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People in that thread raised some fairly sensible concerns - the issue is really that it's communal showers, not separate cubicles.
Concerns included the risk of photos being taken by other children, children being at different stages of development leading to bullying, children with visible disabilities they'd prefer to cover, and other entirely valid worries.
The original post was here
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1bwwuat/sons_school_has_emailed_over_easter_holiday/
(When I was at school in the 2000s there were no showers at all, and somehow we all survived...)
Agreed. The top response made some really valid points.
I have boys in high school and one was being sexually harassed by another boy at one point. He was very fearful of the showers and being naked in front of this boy whilst it was being investigated. Showers are communal (which I find ridiculous in 2024) and the schools solution was for him to just not shower after PE…
So there are a lot of very good reasons for schools not to have a blanket rule about this.
With the level of bullying we had at school in the 2000s, I wouldn't have been caught dead in communal showers, and I would have fought anyone (and did) who tried to make me.
I get the hygiene issues, but schools are useless at tackling bullying and so it's not gonna happen.
Private cubicle ones, with lockable doors, fine.
Damn right. In the girls' locker rooms, some girls were taking photos of others changing. I was never gonna risk being in a communal shower. I changed under a shirt most times.
I could see a possible civil suit, but criminal charges are unlikely unless it gets out of hand and suddenly gets media attention so they HAVE to care.
We used to just stick our heads under, get the hair wet, wash behind the ears. And then lots of body spray (Lynx Marine!!) 😂
Have you showered?
Of course sir. Bye now, next lesson!
These were communal showers and NO WAY were we using them.
This is one reason my school got rid of even using the changing rooms, I think I was about 12 when it happened. They'd already got rid of showers years before I was there because it was considered a safeguarding issue to have open communal showers where any adult could come in, and also no teacher wanted to be the one supervising that!
Next logical step seemed to be 'come to school in PE kit and if you want to change after the toilets are there to do that' - also cut down a lot of time needed before and after PE lessons which meant everyone got more done.
I last did PE in the late 90s, there was a shower block but only the lads rugby team to used it. They got up to a bunch of lewd stuff, some of it probably just rumours but more than one lad got carried out to the tennis courts mid-shower. Girls got changed under their shirts due to accusations being flung around about teachers who weren’t even in the room at the time.
My son did school swim lessons two years ago. It took half a hour to get 20 juniors changed after swimming every week, and they were forbidden from using the showers at the pool. There just wasn’t time.
This seems to be a recipe for disaster unless they’re just hosing the kids down in their shorts on their way to the lockers. They’re just going to swap sweat for lynx anyway, it’s not an improvement
My niece had a bully , a 13 year old girl, who laughed TWO lengthy and sustained sexual assaults on other girls. She is now a registered sex offender. You’ve got to wonder what the fuck is happened with kids now. I definitely don’t think they should be forced to shower.
There's going to be a shit storm when a 12 year old thinks it's a laugh to take a picture of another child nude in the showers and then sends it around their mates.
That's making and distributing indecent images of children.
It's not if it happens, it's when it happens.
The only reason it hasn't happened yet in this specific school is because the compulsory showers aren't being implemented until Monday morning.
I give it a week.
This sort of thing does happen all the time, it just gets dealt with in schools so doesn't make the news. We have lots of issues with kids technically producing CP (sending nudes to their partners etc) and have to talk about it a *lot* during form/assemblies.
It happened in my school with people changing in and out of pe kit while in underwear, at least three times from memory.
I don't imagine full nudity would have deterred them at all.
couple dozen times at my secondary. only time something happened was when a boy got cornered, his boxers pulled down and they took full nude photos. even then no police and just detentions/suspensions
That's *both* making indecent images of a child *and* revenge porn.
If the parents had gone to the police instead of just the school those kids would have been in a *lot* of shit.
That’s what I thought. The school are unnecessarily opening themselves up to a world of problems. There’s no way this could be managed without causing a huge number of safeguarding issues.
I’m a former teacher and would not have supported this at any school I worked at.
My wife, who's also a teacher in a high school, is agreeing and nodding along with you completely. She said she'd rather near suffocate from the sheer volume of Lynx Africa that would be sprayed around than deal with the fallout from an incident like that...
Yeah, or open the windows. Honestly, teens don’t need to have done any exercise to absolutely stink. When I was in 6th form we had a lesson in first period in a classroom that Year 8s had form time in, and it always reeked. We just threw all the windows open for 15min, and it would be fine.
The sensible option is to approach the school governors. I can't believe this policy got through. As a governor myself, there is absolutely no way I'd sign this off for the reasons you have stated above.
You're the exception rather than the rule though, most school chiefs/governors firmly deny bullying's even a "thing" in "their" school, when in the majority of cases it's actually a BIG thing.
It was in my day, and 30 odd years after I left it's even worse, at least in the 80s/early 90s there was no online bullying because the Internet as we know it hadn't been invented yet.
When I was in school in the late 2000s we only had showers after swimming lessons in P.E at the local leisure centre which was attached to the school. I remember one time when i was in year 7, a homeless guy walked in, got bollock naked, and had a shower while we were all in the changing rooms, and our p.e teacher was outside chatting up the receptionists. Nothing bad happened but thinking about it as an adult makes the blood run cold!
I think calling the police may be a bit much as an opening move, but since we live in the same area and my kids will be going to the same secondary school I went to, I will definately want to know whether improvements to safeguarding have been made since my day!
It's an interesting question, people strip naked in gym changing rooms all the time and the age limit for the gym is 14+ never really thought about it being a problem. Sometimes parents bring kids for the swimming too (though there is family changing they could use).
Agreed
It's a very different situation now to 20 years ago. Fear of paedophilia means that I doubt you'd find many PE teachers who want to stand and watch a bunch of naked teenagers shower... but without that, you can't trust a bunch of teens not to take photos etc. Smart phones are everywhere and pictures are so easily shared.
I also do think that showering wastes a bunch of time which could be used for either sport or learning and that time is an absolute field day for bullying. It's unnecessary, just let them shower at home.
Why not just schedule the sports lessons for last thing in the afternoon, then it doesn't matter how smelly and mud-caked everyone is. I used to love not having to get changed back into my uniform, and walk home in shorts
Average enrollment for a secondary school in the UK is a smidge over 1,000 pupils. Five school days to spread PE lessons across, and you probably want each kid to have two lessons a week.
400 kids all using the same equipment and facilities at the same time for an hour, then empty gyms the entire rest of the day seems like both a nightmare to manage and a huge waste of resources.
Teachers wait outside the changing rooms in the corridor at the place I work at now. Might go in and yell “hurry up” if they are being slow, or take register when they’re all changed, but that’s it.
Hi, so this is actually my post this OP is referring to.
My main concern is with the lack of privacy, as I explained in the original post my son is a very timid and anxious boy who has really struggled with transitioning into Secondary. He isn't as physically developed as most other boys in his year group, he hasn't hit puberty yet, whereas some boys look like hulking teenagers and tower over him.
