A question for British members

@SunshineGirl What was the punishment - eat an extra fairy cake? My mum was an HE teacher, but in her day it was Domestic Science!

@MartinII I had to sit outside te headmistress's office and explain why I had been sent out of the class. She basically agreed with me 😅 But it still got reported on my school record and I had to come back in my lunch hour to do the lesson again 😒

@SunshineGirl remind me not to come to dinner or if I do I will bring something jawohl!😂👍

@MartinII Yes, artificial ranking against one's fellow class-mates; not against the marking system of internal tests and certainly not of the real, externally-moderated examinations.

As far as I was aware my school was no different from any other British LEA one within the national education system of the time (mid-1960s), though it did have two streams by relative ability for the GCE Ordinary-Level courses*. I forget how and when you were put in which stream.

I had heard of people being colloquially called "top" or "bottom" or whatever of the class, but until now had no idea it once existed in reality beyond perhaps the occasional throw-away comment by some teacher or parent. Certainly never as a formal Report judgement!

Perhaps governors and head-teachers were give more latitude then, so some might have run these absurd class-level pseudo-"competitions" by which a pupil can be called top or bottom of his or her class - overall or by subject though? If that did happen, I hope it has long gone.


*(I was in the "lower" one, which taught only French, not French and Latin, and General Science rather than separate Physics, Chemistry and Biology courses. The extra hours this gave were dedicated to practical subjects: Domestic Science for the girls, Woodwork or Metalwork for the boys, and Technical Drawing. The subjects were all to GCE O-Level and the ones common to both streams (Maths, English Lit. & Lang., History, Geography) were to the same syllabi.)

@ArishMell Yes, the rankings I remember were for individual subjects. I don’t think anyone attempted a comprehensive ranking for all subjects taken together, which would indeed have been absurd.

At my (direct grant grammar) school, after the first year we were divided into “fast” and “regular” streams. “Fast” was meant literally. The fast stream took O levels after four years rather than five, and to facilitate that took fewer subjects than the regular stream. In those days, unlike today, specialisation was the watchword. At the beginning of the second year those of us in the fast stream had to choose between studying German, Greek or Geography. Those three were chosen, I liked to imagine, because of their common initial letter rather than for any better reason.

@MartinII Interesting! A very different approach.

Ours had the same 5 years for both the "Latin" and "non-Latin" streams, but the former seemed to add to their curriculum, rather than reduce it. I think they offered German as an option as well.

That does seem a curious choice - I can understand a choice between three languages, but not between two languages and one non-language subject.

@helenS Surely children should be encouraged to do both - which, on the whole, they were at my school

@MartinII I was much much too competitive, as a school girl 😑

@helenS Ah. I was terribly nice and cooperative - well, except when I wasn’t.

@Andy72 that's what I'm asking

@MartinII I have seen my mother's old reports from the 1930s. They had it back then.

@SW-User what years were you at school?

@BridgeOvertroubledWaters I left school 4 years ago