One particularly useful piece of contemporary evidence concerns Linskill High School in North Shields.
The Newcastle Evening Chronicle reported on 12 January 1976 that two female pupils had been punished following an assault upon another girl.
Headmaster Donald Simpson defended the school’s disciplinary policy and said he had received no complaints from parents about the use of corporal punishment for serious offences, particularly violence.
The report is valuable because it provides something Facebook memories generally cannot: a contemporary newspaper account produced at the time of the event.
Another contemporary report stated that the girls were fifth-form pupils aged about 15 and that punishment was administered to their hands.
The local Director of Education was quoted as saying that disciplinary responsibility rested with the headmaster and that corporal punishments had to be entered in the school’s punishment book.
Whatever one thinks of the policy from a modern standpoint, such reports provide useful evidence of how discipline was understood and publicly discussed during the period.
