Questions to ask about school days

"What was school like?" tends to get the same three words back — "fine, I suppose" — because it's too broad to answer with anything specific. School is one of the few experiences almost everyone shares, which makes it an easy place to start, but only if the question picks out one detail rather than asking for the whole thing at once.

For anyone at school in Britain before the mid-1970s, a handful of things were true that aren't any more: in much of the country a single exam at eleven could decide which type of secondary school they went to, the cane or the strap was a legal punishment, and leaving at fifteen was entirely normal. None of that comes up unless something asks for it directly.

The 11-plus and the school you ended up at

From 1945 in England and Wales (1947 in Northern Ireland), most children sat an exam at eleven — the 11-plus — that sorted them into one of three types of secondary school: grammar schools for an academic curriculum, secondary technical schools (rare — few were ever built), and secondary modern schools, which became the de facto school for everyone who didn't pass. The system started being phased out after a 1965 government circular asked councils to plan a switch to comprehensive schools, and the Education Act 1976 required councils to plan for it. Selection was allowed again from 1979, and some parts of England, such as Kent and Buckinghamshire, still have grammar schools today. Northern Ireland kept the 11-plus until 2008. Scotland never ran the tripartite system at all. Whether and when someone sat the 11-plus depends on exactly where and when they grew up, so it's worth asking rather than assuming.

• Did you sit the 11-plus? What do you remember about the day itself?
• Which school did it send you to, and how did you feel about the result at the time?
• Did your friends end up at a different school because of it? What happened to those friendships?
• If you didn't sit it, or it didn't apply where you grew up, what decided which school you went to?

The school day itself

“What was your school like? Who was your favourite teacher, and why?”

Discipline is worth asking about plainly rather than skirting round: the cane (or in Scotland, the leather tawse) was a legal punishment in British state schools until Parliament voted to abolish it on 22 July 1986, with the ban taking effect in 1987. It lasted even longer in independent schools — until 1998 in England and Wales, 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in Northern Ireland. Asking about it directly tends to get a straighter answer than asking generally about discipline.

• Was the cane or the strap used at your school? Did it happen to you, or did you just see it happen?
• What were school dinners actually like? Was there one you remember hating, or loving?
• What did the uniform look like, and did your family struggle to afford it?
• Was there a teacher who was kind to you specifically, or one everyone was frightened of?
• What subject were you best at, and did anyone encourage it — or discourage it?
• How did you get to school, and how far was it?
• What age did you leave, and was that your choice or expected of you?

Leaving, and what came after

The school leaving age itself moved during the twentieth century: the Education Act 1944 raised it to fifteen in England and Wales (in practice from 1947), and it rose again to sixteen across England, Wales and Scotland in 1972. So someone who left school at fourteen or fifteen wasn't dropping out by the standards of their own time — they were leaving exactly when the law of the day said they could. What happened immediately afterwards — straight into a job, an apprenticeship, National Service — is covered in more depth on the first job and National Service pages, but the moment of actually leaving school is worth its own question.

Questions worth trying

Why the specific version beats the general one

A question about one exam, one punishment, one teacher produces a scene someone can actually picture and describe. A question about "your school days" generally produces the same tidy half-paragraph that's been given at family gatherings for years. That's the method behind every page in the questions to ask your grandparents list, applied here to a subject almost everyone has an answer to, if asked the right way.

StoryPrompt sends one question like these by email every week for a year, written for a British life, and compiles the typed answers into a book. One of the 52 weekly prompts asks specifically about school and a favourite teacher; the National Service and first-job prompts cover what came immediately after. £25, once, for the full year; not a subscription, and the finished book stays downloadable afterwards.