I will jump in at the deep end and start a new topic. One question that I would like to answer is what the entries in Punishment Books show.

As I see it the use of Punishment Books in schools can be classified in two main categories:
1. “Tip of the iceberg” – this is the category I am familiar with. Most CP in a school is informal. The punishment book just shows those who are punished (usually caned) by a select few eg the Head and Deputy (or a senior staff member standing in for them). I believe all my schools in the 1950s/1960s operated this system.
2. “All or nearly all” – CP may only be given by a small and select group (eg Head and Deputy) and all occurrences must be recorded in the punishment book.
3. Theoretically there could be a third category where multiple teachers are authorised to give CP and record it in multiple books or pages. But that would seem to be very difficult to implement and messy.
People are welcome to add further categories.

So my questions are:
Does anybody know definitively the way the Punishment Book was used in their school (or in another school)?
If not does anyone believe they know or have a good understanding as to how the Punishment Book was used?
The school does not have to be named but it would be helpful to know the type of school (eg primary/secondary, private/public), the country/region and the administrative structure (eg county council, state department of education and the rules applying)

Oliver Sydney asks a most interesting question.  I was invited to be a guest at the anniversary of my primary school, where my father had been deputy head and then headmaster for a time prior to his retirement.  I had been at the school until 1956.  Among the “historic” items on show was the punishment book.  It only listed the formal punishments that were carried out in the headmaster’s study and there was no trace of the slipperings and smackings that took place in the classroom.  What I found most interesting was the difference in punishments when the new headmaster took over from my father.  Dad hated using the cane and only did so in extremis, usually limiting punishments to a single stroke.  However his successor frequently gave six strokes, which seems excessive to me for pupils under the age of eleven.  I wonder if many schools were so inconsistent in their punishments?

The secondary school I went to worked like the first scenario you mention.  Things like slipperings in the class, or after class, didn’t get recorded.  The cane was considered a more serious sanction, and was only carried out in private, usually by the headmaster in the case of boys, and that did get registered in a punishment book.  I think at the time (1970s), punishment books in most schools were considered private, and were not something that were left lying around for pupils to browse while they were waiting to see the secretary or the head.  I know they could, at least in theory, be viewed by the authorities, but I’m not sure who, or in what circumstances, or for what purpose (although I can guess it might be to check whether some schools were using the cane excessively, or on particular pupils, probably following allegations of misuse).

At my school, they did report how many times we had been in detention to the parents on the end term report, but not whether we had been caned, so the punishment book wasn’t used for that type of purpose.  I think the reporting of detentions was more to do with what is known as ‘safeguarding’ in modern parlance rather than as a ‘black mark’ anyway – although I can’t say that would be the same in all schools at the time.

I suspect that, at both the schools I attended, “informal” classroom punishments were not officially recorded in the punishment book. They were certainly not recorded at the time the punishment was inflicted, because the teachers used their own slippers (or whatever) and didn’t fetch “book and cane” from a central repository such as the secretary’s office or the head’s study.

There’s one oddity though. It’s the only definite fact I know about those punishment books. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s perhaps worth recalling. I think it dates from 1958 when I was in junior school, but it could be a little later.

Each morning, at the end of assembly, our headmistress would make announcements. I remember one day she told us about a boy who had damaged a teacher’s bicycle. As a result the teacher had caned the boy.  She told us that although the cane was intended as a serious punishment, it was meant to be inflicted in a moderate way, and that this punishment had been excessively severe. In view of this, the entry in the punishment book would be deleted.

Looking back, that all seems rather strange. I imagine that this was an “official” cane, obtained from the headmistress together with the book, so that in itself would have been unusual. Presumably the marks from the caning would have been seen by the boy’s parents, who had then complained, and the deletion of the punishment book entry would have been part of an agreement between the school and the parents, because somehow an officially recorded punishment would have been a “stain on his character”. But that’s just a guess.

