Perhaps the most important lesson to emerge from the research is the danger of imposing modern assumptions upon earlier decades.
Someone who remembers very little of the 1970s may instinctively interpret school rules and punishments according to the attitudes of later years.
Yet British education during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s operated within a quite different social environment.
Practices varied not merely between countries, but between education authorities, schools, headteachers and individual classrooms.
Girls might be treated differently from boys in one school and much the same in another.
A punishment remembered as extraordinary in one part of Britain might have been regarded as routine elsewhere.
This is precisely why large collections of evidence are useful.