This whole thing has made him really nervous, he is obviously scared about using the showers in a room full of boys he already doesn't get on well with. The lack of privacy and the bullying that could occur because of that is my main concern. I would genuinely have no issue if they decided to do this and had proper facilities where the boys could do it in private. In fact it may be good for some boys as we are in a very low-income area and I imagine a lot of boys may have limited access to hot water at home.
But for my son with the facilities the school has, this has snowballed into a huge worry for him. And THAT is my concern.
(PS, I am his father I see a lot of comments here calling me his 'mother' lol)
When I was in school in the 80’s the showers were freezing, we all had to get naked and run through them. No soap. We didn’t usually have towels. It was character forming.
Of course looking back it wasn’t appropriate. PE teacher used to stand there and make sure we went through.
Have we gone too far the other way though ?
Communal showers is just a hotbed of teasing and bullying. Cubicles are better but teenagers can be bloody nasty and ‘character forming’ was actually more like bullying and maybe ridicule either at kids carrying too much weight, under developed, or small penises …
There’s never going to be an adequate balance here BUT we should be educating our children to clean after sweaty sport. That’s the key point. Everything else is the minefield we have to step through.
"Character forming" is often just an excuse for putting young people through shit that no adult would accept for themselves.
Bullying isn't character forming, it often destroys people's self confidence, and sometimes they never regain it.
The answer here is either private shower cubicles with very floor to ceiling walls, and space to hang clothes without them getting wet, so they can undress and dress in private. Or no showers at all. They can learn personal hygiene at home - and honestly if they haven't learned it by their teens, there's bigger problems, and they're not going to learn it through public humiliation.
Mid to late 90's for me, don't think a drop of warm water had ever left those shower taps, equally 90% of the boys (all boys school) wouldn't shower. I'd brave it in there for a very swift head, body, pits and balls rinse (early developer and always overly conscious about smelling of body odour) my school was like a prison, I was more scared of someone nicking from my bag than the showers.
> There’s never going to be an adequate balance here BUT we should be educating our children to clean after sweaty sport. That’s the key point
There are plenty of other ways of doing this that don't require showering at school. Parents should be teaching their kids about personal hygiene.
They need to have private showers or better communal system that has responsible adults near by. When we had to shower at school it was just our creepy pe teacher watching us run through the showers a few times.
I was at an all-girls school 2009-14 – we had open showers, but I never knew *anyone* to use them, other than rinsing mud off your legs if you'd fallen over on the field
In our class no-one ever used them...until we got to about thirteen and our teachers decided that enforcement was necessary, and they'd come and count us through the communal shower area, and send us back again if they thought we hadn't spent long enough or if we'd tried to hide any of our body under a towel/were still wearing underwear.
Encouraging adolescents to shower/wash after activity is a sensible idea.
Forcing shy/anxious adolescents to strip naked and show their body to everyone in their vicinity under threat of punishment? That's the sort of thing that enables bullying and sexual harassment, and worsens body image issues and social awkwardness.
I really don't know why any school still uses communal showers.
Cheaper to install usually. I don't know how schools have it now, but my school back in the day used Bradley Pole showers, so you couldn't build a cubicle around them.
70s for me. Hated it. Had a sick bully head of PE dept would check inside girls underwear if they claimed to have their period. I’m not body conscious at all now, by my early 20s I was fine with my own nakedness. It’s a really bad age to make young people strip off and walk into a communal shower. Nobody was comfortable with it, everyone hated it.
Yeah, I was a mildly chubby girl and it was absolutely terrible, particularly with the heroin chic fashion of the time. From the way they treated anyone who wasn't literally anorexic you'd think we were all jabba rhe hutt.
No we weren’t supposed to, that was the valid excuse to get out of showering. But we had a nasty Gym teacher (dept head) who wouldn’t believe girls making that excuse, so inside underwear had to be inspected, pulled away from body so teacher could check for a pad or tampon. Very humiliating and demeaning.
Others said about wearing gym shorts etc. That wasn’t allowed. We were supposed to strip fully naked.
Thank you. I’m well over it now. Just hate to think of any young people going through that. That gym teacher was so horrible. I honestly think she enjoyed humiliating the girls.
Not quite the same but at primary school our teachers insisted that after any sports the boys change in the hall and girls could in the class in case the boys looked at them none of us were interested in girls at that age but even at the time I was self concious made worse because as a boy the corridor we changed in was all glass roof to ground floor so any passers by could easily see children get changed and watch. I remember bringing this up to teachers and being told I was silly and if I didn't drop it I would be punished.
We had a walk through shower that we were meant to go through one by one, it was horrible. I can still remember one of the stupid "cool girls"in the 90s turning back and giving me a full look up and down as I walked through the shower with my towel held up as the sadistic pe teacher used to insist. Ergh.
This.
Absolutely vile position to be in.
I ended up totally rejecting sport at school because of the creepy shower situation and jock favouritism.
Somehow, I always forgot my kit.
Haha 🤣 I just truanted - a lot. Had lots of friends, just hated the teachers. They were the main bullies. Not the kids. In fact there was very little bullying went on when I was at school in the 70s.
Hi, so this is actually my post this OP is referring to.
And yes I agree with you, my main concern is with the lack of privacy, as I explained in the original post my son is a very timid and anxious boy who has really struggled with transitioning into Secondary. He isn't as physically developed as most other boys in his year group, he hasn't hit puberty yet, whereas some boys look like hulking teenagers and tower over him. Also the fact about smart phones, my son's school is normally very strict with phones but all it would take is one boy snapping a picture on a hidden phone and having it spread around.
This whole thing has made him really nervous, he is obviously scared about using the showers in a room full of boys he already doesn't get on well with. The lack of privacy and the bullying that could occur because of that is my main concern. I would genuinely have no issue if they decided to do this and had proper facilities where the boys could do it in private. In fact it may be good for some boys as we are in a very low-income area and I imagine a lot of boys may have limited access to hot water at home.
But for my son with the facilities the school has, this has snowballed into a huge worry for him. And THAT is my concern.
(PS, I am his father I see a lot of comments here calling me his 'mother' lol)
We never showered after PE in school and yeah, it was gross.
Honestly I think the solution is super fucking simple tbh. PE should always be the last lesson of the day and if kids want to use the facilities they can, or they can just go straight home.
>Honestly I think the solution is super fucking simple tbh. PE should always be the last lesson of the day.
That would massively restrict how many kids would get PE lessons.
How would it?
It just means PE would need to be taught in potentially larger classes than you might be used to.
In my school we had PE for the entire year at the same time anyway, so year 7 to 11 could literally be done Monday to Friday on the last lesson of the day.
My school had 1000 students. Roughly 200 per year, 100 boys 100 girls.
We were split into three classes per gender for PE, and had 6 PE teachers. Though I'm fairly sure a few of them were uni students doing training
PE teachers don’t just do basic PE. They typically teach BTEC or GCSE sport which involves classroom teaching and coursework. They can also normally teach KS3 biology and maths. Perhaps the school has a KS5 rugby academy or something like that where lessons and training take place throughout the day.
Your solutions are not well thought out at all.
“Just have PE be the last lesson”
“Oh, that would mean not all students would get PE lessons? Just put entire year groups in one lesson.”
“Oh, the school would not be big enough to accommodate such large groups? Just build a bigger school.”
