According to this article on the BBC’s website it was traditional for primary school boys & girls to change together. How common was this and why? Also how long does primary education last in the UK?
When I was at primary (mid to late 70s) not only did we change together, we did it in the classroom - no changing rooms provided. Nearly everyone I know who went to a co-ed school did the same.
Why? I presume because children between the ages of 7 and 11 were considered asexual, and we lived in more innocent times. There was no nudity: just down to our underwear. I never had a problem with it as I recall.
The changing rooms we had at secondary school were very separate; they were in different blocks; I don’t know what the female ones were like inside (honestly, I don’t), but the male changing rooms were just a large tiled room with wooden benches and clotheshooks, adjoining a single, large communal shower room.
At primary school, the changing rooms for the (unheated)swimming pool were just a couple of rough, dark rooms in a crude brick-built shed; they were separate, but there was a connecting door - always locked, but there was a keyhole…
In my American high school, we regularly changed in one room for drama (the shy could change in a bathroom, but nobody did that after the first week of school) It was the biggest not-a-big-deal in the world and there were never any problems or anything interesting happening at all.
Primary education is ages 5-11. And yes, the article given will be no surprise to anyone. Finding the amount of money needed to build an extension just for changing rooms isn’t within the grasp of most primary schools. (Building it within the existing accomodation is hardly ever an option!) However, any middle or secondary school will certainly have full changing facilities.
I was in primary school less than a decade ago, and it seems times have changed - we did have to get changed seperatly. And by seperatly, I mean the girls changed in the classroom (overlooked by pervy male phys. ed. teachers) and we boys had to change outside in the corridor.
I lived in Wembley for a year when I was 9, back in 1979. Boys and girls changed into their gym clothes together in the classroom.
Interestingly enough other things were segregated by sex - boys and girls had seperate playgrounds and seperate lunch tables.
Me too, but the changes were obviously slower to reach my school. Changing in classrooms was the norm.
I was in primary school two decades ago (and more). We did PE in the assembly hall, with boys getting changed on one side of the hall and girls on the other (probably about 15’ apart). I think it would have been quite unusual for a primary school to have a dedicated changing room or rooms.
I do remember being extremely embarrassed once when I accidentally pulled down my pants as well as my trousers, but I doubt anyone else noticed or cared.
What’s worse is that we had to do PE in our pants (underpants for Americans - at this age normally a snazzy pair of Spiderman y-fronts) and vest, if we forgot our kit.
OB
Well I can’t honestly remember (it was over 50 years ago though) but I do remember that girls were judged to be an alien species that you did your best to ignore.
I was at Primary school in the late eighties, and we got changed together in the classroom. We weren’t segregated in the playground or at lunch, either.
There were changing rooms for the pool, but they were dingy corridor-like things. And there was a small hole in the wall between the boys and girls.
I remember that we weren’t interested in each other’s bodies at that age, but that despite this the girls learned how to change t-shirt without removing their jumper. They’d bring their arms inside the jumper, take off the normal t-shirt, put on the PE t-shirt, then take the jumper off - ta-da, all ready for PE. Magic.
Let’s see now. Oh yes, now I remember. We started gym in 4th or 5th grade. Gym clothes were brought to school in a bag and we boys all walked down to the high school (small town) where we changed in the boys dressing room. As I recall, gym was only two or three days a week.
The girls had gym at on different days. Believe it or not, the girls wore a gym uniform that was a one-piece, blue outfit sort of like a short sleeved coverall except they were baggy and the legs had elastic at the ankle. In any case, they also walked to the high school and changed in the girls dressing room.
That skill is a rite of womanhood. We all learn it as it becomes necesary. In fact, after a rather messy episode at work yesterday, I performed that very same trick in my fully windowed office.
Me too but we still got changed together in the same room. The same was true of my two younger sisters, as well. I doubt things have changed even now, there simply was nowhere else to change.
We had to do this at high school! If you forgot your kit, you either borrowed one off someone else, borrowed an old, unwashed stinking one from the PE office or, if none were available, joined the th’underpant gang 
Just to chime in, I was at primary school during the 80s too, and we changed in the classroom together with the boys. When we went swimming, it was seperate changing rooms, but that’s because we went to the local swimming baths.
If that’s not bad enough, a friend’s Dad claims that in his English boys’ public school in the 1950s they had swimming lessons naked. :eek:
My previous post was meant to be a reply to this one. :smack:
Nothing wrong with that! Noble tradition. Good enough for the Greeks, good enough for you! Never did me any harm. Made me the man I am today, in fact. ::twitch::
Seriously though, in Oxford where I’m now living there’s a stretch of the Cherwell river called “Parson’s Pleasure”, which, due to an ancient by-law, is a men-only naked swimming place.
Indeed all-male nudity seems to be all the rage in Britain these days.
Actually alot of schools in the US had boys swim nude (without females present) until the 70s. YMCAs did too. My father said they were told it was because the filters couldn’t handle the lint from their suits (yet girls wore modest one-pieces). I think schools just didn’t trust boys not to leave wet suits in their lockers or have to worry about poor kids.
My elementry school was a former middle school so our gym had lockerrooms complete with showers, but we didn’t change at all for gym. In middle and high school we did, but the showers went unused. In high school a few athletes would shower if they a morning class. We didn’t have a pool. We never had any PE uniform. If you didn’t bring a change of clothes you got a zero for the day. Very few guys ever changed their underwear or wore jocks. Changing in the toilet stalls wasn’t an option since we didn’t have any.
Nude swimming, hmm.
When I first went to University of Chicago in 1967 I was obliged to take a swimming class, as I did not swim well enough to pass a test. And we did our swimming nude (except for the instructor - odd because we would often come to the pool at class time to find the instructor doing laps nude, then he would get out and put on a bathing suite). It didn’t seem too weird at the time (as I recall the pool was not heated so there was probably major shrinkage going on).
I do remember one time when the instructor was teaching us some sort of sideways frog kick, and required each young man to lie on his side on a table or something and demonstrate his ability to do this kick, while the instructor had his hands on the student’s feet so he could tell that the proper amount of kick was being applied. When it was my turn (I was the last one, I think) he gave me what I thought was an oddly meaningful look. I was so deeply buried in the closet at that time that I didn’t think much about it until much later in my life. Now I have to wonder at the whole thing.