UKC

I'm guessing that the phrase "Home Economics" gives a good clue to my age, but since these subjects were not prioritised since the early eighties, are we now seeing those results in an obese society?

Definitely! I lament the days when we were actually taught something useful in school, before it became a holding pen for future worker drones and consumers!

I may eat too many takeaways and take negligible quantities of exercise but that's on my head as I can cook a mean bread and butter pudding if pushed and am not too shabby at the 1500M (although the last time I attempted it was circa 1992)

I seem to recall having arou innd 2 home-ec classes, I guess around mid 70s.  I do remember what I cooked - in one lesson it was chocolate mousse, in the other a croque monsieur.  Neither of those dishes would I describe as being exactly healthy eating.  Not a cast iron data driven scientific result, but I can't help notice a large number of middle aged fatties around.  I'd personally look elsewhere for the rise in obesity.

Perhaps you do have something in the lack of exercise suggestion though (presumably what you were getting at with your PE mention).  I do recall almost nobody was dropped off via car at school.  Everyone walked and/or got the bus.  Appears to be less the case now (or am I wrong).

Thinking more earnestly about it, I put it down to the decline in popularity of smoking.  You couldn't beat a Will's Whiff or two to take the edge off the appetite.  My grandad swore by them (or at them, can't quite recall which).

Unless my memory is faulty, which is quite possible, experience as a student in the early eighties wasn't massively different to the kids I taught fairly recently. In fact I'd say I did less actual cooking than they do now. There probably has been a move away from practical skills like ironing a shirt, sewing a button back on etc. to more theory, design a balanced multicultural menu. (which was fish and chips, for some, in West Cumbria last term 😊) 

This is also true for what used to be woodwork and metalwork and is now part of DT. Less making more designing and justifying your decisions. 

When I was at college in early 80s I basically lived off student union chips and gravy (18p) or if I was flush student union chips and beans (22p).

I remember Home Economics, which was actually quite good, as we started off how to make sandwich, then progressed from there, so we ended up with some rudimentary skills.

PE I'm less sure about. It was essentially run round the football pitch; the fast ones are all going to be in the various school teams, the slow kids are going to be mercilessly bullied by the fast kids and PE teachers, the rest of you useless lot will be left to stand around with hands in pockets in the pouring rain for four years.

All PE taught me was I'm useless any any form of team sport and it's best avoided if at all possible.

I think we did a fair bit of PE at school in the 80s and 90s? I think the major problem with it was that it seemed to be designed to make sure everyone who wasn't naturally sporty did what they were told to until they left school and then came out of it thinking they hated all forms of exercise. I don't know what the state of it is now, but I feel like the stuff we did would have been improved by more support, more options, more streaming by ability and arguably more "theory" so that if / when you took up some form of exercise in later life then you'd come to it with a bit of an understanding of health and fitness and injury and how to train and suchlike.

Cookery / Home Economics is an interesting one - I didn't do any at all, my partner did a load of stuff that treated it as a precursor to going into the food industry, so they spent a whole term doing questionnaires and researching preferences and stuff and about one lesson actually cooking something. I guess there's historically been an assumption that everyone who needs to cook for themselves gets taught how to do it by their parents, but it seems like people are now cottoning onto the fact that this isn't always true and that teaching kids how to cook some cheap, healthy family dinners is actually going to be a pretty good use of their time in the long run.

Similar for me, although prices had more than doubled by the late eighties. Four football matches a week as well as training sessions meant I thought I could eat whatever I wanted. 

I did no cooking at all at school. I didn't learn to cook meals until I was in my twenties and had a housemate who was into food (I mean I could follow a recipe before then but I was a bit clueless). I'm still surprised now at how many people my age can't cook.

I did a lot of sport though. And that's translated into being quite active now.

However my children in state primary school do lots of healthy eating activities - and cooking - and do PE twice, a sports club, swimming and usually judo / dance every week in school. So I do think things have improved. I'm also going to get them to cook once a week once they are in high school (I think).

When was that then? The state school system had its roots in the industrial revolution and the requirements of industrial capitalism for a compliant and amenable workforce. It’s always had at least a partial remit to produce workers. 
I think your point hinges on the issue as to what’s useful? Being trained to fit the requirements of economy and society, or acquiring a wider range of skills (in the broadest sense) for life?

I’m a parent of three teenagers currently/recently in the school system in Scotland.

Home Economics still exists as a practical subject with pretty much the same amount of cooking as when I was in secondary school in the 1980s.  The menu has been updated thankfully, my kids had not been subject to the fun which was removing the tubes from a lump of liver with a butter knife.

PE still compulsory up to and including 4th year (roughly 16 years old).  I didn’t do PE after 14, although I think asbestos being discovered in our PE hall had a fair bit to do with the sudden cessation of classes for all but the most keen.

