Talk:Purley High School for Boys

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Not unusual caning record?[edit]

The article as it currently stands reads:

"showed that there had been nothing especially remarkable about Purley's caning figures as compared with many other boys' secondary schools of a similar kind"
and links to a CorPun website. The referenced article has examples including:

"Ralph Gardner's ratio of 23.1 beatings per 100 pupils puts it at No. 19 in the STOPP national top 20." - i.e 23.1% caning record
"Inspectors found that 60 of the 360 lower school pupils at Lewis Boys' Comprehensive" - i.e. 16% caning record

The article on CorPun for Purley Boys includes the following information:

"Purley High was a 14-18 school, so ALL its 900 pupils were boys in the fourth and fifth form or various levels of sixth form."
"After all that publicity, the statistics for the next two years -- 1978/9 and 1979/80 -- do show a considerable drop, both for Croydon as a whole and for Purley High:

Canings at Purley High (in brackets: all Croydon secondary schools)

1977/8: 394 (1,581)
1978/9: 186 (1,318)
1979/80: 168 (1,049)"

So, prior to the bad publicity, resulting in a dramatic decrease in canings, the %ge of canings was running at 394/900 = 43.7% (43.7 beatings per 100 pupils)

Unfortunately, the other article referenced is dated 1983 (5 years post PHB massive caning figures) so we cannot draw direct comparisons as canings may have decreased across the board during that 5 year period. However, it's also possible, that canings in the other schools maintained a consistent level of canings from 1977-1983. If this were the case then PHB has a significantly high (i.e. remarkable) %ge of canings (43.7% (PHB 1977) versus 23.1% (Ralph Gardner 1983, position 19 in national STOPP top 20 caning schools)).

Given that we don't have the ranking of PHB by STOPP in 1977, and we don't have the figures for the other referenced schools in 1977, I think it's not accurate for the article to state:

"showed that there had been nothing especially remarkable about Purley's caning figures as compared with many other boys' secondary schools of a similar kind"

The referenced articles do not back up this statement. I'll leave this up for a few months for comment by others. If no one has any justified objections I'll adjust the article to remove the 'unremarkable' claim.Dbnull (talk) 13:42, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just to follow up on this, in 1982 STOPP estimated that:

"corporal punishment in schools is running at a rate of one beating every 20 seconds, or a quarter of a million beatings per school year. This averages out at about five beatings per year per 100 pupils. "

So, 4 years post PHB showing a 43.7 beatings per year per 100 pupils the national average was 5. That seems to be a significant difference.

See: http://www.teachers.tv/behaviour/timeline/html

The same page states, for Scotland in 1978:

"In one 14-day period, a survey of 40 Scottish secondary schools revealed that more than one third of all the 12- to 15-year-old boys had been belted with the tawse (a punishment strap)."

This is not in one year, but have been ever beaten. Even assuming this was in one year and equating this rate, for 1978, to England (which is making some big assumptions) still shows PHB to be nearly 30% above the mean. We cannot extrapolate percentile ranking without knowing the SD, but it would be a stretch to assume that PHB does not have a significant (i.e. an unremarkable) caning record.

Dbnull (talk) 14:09, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

But we were not comparing Purley with "the national average", but with other heavy-caning boys' schools; nobody is saying these were particularly typical of secondary schools generally, but there were quite a number of others not unlike Purley in this respect. Bear in mind also that as a 14-18 school Purley had twice the concentration of middle teens of an ordinary (11-18) school. I have reworded the section accordingly. Alarics (talk) 07:37, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would question the relevance of sentence you added; this article is about the School, Purley High School for Boys. It either did have a record of excessive corporal punishment, or it didn't. As to how this compares to other schools seems immaterial in this article. The details comparing to other other schools reads as a refutation of it's record of excessive corporal punishment record. I would question the value of the following 2 sentences:

"This was because STOPP happened to be based in Croydon at the time, and managed to get the Local Education Authority to publish an analysis of statistics collated from school punishment books, the first time this had happened in the UK. However, statistics for the use of corporal punishment later appeared from other areas of England and Wales, suggesting that Purley's caning record, as compared with some other boys' secondary schools, was not quite as extraordinary as STOPP had originally claimed, once the fact that Purley was a 14-18 school (and therefore had about twice the proportion of 14- to 16-year-olds as an 11-18 school) was taken into account, 14-16 being almost invariably the peak age group for getting into trouble at school.[2]"

These two sentences account for 45% of the word content in the main article and are not really relevant to the article topic (i.e. Purley High School for Boys). I'd suggest putting this information in a STOPP article and link to it from here. Dbnull (talk) 13:43, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You make a fair point when you say that this takes up too large a proportion of the article. However, a different way of dealing with that would be to add more material about other aspects of the school.

It's a moot point what constitutes "excessive", of course. My point is that Purley, though no doubt at the "heavy" end of the caning spectrum, was not especially unusual, and certainly not as remarkable as was suggested at the time. There were several other boys' schools like Battersea Grammar, and St Augustine's in Manchester, which later turned out to be dishing out many canings per day, and no doubt many others which never happened to be "fingered" by STOPP or the press. Purley was to that extent unlucky in being in the same borough as STOPP's then headquarters. Alarics (talk) 16:35, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]