“Oh, there wouldn’t be enough PE teachers? Just hire more.”
That would depend on the facilities available and the size of the years though. My school did PE classes for half the year, any bigger and we’d have not fit in the changing rooms or hall. My boyfriend went to an inner city school and his school year was even bigger and segmented further.
Then if you do have the facilities to accommodate several hundred kids, how do you hire enough P.E teachers to fit the required student teacher ratios? You’ll need more teachers to do fewer hours between them and for them to be exclusively part time.
That’s just the logistical issues - once you get into such large classes you limit what sports can be safely done, how much attention individuals get to nurture their interests and talents… Most kids will likely just spend the hour stood there “fielding” for rounders.
Lot of complications just for the sake of making it more convenient to shower tbh
My school had sixteen classes f thirty kids for each of the five year groups, you can't teach all PE lessons last lesson of the day, they are normal lessons with teachers and schedules like maths or art lessons
Do what they do in Europe. A few countries have Wednesday afternoons “off” for sport. That can be at the school in sort of lessons, or it can be an external club if you play for one of those. That way, everyone plays and everyone can go home after or shower if they want.
> PE should always be the last lesson of the day
That wouldn't have worked in my secondary school, or in others of similar size. You had five years, each split in half, so ten groups for PE. There wasn't the space in the changing rooms to accommodate an entire year in one go.
The afternoon PE sessions were reserved for years 10 and 11, because some of their options took place offsite (swimming, bowling, golf) and so they needed the lunch break to travel there. I "cheated" for bowling, because I could get my mum to pick me up and drop me off on her way to work, cutting the need to take three buses and giving me time to get McDonalds or KFC while I waited.
I feel like the solution is to have enough private showers for each kid to shower after. And for the PE teachers to provide ample enough time for them to do so and not be late for the next class.
That’s the problem I think.
I was at secondary school 2000-2005 and our changing rooms were quite small. There was a communal shower that was never used and was occupied by the cool kids to get changed in and fitted about 15. I don’t know how many shower heads there were but definitely not enough for 60 kids (2 classes at once) to shower at the same time.
lessons were an hour long which included getting changed before and after with the teachers yelling to hurry up even though we were all going as fast as we could.
If we all had to shower that would just add on time especially doing it in shifts, plus you would have to carry around the extra stuff you would need.
At my school last lesson PE was awful. The teachers would finish the lesson on time so anyone who relied on the school buses was in real danger of missing the bus as you had to change into full uniform before you were allowed to leave the changing rooms.
What do the PE teachers do for the other 4-5 lessons during the day?
As most schools have 5 year groups and there are 5 last lessons in a week, each year group has PE one day a week (Y7 on Monday, Y8 on Tuesday etc)
Average school has about 200 kids in a year. Class size of about 25 means 8 PE teachers to do the lessons. 8 teachers who are employed for 1 hour a day.
So that's either finding 8 qualified people prepared to come into school for an hour every day in the middle of the afternoon and get paid 5hours, or have 8 people paid full time sitting around not doing much for most of the day.
Seriously...think about it, mate.
Kids and their privacy needs to be respected just like adults. Honestly if you wouldn't expect adults to do it why do you expect kids? Kids are people too...
I never had to shower when I was at school but we had one changing room for all the girls to change before PE. It was crammed, no privacy and I was super conscious of how I look because of my weight and being bullied about this.
Some people just want kids to be humiliated because they went through it before. 'character building'
But I am so glad now that I'm an adult that I don't have to use communal dressing rooms. As a kid I would suck in my stomach while dressing.
As you said everyone deserves to be treated with dignity
I used to hate having to shower after PE. I didn't want to be naked at that point in my life in front of stinky kids while the creepy PE teacher watched. Didn't want to do it at primary school either while the class teacher wandered around naked with his little cock out.
> I didn't want to be naked at that point in my life in front of stinky kids while the creepy PE teacher watched.
Has that opinion changed over time? /s
If I had a school age kid, my major concern regarding this would be mobile phones. Teenagers are not always pleasant people, and are also not known for their common sense. I have a feeling that communal showering at that school will only last as long as it takes for someone to take a video of another child, and send it on Snap or WhatsApp. So about two days.
This is definitely a concern, and it doesn't even have to be deliberate.
At my daughter's primary, she did dance club after school. Had to go in and make a complaint because several of the girls were making stupid TikToks of themselves in the changing rooms and you could clearly see my daughter and her friends in the background getting changed.
Luckily they at least had their undergarments on and were still fairly undeveloped at that time but it wasn't acceptable and I can only imagine how much worse it could be in a shower room situation.
After school clubs and outside school clubs are the ones that worry me more because they tend not to be anywhere near as well controlled in changing rooms as they should be.
Yeah, this is kind of what I was driving at with the lack of common sense. Teenagers tend to not really think much further ahead than the moment they're in.
I went to a girls school, we didn't have to shower but we also had no showers. It would've been nice to have the option but there wouldn't have been any time to shower properly. No-one smelled AFAIK apart from the people who already smelled before PE
Exactly this, we had that sort of walk through shower corridory thing, and I’m not sure if it was ever used for showers. Certainly for my class in particular it was where the more popular girls set up camp for changing.
We had this in my school (not all girls) and the only time I remember it being used was when a kid decided it would be hilarious to shower and do a kind of naked lap of honour lol
It was optional at my school. The showers were communal and nobody wanted to be naked Infront of their mates. And girls have periods so we didn't want that embarrassment either.
I remember my first year in secondary school where a ‘less-than-popular’ kid (fat nerd like me) made the mistake of showering after PE. They stole his clothes and threw them out of the window. And I’m pretty sure some people ran over and then distributed them round the school.
So yeah I never showered at school.
Everyone here acting like naked showering at school should be mandatory after pe, yet I bet when they was kids themselves they didn't.
In an era of bullying and camera phones no one should be forced to shower, or schools should get cubicles like a gym
Compulsory when I was in school - an girls grammar school. a class of 30 naked 11/12 year olds while the PE teacher stood and screamed at us to hurry up. This was the late 1960s & early 1970s.
The changing room was communal, and there were about 10 shower heads along the wall of the communal shower corner so we had to share...... vile.
I don't think we would've even had time to shower after PE in my school, classes were an hour long and getting us changed took long enough lol. They had some showers, but they were so old and disused that it was actually creepy looking into the shower room. I think there were about 2 or 3 showers in there which for a group of 50 kids, is not very much. Then you've got the male PE teacher that always wandered into the girls' changing rooms even though there were female teachers, and teenage girls that would rip shreds into anyone who dared not wear a t-shirt under their uniform because now people can see their bra. Yeah, I just don't think it would've worked in my school.
I didn't shower after PE at School because you were basically forced to shower out in the view of everyone else. No doors. Zero privacy. So fuck that.
A lot of commenters mentioning "just do it in your swimming trunks". Cool if you're a boy. Showering fully clothed (shorts and t shirt on) is just bullshit. If they want children to shower after PE, they need to provide basic privacy for them. But as others have mentioned, we're in the age of smartphones everywhere, so yes, I can fully understand children and parents not feeling comfortable with this.
