Burnley Grammar School

People often say the cane done them no harm. Thankfully the cane was abolished in state schools in 1986 and in private schools in 1999. Often teachers refused to hit girls for quite serious offences but beat boys for much lesser misdemeanours. If a girl was hit it was usually a light tap. Our headmaster at primary school did not hit girls at all.

Likewise, bare-chested pe is a form of sex discrimination. True boys bodies are less defined at 5-9 years of age. This is also true of girls. At that age they have not developed breasts and are below the criminal age of responsibility for indecent exposure. However, parents would go mad if girls were forced to go topless.

In my view all pe kits should be unisex no matter what the age.

No boy/girl should be forced to pe in underwear and knickers. All schools should have a spare kit policy.

No boy should be forced to do swimming in brief style shorts. All should have the option of swimming in wetsuits or rash vests and long bermuda shorts.

All pupils should either be allowed to wear tracksuits over t-shirts and shorts or have compulsory sports trousers in the school to cover bare-legs to protect modesty and protect from the sun or cold weather.

Both boys and girls should have the same colour pe uniform. There should be no white shorts and T-shirts for boys. Girls would kick up a fuss if you could see their underwear under their sports gear.

There should be no compulsory football boots for boys. If girls doe pe in trainers then so should the boys.

The showering poicy should only be optional or recommended. There should be no compulsory showers or situations where girls have optional showers and boys mandatory showers.

There should also be no compulsory change of underwear or dictation that boys wear swimming trunks under shorts.

Football and rugby should at best be optional for boys if not phased out altogether in schools. All PE subjects should be gender nuetral.

Overall, PE kits must be unisex. Publis sector unions in school are quick to demand the end of sex discrimination against teachers but they are more relaxed about gender bias against male pupils. State sponsored mysandry may have been acceptable in past days when we had male conscription and illiberal divorce laws but in today's post feminist pluralistic society such rules have no place.

To Roger G.
Was the boy doing the handstand on the box "imported" from an older class for the photograph? He looks bigger than the other pupils in the photo. To me, that boy on the left of the group of four standing watching seems to me to be thinking "I don't want to have to do that. I thought I was coming to this school to learn Physics and Chemistry and Latin."

Rob, I suspect that if a boy made it clear he was that unhappy about doing PE barechested, his parents would send him to a school where shirts or vests were permitted. But I'd be surprised if many boys of that age were terribly bothered about it. I think it's a different matter when a boy reaches puberty, suddenly he may be more self conscious about having a six pack, whether his chest is more defined than other boys and several other body issues, especially if they do PE in front of girls. So I don't think a barechested uniform should be enforced for teenage boys, but at a younger age I can't really see that it matters.

Remember Mr Parry as am one of the boys(class3m?) in this photo (taken when BGS moved to the 'new'school in Kiddrow lane).We also did cross country races in snowy conditions also lightly clad,it did us no harm in fact toughened us up.Happy days!

But if the boys are unhappy with it they probably can't do anything.

Can't really see why this is such a big deal, we're talking about primary school children not teenagers. When I was that age the boys and girls had swimming lessons together, naturally the boys were all barechested while the girls were not. Does it really matter if that's the case in the gym as well? And as John pointed out, if parents are unhappy about their sons having to do classes with their tops off, they can always send them to another school.

Ofsted report from St Michaels, Bamford, Rochdale ...

http://clc2.uniservity.com/GroupDownloadFile.asp?GroupID=677164&ResourceId=1936957

Hi Rob, lots of things are enforced in school, you ahve to wear a uniform, you have to go to classes etc etc. Why should it be different for boys going barechested in PE? It's a policy that has it reasons (H&S, discipline, gender indetity, ..) as has any other policy. If you're not happy, go to another school that doesn't have has a different PE uniform!

John, boys may not need shirts for PE, but it cannot be right to force them to go without one. There is no need for that either.

