Thank you to everybody for your most interesting comments. It does appear that many schools in England used their punishment books in ways similar to mine. I believe I have read somewhere that they were a NSW Department of Education requirement.

Former contributor HH (Harold Hoff) analysed a number of punishment books for his book “Corporal Punishment: Is it Effective? An Empirical Study of School Punishment Records. His main focus was on trying to measure “recidivism” but I found the summaries interesting. He includes “Confidence” which is his assessment of the issue I raised in this thread. I have scanned one example (pp 160-1):

To understand how corporal punishment was or is regulated in different places at different times it is first necessary to understand:

The Hierarchy of Laws 

Respect for the hierarchy of laws is fundamental to the rule of law, as it dictates how the different levels of law will apply in practice. In general, the fundamental levels of hierarchy consist of: a constitution or founding document; statutes or legislation; regulations; and procedures.

The terminology, structure and levels of control vary in different jurisdictions.

The Constitution

• Establishes the innate characteristics of the country and its sovereignty; outlines the rights and responsibilities of its citizens – as such it is the supreme law.
• Establishes the country’s governance structure.
• All other laws must adhere to the constitution.

Statutes / Legislation  – Acts of Parliament

• Statutes are enacted by the legislative branch of government, and govern a wide range of issues that require regulation in a modern, democratic state.
• Must adhere to the constitution and international law.
• Amended by the same process as first enacted, and enforced by a country’s enforcement agencies.

Common Law / Case Law 

• Common law is law made by the courts, not legislature, and is not a level of hierarchy of laws per se.
• It consists of the judgments of courts, to interpret the wording of statute law, to protect the principles of natural justice, to fill a gap in the law, or to deal with an unforeseen situation not covered by statute.
• A new statute may override or replace common or case law. This has happened in a number of jurisdictions where school CP was permitted by common law.

Regulations – Statutory instruments

• A form of delegated legislation, developed and enacted by ministers, department heads, or by an independent body or commission, to administer their responsibilities
•  Must adhere to the constitution, international law, and governing statute, and can be enforced in the same way as statutory law.
•  Provide detail on the administration of principles in the law.
• A violation of a regulation can be treated as an offense and enforced as such.

Procedure 

•  A procedure is a description of the required steps necessary to complete a process.
• Procedures are generally written by an administrative body to ensure that the law and regulations are applied consistently and fairly to all parties.
• Enforcement of a procedure is generally achieved by requesting compliance as a condition of completing a process or receiving a benefit rather than by sanction or punishment.

Codes of Conduct

• A written set of rules, principles or standards to govern the behavior of certain groups.
• Enforcement of codes of conduct depends on whether they are considered “soft” or “hard” law. Codes of conduct are considered “soft law” when they are not passed by a lawmaking body and thus rely on voluntary compliance.

Guidelines, Instructions, and Policies 

• Terms such as “guidelines” and “instructions” are uncertain in meaning and can result in ambiguity, particularly with regard to enforceability.
• “Policies” are broad, informative statements of intent regarding principles to be followed and the priority of programs.
• These should not be used as if they were elements of the structure of the hierarchy of laws.
•  A procedure is a description of the required steps necessary to complete a process

A school teacher is subject to the directions of the headteacher, the terms of his or her employment, the rules and policies of the school’s board and the directions, rules or bylaws of the local and national education authorities.

Some excellent contributions in this thread. I have previously,in other threads, given  full details of the practices carried out in both my mixed junior school and boys only grammar school so will not repeat.  SCP was not recorded in my junior school and, in my senior school,  as appears to have been  common practice in the late 50s and 60s was  only recorded in  the punishment book when the cane was used. Canings were not an irregular occurance.

It was actually explained to us that the formal recording of the punishment in the book combined with the countersigning by the teacher witnessing the punishment was primarily to protect the teacher.  The signature of the witnessing teacher it is assumed was supposed to confirm that what he had witnessed was reasonable and not unduly brutal.. Since the cane appeared to be given with “full force” as hard as the teacher could lay it on, leaving 3 or 4 stripes which lasted over a week and turned all the colours of the rainbow one often wondered what constituted unreasonable.