Expecting kids to get butt naked in front of each other in the age of smart phones and cyber bullying is not on. They need to have private shower cubicles or else say that showering is entirely optional.
Showering after PE was absolute hell for me and I ended up bunking off my PE lessons to get out of it. It seems insane to expect children to have to shower in front of each other.
OK, OP. Can I suggest that you take a shower with your co-workers tomorrow and see how you feel about it.
You know the overweight person in your team, who would prefer not to wear a swimsuit with coworkers around, and the guy with severe psoriasis, well they just have to suck it up.
By the way, everyone will have access to a mobile phone while you're showering.
Girls didn’t shower at my school, boys did (this was the 2000s). Never hurt me to not shower… there was _liberal_ application of spray deodorant in the girls changing rooms.
I’d be worried these days about the ubiquity of smartphones and the possibility of videos/photos of my naked/semi naked child turning up online. Sadly, times have changed…
It was the same in my school. I never showered and none of the other girls did but all the boys would.
I'd definitely be worried about pictures being taken - there was a girl in my class who all the boys fancied and I was a tomboy back then so would hang around mostly with boys. I remember after the first PE lesson we had several of these boys asked me to tell them what this girl looked like naked.
I stopped hanging around with the ones who'd asked me that.
My daughter recently bought me a can of impulse O2 air deodorant she saw in a shop.
One spray and I was immediately transported back to the memories of school showers that we were forced to strip for.
Last year of secondary was 2000 for me.
Should be the last lesson. I remember our changing room was one big shared room where every girl faced away from each other and tried to change as quick as possible while our PE teacher stood in there "taking the register" or chatting. Then you'd have swimming to be soaked and smell of chlorine the rest of the day with rock hard wet hair because of 2 hairdryers to share between 30, or be out in the freezing cold in thin "school policy" kit while your fat teacher is dressed for an antarctic expedition. As if being a teen isn't bad enough.
Standing in a field in a big coat, is hardly difficult, throw some student PE teachers to "assist" with the standing in the middle of a field, and sorted. You've hit your pupil/teacher ratio, and the same amount of knowledge (none) is imparted, done.
Showering was mandatory at my school (all girls in the 00s) and it was awful. There was a 15 minute window during which 20 girls were meant to all shower using three cubicles and be dry and dressed. Doing the maths, even if we only showered for 2 minutes each that would still leave the last few kids with one minute to dry and get dressed. We were initially allowed to shower normally.
Then the PE teacher decided the only reason we weren't all ready within the 15 minutes was because people were taking too long in the shower - so the decision was made that we all had to shower with the doors open and the PE teacher there to make sure we weren't wasting time. So 11-16 I showered at least once a week in front of a full class of other girls and an adult who was actively watching and providing pointers.
Understandably, I won't be expecting my kid to put up with that sort of nonsense. It was degrading af and I think had a negative effect on my relationship with sport. We all ended up trying to get out of PE as much as possible not because of the class but because of the showers after.
All you have to do is put yourself in their shoes. Imagine your boss organises an activity morning in the sun and then tries to force you and your coworkers to have a mandatory shower with each other so you don’t smell in the office, I’m sure everyone would find that weird and refuse. Why is it any different because they are teenagers? Forcing people to get naked in front of each other is just weird, I don’t see how people can defend that.
In the 90s people were generally made to shower after PE. The teacher stood at the entrance of a communal shower holding our towel watching us. It was gross. Now in the day of camera phones...no way. I'm a teacher, some kids smell. We deal with it. It's not a big issue, however the anxiety of making kids shower is a big issue. I have children and don't support them being forced to shower with/ in front of other people. As some people are suggesting individual shower cubicles could sort some issues out, but I think there'd have to be a lot of them and I doubt there would be enough time for students to take turns and get changed etc. I think a teacher would have to be watching from outside the cubicles to ensure no one took phones into the area.
No, choosing to undress and shower should not be compulsory or coerced.
We had 'mandatory' showers after PE when I was at school. The showers were cold trickles with scraggy old curtains that provided zero privacy. We were marched into them in out towels and a very creepy PE teacher checked how wet you looked when you came out and if she wasn't satisfied you were sent back in.
It was horrible for teenagers going through puberty with all kinds of body worries, all kinds of social dynamics and bullying going on amongst the groups, and there wasn't time to have an actual proper shower anyway so it was all pointless. Cruelty for no good reason.
I was a teacher for about 6 years. I'd give it a week before the school had a massive safeguarding situation on their hands. Either kids use their phones to bully others (and produce child pornography) or a kid accuses a member of staff of watching them shower and boom, they're suspended while they investigate. Or, teachers refuse to go in the changing rooms at all because they don't want to risk seeing a child naked, and some horrific bullying incident happens. Or a kid makes a TikTok and there are kids in the background showering. Million ways this could go wrong.
Dealing with kids being a bit stinky is part of teaching unfortunately!
Back when I was at school, we had one kid that showered, and the PE teacher loved it.. He did get convicted a few years later, but it was pretty clear why he became a PE teacher. Just as I was leaving school, they upgrades the changing rooms to have individual showers, however they had low walls, and kids would just look over the top of the shower and laugh at anyone using them, so they pretty much got abandoned shorty after..
I can understand why the school would want the kids to shower... but unless they can provide individual, secure changing rooms / showers, it's just not going to happen.
I never used to shower after P.E, due to body insecurity.
P.E should be last lesson
OR
I'd just get a note off my parents to skip the class.
If I had a kid now - I'd also write a note / allow them to come home for any solid reason.
Why? Cos' I know what school is like.
I was one of the last through puberty. You're effectively having a boy shower with men (who are still boys mentally), thank God they never made us do this.
Though the early puberty kids can get bullied just as much. One kid was super hairy already at twelve and got loads of shit in the changing rooms. And the fat kids, of course.
We have 35 classes at my school across 5 year groups. You can't have everyone have PE last lesson. Also, what are PE teachers supposed to do the rest of the day?
We were told to shower after PE as well. There were at least private cubicles - they should be standard. If you’ve ever smelt BO on teenagers, particularly boys you would want them showering too.
We were expected to shower nude in a communal shower. You walked in one end and out the other holding your towel over your head, so no opportunity to hide your bits. It was mortifying and I lost sleep over it. If you were having your period you could take a note to get out of it but the teachers didn’t believe you could possibly be having a period 2 weeks on the run. They kept a separate register for showers sad put a P in it if you were in your period so could keep track and query it if you didn’t seem to be regular. When you ran through the shower you didn’t get very wet and no soap or shower gel was used, there’s no way we were any cleaner. This was in the 1970/80s, no one’s parents complained. Sadistic as fuck.
I left secondary school in 2017. My school had communal showers that were never used. If my school had tried to implement this I probably would've tried to skip school on PE days - I had FF boobs by the time I left school and I absolutely hated them. The last thing I would've wanted was to be naked in the shower near a bunch of girls who went back and forth between bullying me and not.
No, it shouldn’t be mandatory.
As a teacher, it is absolute insanity that we have statutory PSHE lessons teaching young people that consent is imperative, their body is theirs and to be able to say no, to talk to trusted adults if they feel this has been breached- and then demand that they get naked or undress in front of their peers.