I have found the offending school. All other St Michael's schools across the country allo boys to wear t-shirts and shorts but this one in Rochdale:

http://www.stmichaelscemidd.rochdale.sch.uk/our-school/school-rules

8. For P.E. boys are expected to wear shorts. Girls should wear knickers and vest (young infants and all Reception children), shorts and white t-shirt or black leotard (older infants and juniors.) Children will do P.E. in pumps or bare feet.

How do they justify this rule. Boys are expected to wear shorts and possibly pumps on their feet but says nothinh about knickers and vest for boys.

Why cant boys wear shorts and t-shirts? If girls can wear black leotards why cant boys wear black leotards with shorts on top like at professional gymnastic academies?

It seems the dead hand of Cyril Smith MP is still alive in working class male Rochdale and we all know what that "liberal MP" done to boys in children homes!

I wonder what the female teachers who often run these primary schools would do if they were forced to turn up to lessons in just a pair of shorts.

They would be going straight to their Trade Unions, go on strike and sue the local authority under the Equalities Act 2010. Well Sex Discrimination laws apply to all services and Education is a service. Equal protection for males and girls doesn't come into force at aged 18, children are covered as well.

If the school rule is that boys do PE barechested that that's the way it is. Stop going on about it as if it was a bad thing. Boys are not girls they do not need a top for PE, let them grow up into healthy men!

Look at rule 8 of the the school rules section of the St Michael's Church of England Primary School. They also seem to require boys to do PE without shirts, whereas girls can chose between shorts and shirts or leotards. The youngest wear vest and pants, but boys have to wear less than that all the way up to year 6

Now is not the time to go wobbly. There are still at least 2 primary schools in the UK that force boys do indoor pe, topless.

These shameful schools are

http://www.holmevalley.n-lincs.sch.uk/parents/key-information-1/school-uniform

Clothing for P.E.

Indoor
Girls - Black leotard

Boys - Black PE shorts

Outdoor
A change of clothing is required for outdoor games

Black Shorts and white T-Shirt

Trainers/black plimsolls—not shoes worn during the school day.

Track suit - advisable in cold weather


Online uniform ordering formation 2012

http://www.marshfieldprimary.co.uk/index.php?page=36

No child will be allowed to participate in gymnastics and games unless appropriate clothing and footwear is worn. Clothing for educational gymnastics and dance:

•Girls: T shirt / school polo shirt and shorts or leotard.
•Boys: shorts.

Larkshill remains a partial victory against state sponsored paedophilia because since 2009 boys have the option of wearing a vest and since 2013 the pe kit is now just "recommended" and not compulsory. Yet the school still thinks it is acceptable that boys aged 5-11 dress less modestly than girls.

http://larkshill.wakefield.sch.uk/school-uniform/

Pupils Recommended Dress for PE Indoor:

Boys: dark shorts and white vest/bare chest.

Girls: navy/black leotards (Reception to Y3); navy/black leotard or white T-shirt and dark shorts (Y4 – Y6).

Footwear is not worn for gymnastics or dance. Written exceptions for medical reasons.

This is indefensible on 7 grounds

1 There are no showers in primary schools so barechested boys have to put on their regular school uniform back on their dust covered bodies.

2 A boy with a skin infection on his back could pass it on indirectly through doing forwards rolls bare-top on gym equipment whereas girls are protected by leotards and t-shirts.

3 Under the age of 10 girls are below the age of discretion for criminal responsibility so cant be prosecuted for going topless and at prepuberty age dont need bra's for support or underwear to keep sanitary towels in place.

4 About 99% of primary schools in the uk require boys to wear t-shirts and there have been no freak accidents concerning boys getting their shirts tangled in gym equipment.

5 Girls are often allowed to wear t-shirts in schools and the pe teacher doesnt seem to be concerned about them hanging themselves on the gym equipment.

6 If you look at professional gym classes (ie outside school organisations) boys aged 3-18 often have to wear more clothes than girls.

Ie boys have to wear leotards with shorts on top to cover any bulge for gymnastics whereas girls often just wear leotards.

In ballet girls wear leotards and stockings with no underwear whereas male ballet dancers get to wear tshirts and shorts/tight trousers with optional vests and ballet belts/support underwear.