Sir John 2, The schools that you attended would seem to have been much like my own. There were many classroom punishments that I am sure went unrecorded. Most of these were given with a plimsoll in front of the class. In effect it was more like a spanking like many parents still gave at home back then. I’m sure that the punishment record books were in later years there to protect teachers from being accused of administering excessive punishments but the recorded detail was very basic. That said I have screen shots of school log books mentioning the cane back in the early part of the last century, the 1900s. I have been given to understand the these books were securely stored away and no one was allowed to see them without very good reason.
A headmaster’s caning was very different to slipperings and spankings. A proper cane applied firmly across the buttocks was the usual punishment for ‘serious’ misbehaviour. I knew of no parents that used that sort of punishment.
I don’t remember any headmaster or deputy headmaster’s canings being witnessed in my school. The school secretary’s office was next door the the head’s office so she must heard canings. Although sometimes joint miscreants were caned in front of each other.
As a lad I did wonder if the headmasters or any of the teachers used the cane on their own children at home. If they were prepared to use it on other peoples youngsters why not their own. I’ve read of local hardware shops selling canes but I’m sure this must have been many years ago.
All my knowledge is of boys being punished. I have since read of girls being caned or slippered but knew nothing of it in my schooldays.

Punishment books were meant to curb excesses

Industrialization during Victoria’s reign required a literate and numerate workforce and this lead to compulsory education, and the structures and practices older member of this forum endured during their school days. Schools had to be built, teachers recruited and trained and a syllabus developed. Cost and efficiency were a major concern. How best to maximize the learning and minimize the cost?  Standardization and uniformity was required as it is in any large organization if its component parts are to be interchangeable and are to work in harmony.

A deliberate effort was made to provide the education best suited to the future roles of the students and thus the existing social divisions were reinforced. The middle class notion of men and women having separate roles was emphasized. At the same time social reformers were active.

Not everyone welcomed compulsory education. Some objected to the cost of something they thought unnecessary. Teaching the underclass to read was dangerous as they might be exposed to revolutionary ideas. Parents and others objected to the loss of child labour, especially during the harvest. Children who had roamed free in the countryside or city streets found sitting quietly in rows and learning things largely by rote unappealing. In early days a bored illiterate 12-year old might be in the same class as a bright eager 5-year old.

Punishment books were primarily a sop to social reformers. It was assumed that if head teachers (headmasters), who were the only ones who were directly authorized  to administer punishment, were required to record CP this would inhibit excesses and abuses. Punishment books were routinely inspected by school inspectors who were charged with seeing that schools were properly run. In larger schools head teachers had authority to delegate their authority. I was usually assumed or explicitly stated the minor punishments or those of a trifling nature did not need to be recorded for reasons of practicality and convenience.

Teachers and their victims often had rather different notions as to what was minor. Also, there is a universal tendency for maximum limits to become the target. This is most obvious with speed limits. If the slipper is considered a minor implement, use the biggest and heaviest available, apply maximum force, etc.

It was not just teachers who were reluctant to record CP (because of inconvenience or because  it might reflect on the ability). Many boys did not want the indiscretions recorded lest they come to notice of parents, future teachers or potential employers. They wanted the slate wiped clean.

Those in senior governing and management roles and the entire judiciary were educated men who had been exposed to school CP growing up. They had little sympathy for working class complaints about welts or bruises and put great weight on the need for order and structure. Courts tend to side with teachers except in extreme cases.

An interesting post. I have to admit that I’d not thought about that era in this way before. Wasn’t the male/female gap much larger back then? With many girls  being seen as soon to be married and have children with boys to become the family breadwinners. Girls in better off families rare worked. Only lesser well off family girls worked in factories. Even the better educated girls found themselves finding it difficult to gain promotion in offices etc.