Like the school Sorepants attended, my direct grant grammar school only recorded detentions on the end of term report. I remember this being a great relief to me when I was told this soon after my first caning (at the tender age of 9 in the prep school) by the older boys. The shame at having been caned troubled me far more than the pain involved and I had been dreading my parents finding out, not that it would have led to any further punishment but because I was a rather shy and sensitive child and would have found the inevitable enquiry embarrassing.

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I am sure that in my primary/secondary and senior school there was no punishment book nor have I heard of one at other schools in the area. Not sure if this absence of record is a Scottish thing. Anyone know of a Scottish school that recorded punishments?

I am fairly sure that was no punishment book at the direct grant grammar school I attended, either. Were they just an LEA requirement – and only in England?

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I believe that the majority of British schools were supposed to keep records of SCP. However this varied greatly area to area and even school to school. I seems to be generally thought that only punishments from the headmaster/mistress or deputy head was recorded. This was usually the cane but some schools used the strap or slipper for these official punishments. There were properly printed School Punishment Record Books. Some were generic, produced ones from educational supplies and other from the appropriate LEAs. The information they carried didn’t vary that much and was fairly basic. Details of the pupil; name, age, class, etc. and the offence and punishment given, the person administrating it and perhaps signed off by the headteacher if another teacher had given it. As most here will know a caning could varied greatly, three from one headmaster could be far worse than six from another. Some record books didn’t even specify whether it was given on hands or the bottom.
I’m sure that in my senior school in the 1950s/60s classroom slipperings were not recorded. I only remember a few classroom canings. These were usually from one of the older teachers. I particularly remember the metalwork teacher giving a 2nd year boy three hard strokes of the cane for a dangerous prank involving another boy being slightly hurt. The class gathered around one of the workshop benches and saw the boy being told to bend over the end of the bench. I knew that the cane was sometimes used by the headmaster there but had never seen a caning being given before.
I’d had a few slipperings in class before that, one or two whacks across the seat of my trousers. At least in school it was on my covered bottom. At home I was spanked across my bare bottom, trousers and underpants or pyjamas down over the arm of our settee. I accepted this as the usual punishment for bad behaviour and was aware that plenty of others had much the same from their own parents back then.
I think it was near the end of the 2nd year or just into the 3rd that I  first felt the school cane. The headmaster gave me three strokes with two other boys for a silly prank. We were caned in front of each other. I was second to take it. I believe the first boy had been caned before as the headmaster just said “You know what to do.” He bent over the desk and took it quite well. I have some recollection of the headmaster writing something in a book before he caned us.

I strongly suspect that none of the ” informal” corporal punishment meted out by PE teachers were ever recorded by schools. PE teachers in particular seem to have always operated outside any known rules. They certainly did at my school in the 1950s/60s.

Six of the Best (see preceeding post) mentions beig spanked on his bare bottom by his parents, which I’m sure he’s right in assuming to have been common practice in homes of that era; but thin cotton PE shorts, as many of us know, offer one’s bottom very little protection from a large plimsoll used by an athletic arm!

My own school, being an all boys school with pretensions to poshness, offered the PE teachers even more opportunities for cruel and humiliating treatment, for younger boys especially, as we were required to swim in the nude in the school’s own swimming pool until we were 14 or so. One teacher, whom I strongly suspect of having had sexually sadistic tendencies, often used some occasion of misbehaviour as a reason to call an unfortunate boy out of the pool and hit his bare bottom with the garden cane which he frequently brandished.

I don’t remember that teacher ever daring to treat an older boy in that way. He probably knew that it would land him in a heap of trouble; but I remember the indignation it aroused in a group of us sixth formers whose time in the pool just happened to overlap with that of some the younger boys, when we unexpectedy witnessed him order a first or second former out for a caning. You might have thought we would have paid little attention to it – after all most of us had probably had experienced the same thing a few years earlier. But this was the mid 60s and ” the times were a changing”. One lad exclaimed: “God, did you see how he laid into that kid?!” and we all agreed it was out of order. We didn’t take it further however. The times still had a bit more changing to do I suppose.

As has been remarked before on this forum: ” The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

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