7 Pe is compulsory therefore boys have no choice but to do sport which is taught at a very basic level in primary schools. These are not adult sportspersons who have freely chosen their discipline and have voluntarily signed up to stringent rules. Therefore pe kits should be modest to placate muslims, radical feminists and shy boys!

I went to boarding school in the 1960s and there was no such thing as privacy. It was a shock on day one but at the end of a week it was normal.

We all slept in open dormitories for twenty of which there were five on each floor along with a further big open washroom that had basins, communal showers and toilets which had no partitions either though once we were about fifteen there were waist high partitions on the toilets but certainly no doors at any time.

Sports kit was white shorts and plimsolls or rugby kit or cricket whites as appropriate. If it wasn't rugby or cricket then be it gym, track, field, cross country or any other game it was white shorts and plimsolls. Like everyone else of my generation, underpants were not allowed either and trying to wear them resulted in a sore bottom.

Ridicule was the cure for shyness. I have to say I got over being shy very easily but I think some lads probably hated it before just accepting it.

Sports masters generally applied the plimsoll vigorously to bare bottoms, other masters used the cane in the privacy of their studies again to bare bottoms.

It was how things were and I've never thought it did me any harm and I liked school and was very happy there.

I do wonder about how boys grow up today. They seem uncertain of their identity and who they are, we didn't have those problems and I think we were better off with the perceived privations and discipline of the time than the boys of today are with their mollycoddling.

I remember doing cross-country along the streets near to our school.
All us boys were stripped to the waist and no-one thought anything of it.

I went to a boys boarding school where we swam naked. I'm not sure why it was insisted upon but it was just normal and group nudity was not unusual.

We slept in open dormitories, showered in communal showers, took off underpants for sport and showered in (different) communal showers afterwards often having two or three showers a day and to top it all off, we were caned on our bare bottoms.

After a couple of weeks I didn't think anything of being naked with my peers so swimmming certainly didn't bother me.

Cornwall, the nearest thing to a difinitive answer to the compulsory naked swimming years read;

http://voices.yahoo.com/the-demise-high-school-nude-swimming-us-8669909.html?cat=4

"Although almost non-existent today, institutional male nude swimming in the U.S. got its start at the YMCA in the 1890s. At the time, men wore wooly suits, which shed fibers, clogging the then sensitive water filters. It became traditional and mandatory for men and boys to swim au natural at these facilities, and many believe schools copied the policy of this respected institution."


".......one reason was discipline, and that boys were not expected to be bothered by nudity. "Nude swimming for boys was a no-nonsense, practical, easy, conforming and cohesive, method of handling 30 exuberant boys in one hour." Nudity had a calming affect for even the most boisterous boys."

Still others credit the military. Schools in the 60s were largely administered by the World War II generation, and during the war, there was little respect for male privacy. Many believe they transferred this norm to schools. And even in the early 70s, one man remembers a selective service physical where "long lines of naked guys being inspected for everything from flat feet to eyesight and hearing in a shockingly open environment."

".....Threads Clogged the Drains? Oh, Come On, This is the 60s"

"Although almost non-existent today, institutional male nude swimming in the U.S. got its start at the YMCA in the 1890s. At the time, men wore wooly suits, which shed fibers, clogging the then sensitive water filters. It became traditional and mandatory for men and boys to swim au natural at these facilities, and many believe schools copied the policy of this respected institution.

READ in full;
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-demise-high-school-nude-swimming-us-8669909.html?cat=4

I still cannot understand why so many schools especially boys boarding schools insisted on naked swimming. Is there a definitive answer?

I remember my pe and swimming lessons very well. From about age 9 - 15, PE was always in just white pe shorts. No question, that was it. If you didn't have your shorts, you just did it in your underpants.
Swimming was always done naked. For new boys, the walk down from the changing area to the end of the pool before a lesson was always odd as you felt very exposed but once you got used to it it was fine. As a boarder we had to swim naked at weekends as well although the older boys generally wore trunks. We never thought anything of it and in fact enjoyed it. At weekends we were often supervised by a female games teach or a housemistress and this was no problem. Any other female however might have been different.

