Thanks for your posts, Thirdformer, and a belated welcome. Your “strong suspicion” is very well founded. It’s inconceivable that every punishment found its way into an official record, in most state schools anyway. Yes, it was the law, but in many schools honoured only in the breach. Schools which used very little CP may well have toed the line, but moderate-to-high CP users commonly used the punishment book only for formal canings, perhaps by the more senior staff.  Can you imagine Miss Smith remembering to make dutiful entries, during her lunch hour, after a morning of slapping infant bottoms or legs.? Or Mr Evans – Evans the Dap to his PE groups of rueful 14 year old boys – bothering with petty paperwork after a relentless day in the gym, when he slippered at least four boys, or was it five? Not a chance.

The most significant dividing line is between canings and other – generally less severe – forms of corporal punishment. Another estimable forum (no, not Corpun) out there on the Web has a large section with links to, or copies of, official punishment books. Its current list of references runs into three figures – but many of those only list as few as, perhaps, a dozen canings in a school year. Tip of the iceberg.

“Yes, it was the law …” (post #11)

I’m not convinced about that. That is to say, I’m not convinced that there was any law (an Act of Parliament, or a Statutory Instrument) which required schools of any kind to keep punishment books.

Regulations? Well, that’s another matter. The various Education Acts empowered  LEAs to make regulations about the running of their schools, and many made regulations about keeping punishment books (and about corporal punishment in general). But breaking a regulation isn’t the same as breaking a law. You can’t be taken to court for breaking a regulation. You might have your employment terminated, and you might be refused a reference for future employment, but that would be about it.

Your point is well made, Mr T, and I was being too careless with my language. Without delving into Acts of Parliament and relevant Statutory Instruments, I can’t say that punishment records were required by law.

Even so, I do believe there was something in the “standing orders” of governing bodies, or whatever they’d have been called, requiring head teachers to keep records and have them available. Likewise I know that a school could – and still can – fail an inspection if disciplinary policies and records are not available for inspection. Breaches of safeguarding guidelines are significantly more grave than, say, deviation from curriculum guidelines.

Thanks to Georgiec for the Hansard records from April 1985. The question of parents being able to have their child exempted from school corporal punishment was although it was a parent’s right must have been seen as somewhat unfair. We must also remember this was only a few years prior to  CP in UK state schools being banned. It would seem that the main concern was the recording of a caning to one boy and no record of another boy who had committed the bad behaviour but had been exempted from SCP by his parents.
The entire recording method would seem to have fraught generally. The entries in these punishment record books would seem to have been rather vague. Some records failed to even say if the punishment was across hands or bottom. True most authorities did talked of ‘an approved cane’ but there was no real way of saying how hard the cane had been applied. A quick light swish of the cane was very different to a full scale cane stroke firmly given.
The phrase ‘in loco parentis’ in 1985 does seem a little inappropriate too. I doubt that many UK parents would have considered let alone giving their child a caning then. Thinking back to my own childhood in the 1950s/60s I only ever heard of one or two parents using a cane on their children. True some parents back then spanked or slippered their own children but that was 20 or 30 years before this Hansard report. By 1985 the number of UK parents still using CP as mild home/family discipline had greatly diminished.

Thanks Six of the Best, for a very interesting post. The mid-1980s proposals for a two-tier approach (Pupil is caneable but Pupil B is exempt) were always likely to fail, although in fact they foundered on the issue of Assisted Places students – pupils at independent schools whose fees were paid by public authorities, either on scholarships or through channels such as Armed Forces.

But in reality, during those years of flux, many schools were already consulting parents incident-by-incident if corporal punishment was being considered. Just as a parent at that time could exempt a child from Health Education or Religious Education. It was a sensible approach – and also a prudent one since no headteacher wanted confrontation, far less legal action, from a disgruntled parent.  It could have worked but was scuppered by people in power who were uninterested in compromise.

The In Loco Parentis concept is a bit of a legal fiction these days; and it had seldom if ever been specifically tested in the UK courts. It was effectively removed, or superseded, by the Children Act of 1988 (89?) – which enshrined the primacy of the child, and children’s rights, ahead of a school’s rights. Perversely, schoolteachers since then have obligations In Loco Parentis, without rights. Thus a schoolteacher’s decision-making – on. say, a school trip or a similar welfare or safety situation –  is held to at least the standard of a “reasonable parent”. That’s a standard of which, ironically,  quite a lot of inadequate parents fall short! A UK teacher’s professional life is on the line day by day; but sanctions – even those of a very reasonable parent – are removed.

