I have another book somewhere called Life in a Secondary Modern which describes a British secondary modern school of the same period, and the canings described in that are, if I recall correctly, rather similar. I’ll look for that when I’m back in my main office tomorrow.
There’s also an Australian film (specifically a Victorian film) from the early 1980s called Fighting Back which supposedly shows a real strapping of the type given in Victorian state schools at the time. The story I’ve been told is that the young actor in the film was persuaded to take that strapping because debate was occurring at the time about whether the strap should be abolished from state schools and if people saw how ‘barbaric’ a real strapping was, it might help it get banned. The boy was supposedly quite upset that the strap was actually banned in the period between the scene being filmed and the film being released, meaning his noble sacrifice for his fellow pupils was completely unnecessary.