I’d have thought that parental and school discipline was very similar back in those times. We must however remember  that even with the newly introduced almost compulsory school the school leaving age back than was by today’s standards was ridiculously low.
As I have already said in a previous post school corporal punishment in the mid 19th century tended to be far more severe than most parents would have considered using on both boys or girls. Many schools in the 1950s/60s and later in some still gave fairly severe canings. On hands or across the backside this was far more than the majority of parents gave around that time.
Back to school corporal punishment record books; prior to the introduction of these many schools particularly the small ones the headteacher and often the only teacher in some village schools completed a daily entry in the school diary. The diary carried all sorts of entries. Presumably these diaries were available the school’s managers/governors to keep them informed of the school’s progress and problems.

Our view of the world and what is normal is greatly coloured by our personal experiences augmented by things we have read and seen in movies and on TV, including fiction.

My current understanding is that the nuclear family living together in a house with dad working away from home and mum staying home attending to household duties and caring for the children is or was a short lived aberration fostered by Victoria and Albert as the ideal middle class model. It was by no means universal.

Idly browsing (as one does) I came across this image of a page from the punishment book used at Somersham School, a primary school in Cambridgeshire, for the period from January 1951 to April 1952. Corporal punishment (of the official variety, at any rate) appears to have been comparatively rare and limited to one stroke, but a point of interest is that two girls appear with the nine boys in the list.

AlanTuringBletchley wrote: ↑

Dec 04, 2021

Somersham School, a primary school in Cambridgeshire, for the period from January 1951 to April 1952. Corporal punishment (of the official variety, at any rate) appears to have been comparatively rare and limited to one stroke, but a point of interest is that two girls appear with the nine boys in the list.

Somersham was a small village and still is, so not many pupils. Two of boys listed there were caned twice in that period and I wonder if Gerald and Rose Robinson were brother and sister. A single stroke of the cane was most likely across the hand wouldn’t been seen as much of a punishment back then when many parents used spanking home.

This is going a little bit off-topic but if I don’t place it here, I can’t imagine ever finding another post to add it to. I was fascinated by CP from a very early age and read voraciously in libraries at every opportunity. So, before I reached my teens, I was well aware of schools keeping records of formal punishment in a Punishment Book. At my high school formal canings were delivered by the first master (deputy head) in his office and were, I guess, formally recorded. On average, I would estimate that in any one class, there would be a couple of instances each year of someone being caned like that so it wasn’t unusual but definitely not over-used. There was also quite a lot of informal punishment using plimsolls, rulers and suchlike which I’m confident never got recorded anywhere.

Around the age of 14-15 I was involved in an Arts Project that was based in a studio within the school. The unusual thing was that there was a door in the studio to the outside world and because of the project, a few of us were given a key to gain access out of hours. All internal doors in the school were routinely locked at weekends but we could go into the studio if we wished. One Sunday I had arranged with a colleague that we would go and spend the day working on the project. I arrived around 9.30 and waited in the studio for my colleague to arrive. When he failed to show up, I got a bit bored because I couldn’t do anything on my own so I went on a bit of a wander and, to my surprise, found one of the doors from the studio to the main part of the school hadn’t been locked. That meant I was able to get access to where there was a single payphone for pupil use (decades before mobile phones of course) so I rang my colleague’s home to see if he was on his way and learned that his understanding was that we were just going for the afternoon but he’d try to get there in a couple of hours.

So, I wandered off a bit further. On a Saturday there might have been other pupils and teachers around for sports teams and so on but on a Sunday, I had the place to myself. It was quite an old building with hard parquet flooring and every footstep echoed – I would have heard anyone else long before I saw them.

And that’s when I saw that the door to the first master’s office was wide open. There was note on the door asking the cleaners not to lock it as he had lost his key. I immediately thought of his cane and school punishment book. Listening intently for any distant footsteps I went in and started looking around. None of the drawers or cupboards were locked so I was able to check everywhere. I did find the cane which was exciting to handle but totally failed to find the book I was seeking. If I had found it, I’m 95% sure I would have stolen it. Not sure what the consequences might have been then. This was a time before PIR security systems and CCTV but I hadn’t taken any steps to avoid leaving fingerprints.