HE still a thing. Only now there is a bit more to learn about nutrition and food sourcing.

PE still a thing. Jocks love it, nerds hate it. Just like the olden days.

It is much better in most schools now. There is still a ace for the school football, netball, hockey teams but PE lessons should be about giving kids the opportunity to experience activities that might promote a heathier lifestyle.  Zumba, Spinning, Aerobics, Trampolining and weight training were options I can remember of the top of my head. Indoor climbing and bouldering were quite popular at a previous school

Ha.  The benefits of youth.  I ate that badly I don't know how I escaped scurvy.  Weights, running, yoga, 20mile round trip on the bike into uni and stuff meant I was (at least on the face of it) super fit.  Didn't think so at the time, but looking back at old photos...

Thinking about it, overall my diet probably wasn't that bad, but the drinking culture after matches/training was a different matter. At the time it wasn't any different at many professional clubs. 

Agree with that. A lot of people just think that nothing is taught at school these days!

Even had a restaurant at my childrens comp school where the parents could get meals. 

That was your choice though!

I lived-in in college for four years, and the delicacies on offer in the dining hall included dishes known as train crash, poo-onna-plate, and greasy tea. I once made the mistake of asking what one particular vat of bubbling brown ... stuff ... was, and was told "I dunno, flower, but I wouldn't eat it!"

(Then again, the city centre boasted an establishment that, at least according to the sign, sold penis burgers. They did rather good chips IIRC.)

My age group seemed to be a bit of a transition period compared to experiences of younger family members- secondary school in the early noughties. 

PE was still pretty well encouraged, two hour long sessions a week plus whatever else you did as extra-curricular (Jeez that was an awful phrase...), although it was a small town in Yorkshire so the school didn't lack for space. Still with old fashioned PE teachers that had a classroom subject as the day job with PE on the side.

The school had good facilities for cookery but it seemed to be falling out of favour. 

My daughter is doing Home Economics at school. It's called Food Technology now, but as far as I can tell it's the same thing. She brings nice stuff home for us to eat, just like I used to to do when I did Home Economics.

She also goes to PE, and it sounds a lot more varied and interesting than the version I bunked off from for most of my school career.

Spending toooo long on’t t’internet is a bigger cause of obesity…..

Stories of these subjects demise seem to be hugely overstated! Don't worry HE - now normally called Food Tech - and PE are very standard secondary school subjects. You can do both at GCSE and at least PE at A level at the school where I teach.

Now actual Economics - there's a subject that seems to have almost disappeared in the state school system since I did in normal comp at the turn of the 90s. Still strong in independent schools supposedly.

About the same as my experience of HE in early mid nineties. To answer the title question.

Not really in the case of HE. Vaguely remember one or two classes but nothing much. PE was a couple of sessions a week of mostly team sports. Shedload of space for sports round the school which surprisingly a quick google maps check indicates is still there and not flogged off for housing.

We did HE only as one of the rotating non-academic subjects in the first year at comp: HE, woodwork, metalwork, pottery, art, needlework. I think I recall making bread rolls and plaits.

PE was a mix of team and individual sport. I discovered i enjoyed cross-country running which we did every week. My results were 4th, 2nd and 1st thereafter. I think we played football, hockey and cricket, and did various track and field sports.

I cooked for myself at uni, apart from the odd ratburger and chips in the union.

As a 10 year old, I guess you don't have much perspective on these things.

As a school kid in the late 70s, PE was alternately rubbish, miserable or downright dangerous (speaking as a 7 stone tighthead prop). The only exceptions were Pirates (a tag game around the gym mats, equipment and wallbars) which was ace, and a walking race I won one sports day by virtue of the fact that none of the other kids took it seriously until I was too far in front to catch.

The only food I recall preparing in Cooking classes (as they were called then) was cheese on toast and a Victoria sponge. While these have been staples of my diet ever since, and I am still fairly slim, I wouldn't hold them up as something to be emulated today.

I OD'd on marzipan while making Christmas cake during a HE lesson circa 1983. 

Battenbergs are my kryptonite.

True.  There was a salad bar there too.  That was around 60p a serving though, so somewhat beyond my pocket.  Anyway, I wasn't trying to make any sort of wider point with that particular anecdote - it was purely a conversational response to RobAJones previous post. 

Have you considered that things might have changed considerably since you were at school? Lessons on healthy eating have been pretty common for a long time and in my experience by the time they reach secondary school most kids know the good from the bad. Whether they make the right choices is another matter.

As with all these sorts of societal changes its really difficult and probably wrong to try to pin it down to a single cause.

I'm a teacher so obviously have a different perspective but I get a bit tired with people in the media and social media proclaiming what schools are or do based on their own experience of decades before. Education has changed massively.

