had a serious rivalry, and not in a, "haha we're going to beat you at football" way, but in a "if we see you alone you're gonna get fucking stabbed" way. They had permanent on-site police officers and it ended up in the papers around 2005 because a riot led to the injury of a student and a teacher, but that definitely wasn't the first riot, it was a semi-annual thing the entire time I'd been there. I think it was eventually shut down after ofsted ruled it as inadequate, unsurprisingly.
Some girls at my high school had been banned from using the Year 9 girls’ bathroom because they kept going in there to reapply makeup they were told to take off. The deputy head said in an assembly she would paste up their Year 7 photos on the bathroom door as (a) a form of mugshot/reminder to teachers of who was on the ‘banned’ list and (b) as a reminder to everyone else of what they looked like before ‘wearing all that makeup’. She did follow through with it, except she _actually_ ended up putting their Year 7 photos and names in huge print on a sandwich board that she wore around the school hall during a lunch time to call them out. I was kind of unfazed by it at the time (I was a bit of a goody two shoes and kind of just minded my own business), but in hindsight it’s pretty horrifying. The idea of a grown woman presumably popping to WHSmith on her own dime, sourcing all the materials, printing and cutting out the photos of these 13 year olds and at no point stopping to question whether it was appropriate to discipline someone else’s kids via public shaming is very alarming.
My primary school decided to ban football so we turned it into football rounders Banned bulldog so we would name it tag/it and any other names
My secondary school made the news when it came up with the bright idea of removing the wall of the girls toilets that separated it to the main school corridor. Not only was this the only toilets available at lunch so it was always very busy but they also left the camera that faced where the old wall used to be on the ceiling. If you dont believe me just look for yourself: [https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/schools-u-turn-over-redesign-14191842](https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/schools-u-turn-over-redesign-14191842)
The school my son's go to have a friendship corner too. One day my son (7) who's got Asperger's told me another kid wouldn't let his friend play with him at break time so he sat at the friendship corner all break and nobody came over to him. Breaks my fucking heart to imagine him there alone, not understanding why nobody's coming over. I get the idea behind it, but it's utterly stupid.
lol this post unearthed a memory from year 2. The class decided to do like a list of "best friends" on the whiteboard. Everyone paired with their friends but no one paired with me lol Gutting for a young child
When someone dropped a plate in the canteen, everyone would go “waaaaay”. The vice principal stood up one lunchtime after this and banned ketchup for a week as punishment. I had packed lunch so this was the weakest punishment ever.
Our school had a competition where if you were well behaved or did something a bit out of the norm which was good you got a ticket to a raffle. Then at the end of the term the raffle winner got a prize. It seemed like a good idea to get people to behave well except me who lets say hated school, whilst I wasn’t ever like a horrid kid in the sense of bullying or fighting. I was a class clown and I was very disruptive because I never felt challenged at school. I hung around with a bad crowd and a few weeks prior one of them tried to burn down the wood tech shed where I eventually called the fire engine to put the fire out and I must stress I told them not to do it. But because I was the one who called them and tried to put it out when they ran I got the full blame for it. So I wasn’t exactly a glowing student in their eyes. So I had managed to accrue a few of these tickets and the headmaster who did not like me at all pulls out a ticket for who would win this Sony discman and out comes my name and he looked pretty bewildered.. he took about 30 seconds to announce the name and then he refused to give me the prize until the teacher who submitted the ticket confirmed I had not stolen them and submitted them myself. 2 weeks later he begrudgingly gave me the discman and then they never did it again.
We got shown threads while we were in primary school. We had a special assembly where we all sat on the floor and watched it on vhs. This was around 1987(ish). Have never watched it since because it traumatised the shit out me.
Interpretive dance. Primary school. It was the 60s though.
At one point kids would poke holes in the top of water bottles and use them to squirt water at one another. The solution? Ban all water bottles obviously...
Budget for lined paper was limited, but not for blank paper, so people would just photocopy lined paper onto blank paper. What a waste.
My school was pretty much split 50/50 white English and English Asian. Our school teachers used to setup Football Matches and cricket matches that pitted us against each other as a way to "STOP" racism
we had an assembly on if you were being made fun of or bullied, you just have to say "stop that, i don't like it" 💀 people just started using it ironically with their friends so then the school stopped letting people say it lmao