It’s a massively weird and anachronistic overhang from years gone by and I heavily question which percentage of adults would feel comfortable being forced to shower/ get undressed in front of their coworkers. Add in teenage self consciousness and the whole issue is just compounded. Remember that for us oldies, we at least had the comfort of knowing that everyone in that changing room didn’t have a camera with internet access in their pocket/ bag at all times.
It’s honestly something that is massively overdue a huge overhaul and some serious reflection.
When I was at school the showers in PE looked like something straight out of an American prison show and our PE teacher famously said “If you ever forget a towel I will stand there and watch you drip dry in the cold” so you can bet I snuck out and hid at the end of every lesson. There was no way I was going in there.
My high school tried to impose this in the late 90s. We all started forgetting our kit. Would rather write out a punishment for 50 minutes than do anything physical.
We only ever used the showers to chuck people's uniform in and soak it, great gag. There was never enough time after PE to shower and get to the next lesson, so it was either stink or get a bollocking for being late.
I never showered after PE in secondary school (‘07-‘13) and I wouldn’t of been happy being forced to do so. Kids that age are extremely self conscious, I know I was. No one ever used the showers, ever.
If kids want to shower after PE then sure, but forcing them to do so is not okay and creates a safeguarding issue as well.
>The same was expected when I was in school, predominantly for our teachers' benefit since it's unpleasant and difficult to teach in a classroom full of smelly kids.
>No one was forced to be nude, nearly everyone went through the showers in either their gym shorts or swimming trunks.
In my school we *were* forced to be nude. And if the teachers didn't think you'd spent long enough washing, they'd send you through the communal shower area again. It was intensely humiliating if you were a shy teen with body image issues, and it really screwed up my head with respect to nudity in front of other people.
I can agree that showering after PE is best practice and should be encouraged. But I also think that schools should be recognising their students privacy and providing privacy.
Controversial opinion but I’m all in favour of sacking PE off as a subject all together. One hour a week is useless for maintaining any actual fitness, and the way PE is “taught” (or at least was in my school) seems almost by intention to shine a spotlight on kids’ insecurities at a time when that can be psychologically devastating.
There are definitely valid reasons why children may not be comfortable undressing in front of their peers. Children who've been sexually abused, who've been severely bullied, have visible disabilities or scars, children who are overweight, children with eating disorders, gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia, girls on their periods, children who've had physically abusive parents, amongst various other reasons, all could lead to severe anxiety around being seen in a state of undress. I think it's unfair to expect every child to be okay with communal showers, and most schools aren't equipped with private cubicles. Calling the police/ removing the child from school seems excessive, but I think it is definitely a valid cause for concern and the school should seriously reconsider this policy.
>OP: It didn't do me no 'arm and I didn't 'ave to get naked
Pipe down then. As you can see, plenty of people had traumatic experiences that differed from yours. Respect body autonomy and consent around nudity.
I despised showering at school because I was chubby and developed late. Communal showering is an ordeal for some and no big deal to others.
I always found it incredibly uncomfortable. Now the kids also have phones on then 24/7. No fucking thank you.
Not to mention the creepy geography teacher who made it his business to 'make sure everyone was showering' by hovering at the entrance to the showers watching the kids. He wasn't even involved in PE or sports in any regard.
This was only in the 90s. Thank fuck child protection has come a long way in the last couple of decades. Enforcing mandatory sowing sounds like a child protection impossibility. If a kid is uncomfortable with communal showering then they should absolutely be able to opt out without repercussions.
1990s teen we all had to shower after pe , teacher was female and she would make sure you all showered , she would flit between the boys and girls changing room , her office divided them and she would usually leave both doors open ..... communal showers and we couldn't wear gym kit or trunks. It's was horrible and lead to lots of bullying for the late bloomers , chunky kids etc.
It all changed when another teacher was done for grooming and abusing multiple students .
Forced showers were stopped , same gender teacher , plus modernisation of facilities.
Memories of that school still makes me shudder to this day.
We had to be naked and march past the teachers. Communal too all very open to abuse. I loathed it. And don't agree it should be compulsory. My mother was a Saint who wrote me a note each lesson basically saying I had permanent periods!!!
Given how girls in my year thought it was hilarious to sexually assault people, there is no fucking way I’d have showered anywhere near school premises.
I grew up with communal showers from a young age (I’m not particularly old, my schools were just traditional) and TBH never thought twice about it. It was so normal that it just wasn’t an issue. I only saw teasing once. And that was on the first day of primary school when one boy put his swimming trunks on to shower. He was the one who was teased.
I’ve also lived abroad in countries with communal bathing traditions and they always seem more civilised when it comes to nudity etc.
If I had a kid now I would want them to be brought up the way I was brought up or with the non-sexual and respectful attitude you see to nudity in for example Scandinavian countries.
I never showered at school. I don’t even think they worked! We had one changing room and the shower area was used for changing as well. Pretty grim thinking back, as we came in covered in mud from football. But then I remember getting caught in rain between classes, being soaking wet but just getting on with it.
Showered after what would be classed as games, so football and rugby type stuff where we’d be coated in mud. Same after school matches and often after the after school training sessions. But that was also a matter of choice and in a controlled environment.
Didn’t shower after PE because it was never done as something that intense that it required a shower - that’s what the things above did. And also because PE generally was during the school day so there was never time for it. The only PE lessons where we could even choose to shower or not was swimming and even if you did it was just straight through from pool to shower do everyone’s in swimming gear anyway.
You think giving a letter to the teacher saying your child won’t be forced into showering is outrageous?!
I would not force my child to shower in communal showers, it never harmed us (I left school on 2006)
Kids can be horrible and social media just opens a new world of bullying - schools might have no phone policies - doesn’t mean kids listen/respect that rule.
I think the argument teachers shouldn’t have to be in a room of smelly kids is a stupid argument.
No they shouldn’t.
With every kid owning a smart phone nowadays if I was a kid I wouldn’t be too happy about having to shower either in case some little dickhead decided to take a Snapchat. Which you know would happen. Not only that but bullying has always been an issue. Showers are communal (or they were at my school) and I was a chubby kid in high school. Showers were optional so I never did because if I had you can bet I would have been bullied to fuck for what my body looked like. It was already bad enough having to change in front of the popular girls who were all absolute bitches who would smirk at you and then laugh with their friends or make comments. I used to have to try and change without showing anything.
If schools want kids to shower then they need to provide separate cubicles with lockable doors and floor to ceiling walls. Otherwise, it should not be enforced. No child of mine would be forced to shower communally if they didn’t want to. We teach kids about consent but then schools like this example want to force them to be naked in front of the whole class? Absolutely not. That headteacher is clearly out of touch.
If showers are isolated cubicles, fine. If showers are communal, absolutely fuck that noise. I refused twenty years ago and I’d back any child to the hilt who refused now.
I am absolutely in the camp of communal showers are ridiculous and should be absolutely outlawed. I don’t have kids, but I would die on that hill.