I remember school PE and Home Economics as horrible experiences which put me off exercise and cooking for years. 

I remember PE at school.  The teacher was psychotic and it put me off exercise for about ten years and team sports for life.

These days he'd have been in court, back then he was eventually forced to retire.

That's only one half of the equation, you forgot PE, which was the enforcement arm of HE. Obese, (or even slightly overweight), kids mercilessly bullied by other kids, egged on by deranged PE teachers...

It sounds like teachers can't teach it. Just like the older days

the only cooking I did at school was on primuses when camping - master the stove, cook or starve.

You have my sympathy. There is a lot of crap about the good old days.

This.  And that if you're unlucky enough to be the fat kid with zero aptitude for sports and no spacial awareness then the psycho PE teacher is going to have a field day taking the p*ss out of you for the enjoyment of all the fit / sporty kids, for the whole time you're there.

I'd love to go back in time to those lessons in my current form.  I'd batter the c*nt.  

Home Ec didn't teach us much about cooking in my high school in the 90s. I remember making a fruit salad and burning some flapjacks! I learnt to cook when I went to university. I would buy things and experiment. I am pretty good at eating almost anything, so my, mostly awful, experiments never went to waste!

PE was my least favourite subject, until the summer term when we used the outdoor swimming pool. The rest of the year, it was put to a class vote for hockey or netball (never any other choices for girls), and most chose netball because you didn't get dirty. I can't throw, or catch, and was a good head and shoulders shorter than most, and never understood why you could only run as far as the next line! I liked hockey, you got to run all over the place in the mud with a big stick! 

When we got to swim in the summer term, it was usually just me and one other girl who did it, the rest of the girls would miraculously have their period for the whole term! And obviously, there is no way you can possibly swim on your period! (The pool was allegedly heated, but we were pretty sure it was only the sun which heated it!) So me and my pal swam with the boys. 

Now, I eat healthily and cook from scratch all the time. I run, cycle, climb, swim and work as an outdoor pursuits instructor! 

Overall, I don't think I lost out from the uselessness of school to teach me these things!

For me, up to Year 10, PE was a waste of time.  It was all about forcing us to play rugby, cricket or hockey (as appropriate to the season) despite the fact that I have utterly awful coordination and it did nothing but put me off exercise.  (Yes, OK, for those who have met me I do *look* a bit like a rugby player, albeit one who's had a bit much pie, but I can't throw, catch or kick so am useless at all ball sports).

From Year 10 up you got a choice of options which was much better.  In my view that should be the case from Year 7 up*, else you alienate people from exercise entirely.  Most high schools are big enough to offer choices if they have whole year groups doing PE at once and enough teachers to manage it properly.

The whack to self-esteem about being rubbish at the sport you're effectively forced to play is massive.  Yet there's probably a sport or other physical activity out there for most people, it's just about finding which one and encouraging it.  And much as schools love showing off about competitive sports teams, that for many will mean something other than a team sport - for instance climbing!

* I don't say primary because much of that is just mucking about on gym equipment, but had someone properly taught me how to climb a rope I might actually have been able to do it rather than just looking frustrated!  But the same applies to those primary schools who just make you play football.

PE taught me valuable lessons in time management. If anything distasteful was in the offing (football for instance) I would use my time much more productively by hiding in the library.

I must have been lucky since the PE sadistic moron teacher seems a common occurence. Our PE teachers whilst not exactly amazing werent bullies and although tried to push everyone to exercise stopped way short of being sadistic arseholes.

The only real bullying I can remember was all us kids trying it against the local community cop who turned up to join in some classes especially after they somehow managed to be busy on the cross country run day.

I agree and in my experience that is now more common, although usually on a rotation system, as

Although this is possible, the impact doing this for all year groups would have negative  staffing and timetabling consequences in other areas. Also getting 270 kids changed at the same time would have been problematic. 

I'm not sure they exist anymore in the state sector. Participation rates in PE lessons are a big concern, most staff go out of their way to persuade/encourage students to take part. You can't really attempt to  bully kids into doing PE now, without getting yourself into serious trouble. 

When I was a Head I could cope with the media doing this. The trouble is, it's also exactly what politicians with the power to determine curriculum and accountability do. Take a bow, Michael Gove, you tw*t.

Crikey, you really messed up the fruit salad recipe!