My first experience of barechested PE actually came when I was 16, probably much older than most of the others who have posted their recollections here. Basically I moved to a different school for the sixth form and I was surprised to find that PE was still compulsory. It didn't occur to me that I might need specific PE kit either - at my old school nobody had bothered too much about what you wore. There was an official PE kit but any kind of top/shorts/trainers combination was usually acceptable.
At my first PE lesson I discovered this was no longer the case. All the other boys wore a vest in school colours, white shorts and socks and running shoes. Thankfully my shorts were white but my coloured t-shirt and socks immediately attracted the PE teacher's displeasure. He demanded to know where my vest was and seemed less than impressed by my plea that I hadn't realised I needed one. I wasn't even sure what he meant when he ordered me to 'do it in skins' - I'd never heard that term at my old school! Most of the other lads were laughing as the exasperated teacher barked at me to take my t-shirt off, as well as the offending socks. I felt very self conscious as I went out to the gym in just shorts (thank heavens I hadn't had to take those off too!) and trainers. It wasn't that I was embarrassed about my upper body, but it felt weird to be the only barechested boy among a group I hardly knew yet and I was very aware of standing out as the new boy.
Before the next PE lesson I got hold of a school vest and wore it as we went to the gym. However, before long I had to take it off again - we were split into teams for a game of basketball and this time I understood what the teacher meant when he announced that my team were skins. The good thing was that this time I wasn't the odd one out, all my team-mates had to go barechested as well. I got talking to one of them, who told me 'skins' games had been regular practice all the way through the school and he said that had encouraged him to make sure he kept in shape and looked after his body properly. To be honest, the results were pretty impressive! I could see the logic of that and I decided to try and do the same over the next two years. Looking back, I think it's a pity I didn't have to go barechested before then and a pity for today's young men that they're never required to at all.

Hello Donald,

I remember the first time I went barechested at school as it was a warm September's morning and that was OK. The school very kindly rostered 2 double games lessons and 2 double PE lessons each week. We weren't so fortunate at the end of week when we were taken outside and stripped down in the pouring rain, something we'd get used to - but that was a suprise at the time.

@ Laura, it was certainly the case at the Woodlands school in Coventry, a fact reported by local journalist Chris Arnot in his various remeniscences of his schooldays there. It was (and still is) an all boys school.

In our junior school we had an outside pool, not much more than a tank really. I can recall in all weathers going out across the tarmac playground in bare feet and swimming trunks. There was due to some architects oversight only one changing room in the school, that was reserved for the girls, the boys changed into their trunks in the corridor, modestly protected only by a hasty arrangement of stacked chairs. After the swim, boys and girls showered together (in our costumes) in the sole changing room.

When I was at school, gym class was always done barechested and barefoot. The teachers made us dress like this so that we knew our place, and it certainly made us feel uncomfortable, especially when we did class with the girls. I remember trying to cover my navel and nipples in my first class, and the other boys were embarrasses as well, though the girls loved it.

To Pete S

How did you feel when u found out you had to do P.E barechested for the first time?

Our lessons were done with either all barechested or half the class left in vests depending on our teacher's whim.

At the start of every PE lesson our teacher made us lads line up just in vests and shorts and then picked who he wanted to strip and then your vest came off. It was exactly the same outdoors too it didn't matter what the sport was. There was a "core" group of 4 lads in every class (I was one in my class) who he always kept stripped regardless until we left at 18.

The way the school was built half the classrooms overlooked the yard and fields so you were assured of an "audience" when stripping to the waist.

