For historians, this remains the great difficulty.
How much went unrecorded?
Former pupils repeatedly remember teachers using the slipper or ruler without writing anything down.
In some junior schools there may have been frequent classroom punishment while the official punishment book remained almost empty.
This makes comparisons between schools extremely difficult.
Suppose School A records 500 punishments and School B records only 50.
Was School A really ten times stricter?
Not necessarily.
School A may simply have had a policy requiring everything to be recorded.
School B might have recorded only punishments administered by the headteacher.
Without knowing the rules governing the register, the numbers alone can be misleading.