I can remember the painful pick-up process for team/ball games where I was usually the last to be chosen. I can remember playing rugby where as someone with a bit of running ability I finished up on the wing where my main aim was to keep ahead of the ball so it couldn’t be passed to me. A bit later when my endurance developed being brought up in a cycling family the PE staff realised I was the school’s second best cross country runner behind someone called Kenys Feltham whose feet never seemed to actually touch ground. Kenys and I - he also had no ball sense - were eventually allowed to spend every games lesson on our own cross country training for things like county championships over ploughed fields and I never had to touch a ball again. When in VIth form we suddenly moved from Bucks to Somerset. A few days after arrival there it was sports day, where I set a new school record of 4’50” for the mile with no running training. But I was doing 8,000 miles a year on my bike at the time and time trialling most Sundays in the season. Best was 2nd in the Charlotteville CC 50mile in 1963 (or maybe it was 1962). Anybody else there?

Depends how important we think the obesity crisis is.  If it is important, a way needs to be found, because presently being forced to play sports they hate is alienating a lot of kids from exercise.  My school did it (for Y10/11) by having some of the options off site in places, e.g. the local pool, with their own changing facilities.

 AS someone who had to cover PE lessons now and again, the biggest change I noticed was the absolute refusal of any of the boys to get a shower after a session playing football. Since I was only covering for an absent colleague it seemed pointless to make a fuss over it but it certainly wouldn't have happened when I was a kid.

My Niece teaches PE.  One of the electives is mountain biking , which I would have loved.  For me it was track and field or table tennis. Though we did do frisbee football in late 70s / early 80s. PE teachers were fine.

Do you think.not showering after playing football is a problem?

We used to be forced to shower but it was rather pointless when all you had done was changed into football kit and stood in a field for the entire lesson.

So many facts are proven today that school is not at all important for a good living...

Exactly. Get changed into shorts, stand around in a field for an hour, strip naked and cram into a communal shower with a bunch of abusive wankers*. That was 40 years ago and I'm still scarred by it.

*As in some seriously unpleasant people. One of them went on to become a serial rapist.

Also how much effect schools can have in it. The pilots looking at extra physical activity and health eating at school weren't encouraging. Also, how many KS4 kids are allowed to miss PE to do extra literacy/numeracy etc. should we prevent schools from doing this? 

I'm not really sure you can force kids to pIay a sport anymore, but I agree if anyone is, it is counterproductive. I thought the general consensus was  that this practice was far less common now, than when most contributers went to school, yet childhood obesity is becoming more of a problem? Similar with school meals, giving kids a choice doesn't seem to have helped. 

Yep, fairly common, especially if the off site facilities aren't to far away, but travelling time quickly eats into 50/60 minute lessons. Double lessons could help with this but again have implications. Staffing is another issue, you really want someone enthusiastic / knowledgeable otherwise those offsite activities simple become a skive for those pupils we are concerned about. Perhaps, at secondary level, we should be prioritising KS3 provision, by the time kids are 15 teacher/parental input has less of an impact. But since it didn't seem to have any effect with primary school age kids, I'm probably wrong.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29436364/

The first is a randomised controlled trial of the West Midlands Active Lifestyle and Healthy Eating in School Children (WAVES) intervention*. This involved almost 1,500 five and six-year-olds from 54 primary schools, and was by no means light touch. Lasting for 12 months, it included:

30 minutes of additional moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) on each school day;

termly cooking workshops during school time, when parents were invited to learn with their children;

a six-week programme to encourage healthy eating and increase physical vitality, delivered by the local professional football club;

information sheets supporting children and their families to be active over the summer.

Gangnam Style!

I'm talking about kids who had worked up a sweat running around for 40 minutes.

Odd that Hoo should mention serial rapists in the shower. One of the  approximate year group who refused to take a shower i mentioned previously turned out to be a serial rapist himself, ending his career by hanging himself in a forest with a suicide note which did not reflect well on me,  his English teacher. 

And all this after I had initiated him and a couple of classmates into the joys of moorland grit with a walk up to Laddow and an enjoyable ascent of Long Climb.

At school I learned to cook a Yule log, a chocolate banana cake and some sort of tray bake. 

So.... That's a healthy diet. 

PE taught me that rugby was for the bigger kids. 

Thank goodness for outdoor pursuits!

Obesity is due to food, not exercise. Exercise is important for bone, heart, lung and mental health. Food is where the weight comes from.

The kids from the local high schools here pour out into the nearest shop every lunchtime and buy sweets, crisps, energy drinks etc. Back when I was at school, you weren't allowed to leave the premises at lunchtime. Of course, we could still buy junk on site, but options were more limited and people didn't generally buy as much. 

It is encouraging to hear from various contributors here that schools are now doing more to educate kids on good nutrition etc, but from what I see in our area I would suggest that the knowledge isn't translating into practice. 

I think our attitudes to food probably need to change at a societal level. Everywhere you go, sugary foods and drinks are promoted, they are the easy things to buy and snack on. It can be really hard in some areas to eat healthy food on the go, and we have busy lives now so we do eat on the go a lot. 