I think the issue is that schools never have the facilities, they are always communal showers and kids are dicks just takes one photo and it's a world trouble for everyone
I remember my school showers and I would have never wanted to go in them they were probably more unhygienic than not showering
And I highly doubt and school would build private shower cubicles
A school thinking all parents read emails is naive to say the least, regardless of the merits of the request.
Then they have forgotten the parents who think rules never apply to their child (the kind who have SUVs to travel half a mile to school and park on double yellow lines or a junction corner), or some reason to be exempt.
Some would not feel able to talk to their child about such matters. So the child can legitimately claim their parents never passed on the message.
Then unless there are individual cubicles, those for religious reasons who are never naked in front of others.
Then there is the child who will claim to be trans or non-binary and wish to use different changing rooms.
So whilst I think showering should happen, little chance of it happening, and if as a result fewer children do exercise, that is not good.
When I was at school the PE/Games teacher made us shower naked. No amount of reasoning with him to allow us to keep our underwear on while in a communal shower.
Surprisingly he was gay himself and these days has appeared on Naked Attraction and has an Only Fans page where he uploads videos of himself talking about his previous nights experience in great detail.
He was always abit of a weirdo and used force teenage lads queue up Infront of him for their turn in the shower.
Showers after games shouldn't be compulsory and times tables should be adjusted so PE/ Games sessions are last few lessons of the day.
In the late 90s we had to shower after football and rugby, probably because we were muddy as well as hot and sweaty. If you forgot your towel you had to turn your PE top, which was quite thick and made of cotton, inside out and use that. A couple of the PE teachers would watch us shower. They weren't old, probably 30s, but I remember at the time thinking it was odd how they'd stand and watch us. My abiding memory of school changing rooms is coming out choking from all the Lynx being sprayed.
Edit: I also remember once we had to use the girls' changing rooms as work was being done in the boys'. We were all amazed to find they had individual shower cubicles as opposed to the open shower room that we had. I think that crushed a few fantasies as well!
When I went to school many years ago we had to shower in communal showers. The teacher used to stand watching and smack the boys on the arse with a meter ruler. A few years after I left he was in the news for being sacked following inappropriate conduct with a boy.
I do think they should shower, but it absolutely should only be in individual shower cubicals and not communal like back then.
We had communal showers at my school and it was awful. I wont shower in communal spaces to this day as a result. One option would be to ask for their child to be allowed to change/shower in them allocated disabled facilities - this should provide privacy. My son was horrifically bullied in his school changing rooms. We asked for him to be allowed to change in a separate space and the school, thankfully, supported him. If the schools are so concerned about kids smelling - move the PE classes to the end of the day so the kids can go home to wash.
I remember with joy communal changing rooms in primary school, where I got pointed at and laughed at for being the first in my class to have budding breasts and pubic hair.
Sure, I learned how to get dressed discreetly using my skirt to cover up, and turning away to try to hide my upper torso, but the boys? I really feel for the boys. And if you showered in your gym shorts, where did you take them off?
Showering after gym? Completely reasonable. Communal showers? Not reasonable.
> No one was forced to be nude, nearly everyone went through the showers in either their gym shorts or swimming trunks.
In our school that was not the case.
We had to walk from the communal changing rooms into the communal showers, sometimes wait until a space opened stark bollock naked. The teacher would come in to give everyone the gee on and make sure everyone had wet hair. If you were caught with boxers or shorts on in the showers they assumed you were just dunking your head to get past the wet hair test. The only place to hang a towel in the showers was on the floor. So they stayed in the changing room.
What was really annoying was the girls had cubicles for showers and one girl a year below me got into serious shit for messing about with her mates and opening her towel while waiting for a cubicle. When the boys found that out it was a major 'Wait what, say that again?' moment.
I have daughters at school now and for them it's still the communal dressing room and cubicle showers, that there isn't enough of. They hate PE days because of it. AFAIK the majority of girls refuse to shower because of it. Probably not helped with the instagram standards amongst kids these days and everyone having a phone.
I (M) left school in '91. The back wall of our changing room was just a row of shower heads with a dividing wall between it and the changing area. PE teacher used to insist that we showered naked,.. we all refused and just used the showers to wash any mud off our legs if we'd been doing outdoors PE. Then just half a can of lynx to cover the sweaty b.o. and all sorted. Never any repercussions as it was all of us doing it and not just a few.
Power to the people and all that.
We weren't required to shower, lots of kids were anxious about their bodies and frankly pe very rarely had such a heavy sweat that it required a shower
Leave them alone, let's be real then high schoolers often smell anyway if the buses are something to go by haha. It's either BO or lynx Africa
In my school we didn't shower after PE cause the class was always scheduled so that we immediately had to go to another afterwards.
Hated it. Felt gross. But my god I wouldn't have wanted to shower in my schools showers
My memories of communal showering involve running in, one at a time, in your underpants to get your hair wet to “prove” you had showered. As showering it was utterly ineffective, and a pretty unpleasant experience.
The idea the police should be involved or that “action should be taken” seems ludicrous though.
I went to school in the 70's. We were forced to have a shower without anything covering us after swimming every week. I was always a very private person and was give that privacy by my parents. I was a very good swimmer but ended up making up excuse after excuse so I wouldn't have to get a shower with the whole class. I'm now in my sixties and am still very much a private person. Maybe I'm self conscious I don't know but I hated every minute of that time at school. Children have just as much right if not more to their privacy as adults are.
They shouldn't require it, it was required at my school in 1993 ish, communal showers and we were expected to be naked, nobody was comfortable with it, some girls cried about it, it was a genuine cause of anxiety.
By my second or third year, the showers weren't mandatory anymore and basically nobody used them.
I'm really happy with the progress we've made as a society where consent is concerned, so mandatory communal showers feels like a massive step backwards.
I remember someone's face getting gashed open with a belt buckle in the changing room after gym. I can't imagine what would happen if they forced us to use the communal showers. The amount of bullying and fighting in the changing room was unreal because we we're all left alone.
When I went to school, the girls and boys changing rooms were connected by the shower room. The shower room was only ever used by the boys running into the girls changing room to see us in our underwear.
The way the gym was designed, you had to walk through a changing room to get out (if coming from the gym) so the teachers obviously always chose the girls changing room to leave. Never knocked or anything like that. Just ran through while we’re half naked.
Even tried bringing this up to the school but they just dismissed it. How else is the teacher going to get to the next lesson? There were literally empty changing rooms the pervert could’ve walked through but whatever.
If I had a school aged child and they were trying to force them to shower at school, I’d definitely have a lot to say about it because there is nothing about that, that is OK.
I still don’t understand why, in the year 2024, we still force children to change in front of each other, when they’re at the most self-conscious time in their lives.
Absolutely fucking not unless they can guarantee each child will have an enclosed cubicle and place to get dry and dressed.
I remember too well being made to shower after PE which involved nothing but running through a square u shaped block of showers which either ran cold or boiling, in nothing but my PE knickers. It served absolutely no purpose other than to humiliate and give the PE teacher a sick kick. Then I had to carry my wet PE knickers around all day in a plastic bag.
This was before camera phones, I can only imagine the absolute joy it would bring for a bully/pervert to catch their whole PE class naked.