In reply to Stuart, I had a PE teacher who made me and another boy do an entire term in shorts only. Our old teacher hadn't minded us wearing T-shirts instead of regulation PE vests, or the wrong colour shorts or socks - but this one certainly did, as we soon discovered at the first lesson. He announced that, as we clearly found it difficult to remember the correct kit, he'd make it easier by restricting our kit to white shorts and nothing else, bare chests and bare feet.
The two of us also had to do a punishment in just shorts which involved running several laps of the gym and then going straight to the swimming pool, where we had to swim lengths, then climb out and do press ups on the poolside, dive back in for more lengths and repeat the press ups. It was exhausting and also embarrassing as our shorts were fairly see through when wet.
The kit restriction also partly applied to outdoor PE - we were permitted to wear trainers or football boots in addition to shorts, but we still had to do each lesson bare chested. Which wasn't a lot of fun when it was cold or raining! I was relieved when the term ended and I was very careful to bring the right kit after that.

Ron Parry shown in the photos was a cruel bully of a man who relished in beating young kids (11 upwards) on the bare buttocks with the rubber sole that he had cut off a large gym shoe.
He was particularly nasty to overweight kids and delighted in making them do things that were clearly beyond their capabilities like watching them struggle to try and climb a rope while he belittled them in front of everyone else. He also liked to make a class of the younger ones parade through the showers naked while he stood and watched.
As a fat kid he often picked on me but I got the satisfaction of upstaging him once. We were obliged to watch play table tennis when the school got a new table. As he beat one kid after another and crowed about how good he was and how poor they were I made a comment that I thought he was pretty rubbish, only beating kids who had never played before. I meanwhile although out of shape had a table at home and played at every opportunity ( and I was good).
He challenged "the fat boy" to a game. I started slow and he got five or six love ahead. Baying at me that I should have kept my "gob shut" he posed at every point won.
I then got annoyed at him and went on to paste him by 21 to ten. Everyone there cheered and he glowered at us all. He insisted on a rematch saying my win was a fluke. I won the second and third games so he made it best of ten.
I then began to let him win (narrowly) because I knew that if I didnt he would have been even meaner towards me in the future. He won the set by one point (as I had had enough- I knew he couldnt beat me and that was enough for me) and he boasted it to all concerned. I often wondered after if he really knew which of us was best?

I don't have any direct experience of schools that required their pupils to swim naked as a matter of routine, but my senior school did require this of lower school girls (11-14) who forgot their swimming costumes. If we forgot our regular kit for PE lessons, we used to have to take part in our underpants, but obviously this wasn't suitable for swimming. I was actually one of the first girls in my class to forget my costume, and that day I had no idea what would happen. I approached my gym mistress with some trepidation, but I was so shocked when she simply told me to strip naked and fiel out to the pool with the rest of my class. A classmate was stood behind me and she told a similar tale of woe, with the same result. We undressed next to one another and tried to hang back but it was still obvious to the whole class that while they had their costumes on, we were totally bare.

I have read on several occasions about boys of all ages having to swim naked & I wonder why schools had this rule. Can any comment whether there is any benefit in discarding swimwear?

At first certain things make sense and then on reflection they do not.

Pe kit did not exist in my junior school, boys would strip to the waist, swap their shoes for a pair of pumps and do PE in their everyday shorts, all boys wore shorts then.
My secondary school specified a top for outdoor work only, however despite of that a T shirt was routinely worn in the gym except for shirts vs skins. (makes sense for shirts vs skins if you have a top to take off)

There was a no underpants rule and although I don’t remember any checks it was pretty much adhered to. We showered together nude. It was the norm any boy covering up was considered to be a bit of a wuss.

Now if it makes sense that kid’s should make a complete change out of their day clothes for hygienic reasons, then why was that not the case in junior school?

Similarly when you consider that most boys would spend their breaktimes running around and playing footy or whatever, they would presumably return to the classroom as sweaty as if they had been doing PE?

From a personal perspective I cannot see any reason why boys should not do PE shirtless and in a minimum of clothing. One might argue that especially in these days some boys may be self conscious about showing too much blubber, but then if one is to promote self confidence and a better body image whatever shape one is in, to cover up seems counter intuitive.

I was at school during the 60’s and the 70’s and there was at least one school with it’s own pool where the boys swam naked, hard as that is to believe nowadays.