PE. What a nightmare when I was 13-14. All I remember is a rope going up to the gym roof. Everyone could climb it except me

At least the other kids and teacher didn't laugh at me or mock me

I totally hated the rest of gym too, And all sport in school except cricket

I can't think of many kids working up a sweat in school PE! They mess around for a bit, maybe some half heartedly knock a ball around in some way or other, some stand there and do their best to avoid a ball coming near them and then they go back inside!

Really? You are surprised that kids going through puberty, the most awkward age of bodies changing, are scarred by having to get in a communal shower?? Can you imagine being the only girl with no breasts yet, or on your period and having blood run down your leg or tampon string hanging out? Or the bloke who still has no pubes or a very small penis?? Kids are cruel, really cruel, and anything at all is an excuse for bullying. How much worse is the bullying if they know what every bit of you looks like?? 

People keep saying that education has changed and you've just provided another  example.

Though apparently the reluctance to get involved in strenuous exercise at school , girls in particular, is because they don't want to work up a sweat and then have the need to take a shower.

So PE in schools is basically a non starter because strenuous activity and the attendant  perspiration causes problems: either you  sweat and have to take a shower with all the risks entailed; or you sweat and move on to your maths lesson smelling of exertion. 

A pity more of us commoners and our offspring haven't got that particular gene bragged about by the Duke of York.

Neither, but I do remember PT, and, crikey, when did they start teaching boys cooking?

It looks like Tom thought better of that comment and deleted it, but it lives on in your post. 

To expand a bit, it's not the taking a shower that was scarring. It was the whole degrading experience of team sports when you're the last to be picked, you haven't a clue how the game works so you feel useless and do nothing, and then you're crammed into a confined space, naked, with sexually aggressive bullies. That's what's scarring.

The PE teacher at my secondary school had been a teacher at my junior school. Until the day he took some offence at desk tidiness, and emptied the entire contents of every child's desk out of the first floor window...

Im sure there are tons of great PE teachers out there and I didn't mean to malign then all. Mine just put me off any type of sport, competition or physical exercise for the better part of 20 years and convinced me that I was a useless fat c##t. It could have been so different with a bit of well directed encouragement, rather than the bullying.

I have amazing positive memories about most of my secondary school teachers. But none about the PE dept. A bit of recent googling about one of the f##krs mentions that he ran as a UKIP candidates. Mmm... I'm back up that neck of the woods soon. I wonder if he's around and up for a social call.

I can only speak personally: my ball skills were poor and so i didn't enjoy some aspects of PE where it was football centred, i was definitely viewed as a Billy Casper and only fit for filling the goal mouth, but PE wasn't only confined to football: we had gym sessions where ball skills were irrelevant and i could match any of the footballers; athletics in season and cross country running throughout the year, where individual effort was prized as much as team spirit and skills.

If you went to a school where team sports were the only opportunity for PE then I understand your negative attitude to it all and i think myself lucky to have attended a place where you could get some benefit from exercise even if you couldn't kick a ball. 

I'd be very surprised if my school was unusual in that respect.

Me and a mate thought we’d save money by taking tins of beans and a camping stove and sneaking off to some nearby disused greenhouses next to the school. One lunchtime whilst poisoning ourselves (we used to plonk the tin straight onto the stove) the whole lot (the greenhouses) went up in flames. Not caused by us. We rushed off to tell the headteacher* and loads of fire engines turned up. 
 

* the headteacher was a total dude. Whilst on holiday, his son raked around and found a box of spanking magazines, of which one included a double spread of my head teacher in full bondage gear. His son sold it to The Times (I think).  This ended his career. Anyway, I’ve walked below Tne Eiger with my old head teacher, and shared a beer at Kleine Scheidegg.

I think the food industry have been taking note of this for years and their answer was to keep down the calorific value of school snacks by reducing  the size of Wagon Wheels by a scandalous amount.

Given how bad they taste I consider this a positive. What they have done to nice confectionery though is an outrage.

That led to my running for the school sports team. I was also a high educationally achieving nerd.

This caused consternation for the school thugs; you could see them wrestling with the conflicting concepts of me being both a 'sports jock', and a nerd. I probably escaped a few beatings as a result.

That's fine but I was pointing out that not all kids will have been active during the lesson.

Does forcing everyone to shower serve any useful purpose?

Are today's PE teachers talented and enthusiastic enough to encourage their pupils to work up a swear?

From what I've seen and heard at our daughters parents evenings things have not changed very much and there is still far too much focus on ballgames.  When I queried this their only answer was "they get to do their DofE in year 10".