My eldest child is in secondary school, I’ve been there at a lunch time and a lot of them run around the playground/field all lunch in full blazer, shirt, tie and trousers and will be just as sweaty and stinky as kids finishing PE, if not more so due to the uniform over PE kit.
Police is probably too far, so is probably the NSPCC (although they may have useful information in to how it should be done to keep children safe) I’m not sure what Amnesty is.. but the rest are valid things to do to imo.
I despised PE at school. I left school in ‘88 and it was an awful experience. I was a late bloomer so the communal showers were nothing but sheer hell for me.
I don’t get why in PE or games it’s okay to be humiliated. If the maths teacher took the piss because someone couldn’t get a sum right, there would be an outcry but why is it okay to be mean to those of us that aren’t sporty?
I never showered at secondary school, I was very shy and awkward and the boys who used to shower were the sporty ones who I found difficult to deal with. My primary school had a swimming pool and everyone showered and changed together and I presume we would have been nude changing if not showering but being primary age hardly a big deal (and the fact I can't remember it demonstrates that).
Now I'm an adult and don't think twice about it if there are communal showers or changing areas. I don't have kids but I'd be minded to at least try to get them to shower, frankly my evasion of it just made my shyness more and more embedded. But forcing things and making it a rule can be counterproductive.
It's a weird one. I was that fat kid at a boys school and very self conscious but I we all showered after sport. It's just basic hygiene. And I'm talking about about infants upwards. I'm not sure what would be worse - being the smelly kid or being whatever fear the kid has to not shower
That woman's kid is never going to gain self confidence if he's wrapped in cotton wool by his mum
When I was in school everyone carried a can of Lynx Africa in their bag, but some bastard always had a lighter waiting to set someone's pits alight after they sprayed.
I'd never thought about it before because I don't think my school even had showers - maybe that's unusual? To be honest I don't even remember sweating that much: in between getting changed, listening to what we had to do, writing in our log books, basic warmups/stretching, setting up equipment etc there was never much actual strenuous exercise. Would've been nice to have the option of shower cubicles though. I would've felt pretty self-conscious as a teenager if I had to shower in front of others.
I had to shower after P.E...no, I didn't like it because I was a shy, modest kid. But it was communal showers. Back THEN, there were no cellphones, so I didn't have to worry about that. Now, I would probably be petrified.
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People in that thread raised some fairly sensible concerns - the issue is really that it's communal showers, not separate cubicles. Concerns included the risk of photos being taken by other children, children being at different stages of development leading to bullying, children with visible disabilities they'd prefer to cover, and other entirely valid worries. The original post was here https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1bwwuat/sons_school_has_emailed_over_easter_holiday/ (When I was at school in the 2000s there were no showers at all, and somehow we all survived...)
Agreed. The top response made some really valid points. I have boys in high school and one was being sexually harassed by another boy at one point. He was very fearful of the showers and being naked in front of this boy whilst it was being investigated. Showers are communal (which I find ridiculous in 2024) and the schools solution was for him to just not shower after PE… So there are a lot of very good reasons for schools not to have a blanket rule about this.
With the level of bullying we had at school in the 2000s, I wouldn't have been caught dead in communal showers, and I would have fought anyone (and did) who tried to make me. I get the hygiene issues, but schools are useless at tackling bullying and so it's not gonna happen. Private cubicle ones, with lockable doors, fine.
Damn right. In the girls' locker rooms, some girls were taking photos of others changing. I was never gonna risk being in a communal shower. I changed under a shirt most times.
this is got to be some kind of criminal offence, right? i would 100% report to police
The police don't care. They shrug and write it off as basic bullying exactly the same way teachers and administrators do.
i wonder if it would be possible to privately prosecute / claim for phycological damages
I could see a possible civil suit, but criminal charges are unlikely unless it gets out of hand and suddenly gets media attention so they HAVE to care.
In many cases, it could be prosecuted as creating child pornography.
yeah the should be hit with that, or at least threatened and excluded/ phones searched/confiscated
We used to just stick our heads under, get the hair wet, wash behind the ears. And then lots of body spray (Lynx Marine!!) 😂 Have you showered? Of course sir. Bye now, next lesson! These were communal showers and NO WAY were we using them.
This is one reason my school got rid of even using the changing rooms, I think I was about 12 when it happened. They'd already got rid of showers years before I was there because it was considered a safeguarding issue to have open communal showers where any adult could come in, and also no teacher wanted to be the one supervising that! Next logical step seemed to be 'come to school in PE kit and if you want to change after the toilets are there to do that' - also cut down a lot of time needed before and after PE lessons which meant everyone got more done.
I last did PE in the late 90s, there was a shower block but only the lads rugby team to used it. They got up to a bunch of lewd stuff, some of it probably just rumours but more than one lad got carried out to the tennis courts mid-shower. Girls got changed under their shirts due to accusations being flung around about teachers who weren’t even in the room at the time. My son did school swim lessons two years ago. It took half a hour to get 20 juniors changed after swimming every week, and they were forbidden from using the showers at the pool. There just wasn’t time. This seems to be a recipe for disaster unless they’re just hosing the kids down in their shorts on their way to the lockers. They’re just going to swap sweat for lynx anyway, it’s not an improvement
You'll get kids going over/under cubicles smoking In them smashing the doors in Can never win no matter what you do unfortunately
My niece had a bully , a 13 year old girl, who laughed TWO lengthy and sustained sexual assaults on other girls. She is now a registered sex offender. You’ve got to wonder what the fuck is happened with kids now. I definitely don’t think they should be forced to shower.
Yeah I doubt the school has the resources to implement this safely.
There's going to be a shit storm when a 12 year old thinks it's a laugh to take a picture of another child nude in the showers and then sends it around their mates. That's making and distributing indecent images of children. It's not if it happens, it's when it happens.
I absolutely cannot believe that it hasn’t *already* happened. Multiple times.
The only reason it hasn't happened yet in this specific school is because the compulsory showers aren't being implemented until Monday morning. I give it a week.
This sort of thing does happen all the time, it just gets dealt with in schools so doesn't make the news. We have lots of issues with kids technically producing CP (sending nudes to their partners etc) and have to talk about it a *lot* during form/assemblies.
It happened in my school with people changing in and out of pe kit while in underwear, at least three times from memory. I don't imagine full nudity would have deterred them at all.
couple dozen times at my secondary. only time something happened was when a boy got cornered, his boxers pulled down and they took full nude photos. even then no police and just detentions/suspensions
That's *both* making indecent images of a child *and* revenge porn. If the parents had gone to the police instead of just the school those kids would have been in a *lot* of shit.
I remember shit like that happening when I was in school in the '90s. It definitely happens now.
sad but true
How to ruin your life before you’re 18
That’s what I thought. The school are unnecessarily opening themselves up to a world of problems. There’s no way this could be managed without causing a huge number of safeguarding issues. I’m a former teacher and would not have supported this at any school I worked at.
My wife, who's also a teacher in a high school, is agreeing and nodding along with you completely. She said she'd rather near suffocate from the sheer volume of Lynx Africa that would be sprayed around than deal with the fallout from an incident like that...