Thanks for posting the Hansard report about possible arrangements should UK have decided to give parents the choice about whether their kids could be caned at school.  One thing I did notice is that it was stated that the purpose of the punishment book was for the school governors to have oversight of the general policy, although they did cite other uses, such as in case of litigation and for the head to check if individual pupils were getting into trouble regularly.  I don’t know whether any of those other uses would have been used in practice, or whether the speakers really knew.

More interestingly, I noticed one of the speakers was Clement Freud.  I remember him talking on a late night TV show about politics a few years ago about an occasion when he had been in trouble at school.  Apparently, he had to take off his trousers and underpants to be caned.  As his grandfather was famously opposed to corporal punishment, the head didn’t actually cane him, but instead fondled his bum.  I remember the way in answer to Andrew Neil asking about the type of school in reference to the bare bottom aspect of it, he stressed ‘yes, it was one of those schools’, which I found quite funny.  I’ve found a transcript of that part of the programme: http://cdnedge.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_week/4955084.stm

Yuk. Tapatalk has mangled my post, which was supposed to say:

I think the extract from Hansard (post #14) is slightly misleading. It quotes Andrew Bennett MP as stating “At present schools where corporal punishment is practised have a statutory duty to ensure that all acts of corporal punishment are recorded in the punishment book.” But I don’t believe that’s right.

Further down the page, Mr Dunn states:

Punishment books are kept by and in schools because of paragraph 6 of DES administrative memorandum 531, which everyone knows is dated 10 May 1956

That’s not a statutory duty; it’s advice.

It’s like the distinction between the Covid-19 regulations (which have the force of law, and can result in penalties if disobeyed) and Government Guidance (which is advice, mostly sensible).

(Perhaps the Forum Management would be kind enough to delete post #18.) Done. Ed

Thanks for confirming about the obligations of schools keeping punishment books, Alan; I wasn’t sure whether it was a legal obligation at that time, and I assume that if it is mainly for school governors, then it might explain why there seems to be inconsistencies in people’s experiences (or not) of them.  The implication in the Hansard report seemed to me that the proposal was to make them mandatory (and presumably to some type of standard).  It is a reminder that we can’t assume that just because someone says something in parliament that the speaker was correct at the time.

It’s great to see this topic being ‘taken on board’ so well. I’ve known of these books being used but mostly from what I have read online. I have seen more information on School Corporal Punishment Record Books here and general on the internet than at any time in real life. Like many other schoolboys of my era, 1950s/60s we all professed to being experts on all things relating to school rules in general. The fact that most schools had no real written rules back then but we all seemed to know them all!
My only real knowledge of such a record book was when I was around age 13 when three of us found ourselves in the headmaster’s office for some joint mischief. I had heard all the tales of the cane there, now it seemed that I was about to experience for myself. After a thorough telling off we were informed of our fate. Then I remember the headmaster writing something in a book asking us to confirm our ages and forms. All three of us were around the same age but I was in a different class to the others. If my memory serves me correctly our surnames were the first three letters of the alphabet with me being the B. We then alphabetically bent over for three strokes of cane in front of each other. I took a few subsequent canings from the headmaster or the deputy head but have no collection of the details being entered in a book. I can only presume it was done either beforehand or afterwards.
I have heard of boys having to collect the cane and book from the school secretary and return it afterwards. I wonder what the secretary thought about this, did she approve of caning  or did she just saw it as part of her job?
As to the ‘in loco parentis” thing. To some extent this was and still is true but only for minor decisions etc. No parents can authorise any person to act on their behalf. This becomes obvious in the case of a youngsters needing serious urgent medical treatment. No teacher, youth worker, etc. can act in this capacity.  If the youngster needs urgent treatment/operation the decision will taken by the medical professionals there.
As I said earlier very few loving parents would have caned a son or daughter at home. Therefore I have said that looking back I don’t believe that any headmaster or teacher should have had the right to give a caning. In my childhood many parents did spank or slipper for bad behaviour at home. This was very different to a comparative stranger wielding a cane that left marks that could last for days. If I really overdid things at home I was sometimes spanked, usually after plenty of warnings.