Oh it wasn't just team sports, it's just that those were the worst. We had athletics (running round in circles and throwing things), gym, and cross-country (which might have been ok if it was actually in the country, but we ran on the streets) I was hopeless at all of it, found it completely pointless and so had no motivation at all to put any effort in. Luckily my parents took me hillwalking and skiing from an early age and I cycled all the time, was in the scouts etc. The irony is that now I'm in my 50s I'm running and cycling for fun. I bet I'm fitter nowadays than most of those guys who used to be good at PE back in the day.

No more or less than in the past. The difference is that some used to bully kids into getting changed and then being ridiculed by their peers. Now those kids have a note excusing them. 

It's far less of a problem in North Cumbria than it was 20 years ago, but I accept it still happens in some schools. Sort of shows how it's not a priority of most leadership teams and inspectors. I don't think say an English department would get away with just studying one author for five years. 

 > When I queried this their only answer was "they get to do their DofE in year 10".

Don't knock it, it's a great opportunity and most if not all the staff running it will be giving up their evenings and weekends for free 

The new school builds I've been involved with have had unisex toilets with individual cubicles. I think it will move this way (like many leisure centres) for school changing rooms as well. 

During my career in education I came across just as many charismatic, inspiring and talented teachers in PE as any other department, as one would expect. I think many of the contributors to this thread have been extremely unlucky. 

Sounds rough, really rough. I was fortunate enough to bump into one ringleader, on his own, when I was in my 20s. It didn't end well for him.

A bit of Facebook stalking can also be therapeutic. The bullies from my time at school are all too thick to lock down their profiles, and it's quite gratifying to see how socially, physically and financially downhill it's been for them since they left school.

TBF that was probably an option in my time over 40 years ago, but.I doubt that being excused would have achieved much.

I'm not sure that there is an easy, there is such a diverse range of sports that it is very hard to see how any school can fit them into the curriculum.  If it can't be done well maybe it should not be compulsory.

Don't worry I'm not knocking DofE, I just think it's a disgrace that it is the only alternative that even today's young PE teachers can offer.

We certainly had  a couple of good one's in my day, but they were the  teachers that taught PE alongside other subjects rather than the specialists. They were the one's that were trusted to introduce us to new ballgames such as hockey which required coaching rather than just refereeing.

Specialist equipment/facilities is going to be an issue for some sports but there are many that don't require much. Time is another issue but they only need to be taster sessions. 

Perhaps PE should take a leaf out of peripatetic instrumental teaching? Specialists in some activities not being employed by one school, but delivering their specialism to a number of schools. 

I wonder about an option for a weekly afternoon where pupils could receive coaching from volunteers at local sports clubs coupled with  incentives for clubs and individuals to provide that coaching.

To be fair I had no complaints about my PE teacher. He was a good teacher who did try to encourage everyone to do something. He ran the school ski trip, which I went on every year. He did make a vague threat to not let me go on the trip unless I started attending PE lessons, but this never came to anything.

My problem was with the actual activities themselves, and the other kids, not the teaching. I wasn't the only one. There was a whole group of us geeky kids that got absolutely nothing out of school PE, but most of us were pretty active outside school. 

I've deliberately stayed away from checking up on any of them. It's all best forgotten and I've moved on. Although you can see I'm still a bit bitter about some of it! 🙂 I have no doubt that most of them are much worse off than me mentally, physically and financially. Apart from the serial rapist I know of several others who ended up in prison.

Perhaps it would inspire some who are not aware of these clubs, but those volunteers will probably already be providing similar opportunities in the evenings. If the kids in our village were typical then we wouldn't be worried about the amount/variety of activities they are doing weekly. An hour or so of PE is a small fraction of what they do in the evenings and at weekends.

I mentioned on a previous thread about maths teaching, it's is at odds with my experience. I dealt with far more parental complaints about non specialists teaching their kids. 

It is due to both; if you burn more than you eat, you lose weight, if you eat more than you burn, you gain.

Two hours of PE won't of course burn much.  But if you are committed to a physical activity you enjoy (which the school could help them to find), you'll do it more than that and probably eat better, too.

School dinners at my school were pure junk - poor quality burgers, sausages, chips etc, and kids bought sweets from shops on the way to and from school.  I bet at least some kids that do go out buy something better e.g. a sandwich, even though some will crowd out the chicken shops.

I like that idea.

With most high schools now part of academy chains, it strikes me that some more specialist capabilities would make sense to be employed at the chain level rather than the school level to allow for this sort of thing, yes.  So instead of your high school employing say 4 PE teachers (we had 2 male and 2 female), your 10 school chain would have 40 with varying specialisms who would go round the schools.

Local authorities could have done that too, to be fair. 

Even communal changing as a whole led to lots of bullying, e.g. nicking someone's boxers and chucking them in the shower then teasing them for "going commando" as a result, or clouting people with rolled up towels (which really hurt).  Yes, happened to me.

Would be much better with cubicles and lockers.

