Punishment books provide an unusual opportunity to examine one of the oldest arguments surrounding corporal punishment: Did it actually...
For historians, this remains the great difficulty. How much went unrecorded? Former pupils repeatedly remember teachers using the slipper...
Scotland presents another difficulty altogether. English schools commonly maintained punishment books, although practices differed between education authorities. Scotland did...
British influence travelled overseas too. Australian schools used punishment registers which were sometimes imported from Britain and sometimes specially...
Modern readers may find one aspect particularly difficult to understand: the extent to which many parents accepted corporal punishment....
The position of girls was particularly complicated. From the 1950s onwards, mixed secondary schools increasingly appointed female deputies or...
Some surviving punishment books contain another intriguing feature — a column for the initials of a manager, clerk or...
Many punishment books disappeared when schools closed. Others found their way into local archives, education authority collections or private...
It would be easy to regard punishment books simply as curiosities from a harsher age. They deserve rather more...
Perhaps that is what makes these battered old registers so fascinating. Behind every carefully ruled column was a real...
By the 1970s the old disciplinary system was already being questioned. Teachers, parents and educationalists were debating whether corporal...
There is an argument one comes across again and again when the subject of corporal punishment is discussed: that...