Since reading this thread I'd been thinking along similar lines. You could probably employ that principle in other areas as well. It could be problematic for many MAT's either beacause they are too small (only 2/3 schools) or they a too far apart, although UL had 46 secondary schools the nearest to me in Carlisle was Accrington. 

They wouldn't have  the problems I've raised above? 

They vary massively, but in general I'd say Jamie Oliver did a bit to undo the decline as a result of the changes made in '80's

At least most people would regard sausage and chips as a meal. My concern is with those kids whose diet leads to behaviour issues and in some cases malnutrition 

I was quite surprised that some schools still allowed kids offsite at lunchtime . Pretty sure none in North Cumbria do except sixth formers. It was interesting to see the effect of the student council suggesting they had a meat free Monday in one local school. 

The quality of school meals and snacks has improved dramatically. By the time I left teaching (well over 10 years ago) we only served fried/battered food once a week - and I'm pretty sure this was a national requirement. Nor could we sell junk food snacks - no sugary drinks, chocolate, crisps etc. I got a real grilling from an Ofsted inspector because he found a single coke can on the yard after break!

(Not a literal grilling, though that would probably have been within the guidelines for food preparation.)

Oh Andy, your Panglossian views on education are always an enjoyable example of déformation professionnelle. The psychopathic PE teacher is a cultural trope for a good reason, his whistle blowing bullying echoes down the decades for so many of us. Mine was a class A c#*t. He did some climbing at a very basic level and called me a liar when I told him I’d done Cemetery Gates one summer holiday. Happy days!

That's so ridiculous! You would think the useless clipboard-bearing bar steward thought that you personally were dropping litter!

When I gave up being amazed by the blame apportioned to teachers for all sorts of things that are not the fault of the teacher, I left the profession (just before last Christmas. Covid has definitely been the last straw. No regrets and best thing I have done for many years!

I taught for 20 years and the remorseless, inexorable deterioration in our working conditions has been wondrous in the extreme, looking back at it. I taught in England in 2002 and couldn't get back to Scotland fast enough. However, the Scottish system has done a great job in trying to catch up with England. It's almost as the 2 systems have been vying with each other in a competition to become the more shitty system!

Soz about hijacking the thread a bit! It may belong better in a new thread (or as an addendum to an excellent thread about teaching about a year ago).

I spent many years buffing those views to a mirror-like shine. In all honesty, my own PE department was worryingly psycho-free. In fact, the staff were disturbingly popular. I always worried about the students' character formation, given the lack of such a tried and tested means of building mental toughness and "I'll show them" spirit.

Sadly, teachers have always provided an easy target for the anti-progressives in government and the media. It's easy enough to shrug this off if you're in a successful and/or advantaged school, but a lot harder if you're on the front line against poverty and despair in a struggling institution.

I didn't actually mind the Ofsted inspector having a go about the coke can, since it told me loud and clear that they weren't finding anything really important to complain about. And I breathed a sigh of relief that I'd picked up the half-smoked spliffs from the staff toilets before he found them.

Perhaps my experience isn't typical but they do seem far less common now. Twenty odd years ago however, mainly from taking football teams to play other schools/districts, they were still far to common. I can distinctly remember on three separate occasions  students in the opposing team apologising for the conduct of their teacher. 

Probably wise not to investigate 

Thinking back to my own education, the meanest teacher I had was in Maths (no offence). I remember we had to stand up if we got a question wrong, up on the desk seat for a second failure, up on the desk itself for a third. A correct answer moved you down a stage. I think the fact I spent a fair bit of time at altitude prepared me well for mountaineering. That was in a traditional state grammar, where a teacher was as likely to get bullied by the boys as vice versa.

Sounds like you got off lightly. My memory of some experienced teachers, when I started teaching, was that they were missing the good old days when physically assaulting the students was part of their toolkit. 

There was plenty of board rubber throwing, gym slippering (write Oxo on the sole in chalk and seek to imprint on miscreant bum), ear lobe abuse and of course caning. A lot of us regarded receiving any of these as a badge of honour.  I guess the difference with Mr Maths - who I think was an ex Battle of Britain ace - was that he took a visibly unhealthy pleasure in his duty to humiliate. The ear twisting and flicking was still commonplace when I started out as a teacher.

The youth of today need to have more respect 😊

Sounds like Mrs J's French teacher, she still has the occasional rant about him. Her mum holds him in even lower regard after he ridiculed her at parents evening. The very nice bottle of red that Mrs J brought back from her French exchange family wasn't supposed to be consumed by working class parents with egg and chips. 

I managed to avoid being caned. Closest I got was being sat outside the heads office waiting for my punishment, when he arrived brandishing the cane the lad I'd been fighting with fainted. 

Dad thought his primary headteacher was a sadist who would cane everyone once a week, even if they hadn't done anything wrong because it was good for them. Although he did suggest it motivated him to do well enough to get into high school, and so avoid a couple more years of abuse. Still there still be those harking back to the good old days of education. 

Interestingly I had a French teacher at school who was a classic old style schoolmistress (in her late 50s by then I think), incredibly strict (silence unless speaking French, for example) and I'm sure she did hark back to the days of the cane.  Guaranteed detention if you didn't bring your homework, no excuses (or valid reasons) accepted, for example.

I later had her as 6th form form tutor, and she was a completely different person, quite relaxed and easy going.

Sadly she went off with stress and I don't think she returned to the role.

I got the slipper once. And then when I got home I got the same from my dad to ensure I did not get the slipper again.

I also remember another time in 4th year Juniors a teacher physically picked me up and threw me out of the classroom. I distinctly remember flying through the air and landing in a heap.

Most of us at Junior school were adept at dodging Blackboard Rubbers. Those that could not dodge, learned quickly once the painful lesson wore off.

I'd suggest that has changed for a significant number of kids. Like you when I got into trouble at school the last thing I wanted was my parents to find out, as they would "double" the punishment. The last few years of my career I seemed to spend too much time with parents who had been summoned to school by their angelic little cherub to argue that the sanctions being imposed were unfair/too harsh

I was caned for totally neglecting revision when I was about 11.  Also got the rubber slipper from the Headmaster for being caught opening the door ready to attack another dormitory.  Threatened with a beating later on if I did any more fireworks on shcool premises.

These left pretty much no impression on me once over but I still haven't got over primary school when the teacher wrongly accused me of cheating in a spelling test or much later when the class shit told the teacher that a poem I'd carefully written and read out and received a rare bit of praise from the teacher for about the North Pennines sounded like one read out "last year" (when I hadn't been in the same group as the class shit).

They also left far less damage long term than the treatment you got from other kids.

It's not all that bad, I'm a teacher at a school in Charlotte, I'm a physical education teacher and I have to say that with me discipline is at the forefront.
Kids have a future!

Board rubbers? Amateurs. We had a woodwork teacher who used to lob the wooden mallets at us, occasionally resorting to chisels for the the most heinous miscreants.

Although even he though the #1 Psycho PE teacher strangling a child with their improperly knotted school school tie was maybe pushing the boundaries a little, especially as the kid ended up unconscious in the middle of the corridor as all the other kids were filing out of the classrooms.

On the plus side #1 Psycho PE teacher was never seen again, so it wasn't all bad.

I think I said upthread when I started teaching it was still commonplace to administer the odd clip to the ear. I once did this to a lad who was messing about in a drama lesson. He stumbled and hit his head on a bookcase as he fell. Very dazed. Large lump emerging before my eyes. Never ratted me out (aka reported abuse) to parents or authorities. It was a very tough inner-city school, he liked drama and we got on well - but even so. Very different times and good riddance to them.

I'm going to say it was Copley High School, Stalybridge 1992 (my first teaching practice) and hope someone can confirm because this sounds pretty far fetched.

Cookery teacher was part of a knife throwing act. I never witnessed it but plenty of kids claimed she did a bit of practise during the day.

My mum started teaching in the mid-late fifties. She's told me a few times about the first lesson she taught in her first school, somewhere in London.

The headmaster came in and said, while flexing a cane:

"This is Miss <mbh's future mum>. She teaches French. I teach bamboo-ish!".

Ridge's description of 1970's PE resonates very much with my own experience. I was never in the school team for anything and PE was a miserable experience of feeling left out and not valued until cross-country (aka making your own way around town) came along and I could finally leave it all behind and just get out on my own.

One's art teacher (in the 60's) had "a twig from the tree of learning".

At my school it wasn't the PE teachers who were the issue (although they were pretty disinterested in me as someone with no obvious sports skill) but the fact that I was one of two girls in a class of 20. We were the last to be picked for teams, we had to parade into the gym in a leotard as all the boys checked to see whether we were wearing bras - we clung to each other in (outdoor) swimming lessons - we were laughed at together when we couldn't do the shot put. No wonder we were close friends (we don't speak now but that's another story). At other times when we were all the girls together the choices were netball or pretty much nothing, and netball is a sport in which you can be very lazy and uninspired. I learnt more being active from the army cadets actually, where being active wasn't limited to throwing a ball.

What is annoying though, is that I am actually very active and always was. I just don't think school PE lessons were ever going to have any effect on my sports skill.

You mention the Cadets...I think without Scouting I would have just been a fat blob behind the computer, and would almost certainly not have taken up climbing and thus not be posting this now.  (Yes, I'm a bit fat now as a middle aged bloke, like a lot of middle aged blokes are, but a lot worse).