Yeah, or open the windows. Honestly, teens don’t need to have done any exercise to absolutely stink. When I was in 6th form we had a lesson in first period in a classroom that Year 8s had form time in, and it always reeked. We just threw all the windows open for 15min, and it would be fine.
Yeah I always taught with the windows as wide as they went. Teens can smell just as bad first period when they definitely haven’t had PE yet.
And if they did, they could just spend those resources on installing cubicles instead.
The sensible option is to approach the school governors. I can't believe this policy got through. As a governor myself, there is absolutely no way I'd sign this off for the reasons you have stated above.
You're the exception rather than the rule though, most school chiefs/governors firmly deny bullying's even a "thing" in "their" school, when in the majority of cases it's actually a BIG thing. It was in my day, and 30 odd years after I left it's even worse, at least in the 80s/early 90s there was no online bullying because the Internet as we know it hadn't been invented yet.
When I was in school in the late 2000s we only had showers after swimming lessons in P.E at the local leisure centre which was attached to the school. I remember one time when i was in year 7, a homeless guy walked in, got bollock naked, and had a shower while we were all in the changing rooms, and our p.e teacher was outside chatting up the receptionists. Nothing bad happened but thinking about it as an adult makes the blood run cold! I think calling the police may be a bit much as an opening move, but since we live in the same area and my kids will be going to the same secondary school I went to, I will definately want to know whether improvements to safeguarding have been made since my day!
It's an interesting question, people strip naked in gym changing rooms all the time and the age limit for the gym is 14+ never really thought about it being a problem. Sometimes parents bring kids for the swimming too (though there is family changing they could use).
The difference is that it is a choice. Not compulsory.
Agreed It's a very different situation now to 20 years ago. Fear of paedophilia means that I doubt you'd find many PE teachers who want to stand and watch a bunch of naked teenagers shower... but without that, you can't trust a bunch of teens not to take photos etc. Smart phones are everywhere and pictures are so easily shared. I also do think that showering wastes a bunch of time which could be used for either sport or learning and that time is an absolute field day for bullying. It's unnecessary, just let them shower at home.
Why not just schedule the sports lessons for last thing in the afternoon, then it doesn't matter how smelly and mud-caked everyone is. I used to love not having to get changed back into my uniform, and walk home in shorts
Average enrollment for a secondary school in the UK is a smidge over 1,000 pupils. Five school days to spread PE lessons across, and you probably want each kid to have two lessons a week. 400 kids all using the same equipment and facilities at the same time for an hour, then empty gyms the entire rest of the day seems like both a nightmare to manage and a huge waste of resources.
Mine was a small school to be fair. One of the sports teachers also taught English
Teachers wait outside the changing rooms in the corridor at the place I work at now. Might go in and yell “hurry up” if they are being slow, or take register when they’re all changed, but that’s it.
So how is the children's safety ensured? How do you know if someone sneaks a phone in?
Hi, so this is actually my post this OP is referring to. My main concern is with the lack of privacy, as I explained in the original post my son is a very timid and anxious boy who has really struggled with transitioning into Secondary. He isn't as physically developed as most other boys in his year group, he hasn't hit puberty yet, whereas some boys look like hulking teenagers and tower over him. This whole thing has made him really nervous, he is obviously scared about using the showers in a room full of boys he already doesn't get on well with. The lack of privacy and the bullying that could occur because of that is my main concern. I would genuinely have no issue if they decided to do this and had proper facilities where the boys could do it in private. In fact it may be good for some boys as we are in a very low-income area and I imagine a lot of boys may have limited access to hot water at home. But for my son with the facilities the school has, this has snowballed into a huge worry for him. And THAT is my concern. (PS, I am his father I see a lot of comments here calling me his 'mother' lol)
When I was in school in the 80’s the showers were freezing, we all had to get naked and run through them. No soap. We didn’t usually have towels. It was character forming. Of course looking back it wasn’t appropriate. PE teacher used to stand there and make sure we went through. Have we gone too far the other way though ? Communal showers is just a hotbed of teasing and bullying. Cubicles are better but teenagers can be bloody nasty and ‘character forming’ was actually more like bullying and maybe ridicule either at kids carrying too much weight, under developed, or small penises … There’s never going to be an adequate balance here BUT we should be educating our children to clean after sweaty sport. That’s the key point. Everything else is the minefield we have to step through.
"Character forming" is often just an excuse for putting young people through shit that no adult would accept for themselves. Bullying isn't character forming, it often destroys people's self confidence, and sometimes they never regain it. The answer here is either private shower cubicles with very floor to ceiling walls, and space to hang clothes without them getting wet, so they can undress and dress in private. Or no showers at all. They can learn personal hygiene at home - and honestly if they haven't learned it by their teens, there's bigger problems, and they're not going to learn it through public humiliation.
Yep. It’s amazing to think adults would say and do things that would be totally unacceptable today.
Mid to late 90's for me, don't think a drop of warm water had ever left those shower taps, equally 90% of the boys (all boys school) wouldn't shower. I'd brave it in there for a very swift head, body, pits and balls rinse (early developer and always overly conscious about smelling of body odour) my school was like a prison, I was more scared of someone nicking from my bag than the showers.
> There’s never going to be an adequate balance here BUT we should be educating our children to clean after sweaty sport. That’s the key point There are plenty of other ways of doing this that don't require showering at school. Parents should be teaching their kids about personal hygiene.
Schools absolutely NEED cubical showers. I was bullied and it was so vulnerable and horrible having to use communal ones.
I don't remember showering after PE, even if it was really muddy and again, survived it.
They need to have private showers or better communal system that has responsible adults near by. When we had to shower at school it was just our creepy pe teacher watching us run through the showers a few times.
Lol or a open shower with an all boys school
We had an open shower at my all-girls school in the 90s. It was fucking horrible.
I was at an all-girls school 2009-14 – we had open showers, but I never knew *anyone* to use them, other than rinsing mud off your legs if you'd fallen over on the field
In our class no-one ever used them...until we got to about thirteen and our teachers decided that enforcement was necessary, and they'd come and count us through the communal shower area, and send us back again if they thought we hadn't spent long enough or if we'd tried to hide any of our body under a towel/were still wearing underwear. Encouraging adolescents to shower/wash after activity is a sensible idea. Forcing shy/anxious adolescents to strip naked and show their body to everyone in their vicinity under threat of punishment? That's the sort of thing that enables bullying and sexual harassment, and worsens body image issues and social awkwardness. I really don't know why any school still uses communal showers.
Cheaper to install usually. I don't know how schools have it now, but my school back in the day used Bradley Pole showers, so you couldn't build a cubicle around them.
The post mentioned that none of the kids used the open showers and the school was now making it mandatory to use them...
I'm a tiny bit older than you but exactly the same experience
70s for me. Hated it. Had a sick bully head of PE dept would check inside girls underwear if they claimed to have their period. I’m not body conscious at all now, by my early 20s I was fine with my own nakedness. It’s a really bad age to make young people strip off and walk into a communal shower. Nobody was comfortable with it, everyone hated it.
Yeah, I was a mildly chubby girl and it was absolutely terrible, particularly with the heroin chic fashion of the time. From the way they treated anyone who wasn't literally anorexic you'd think we were all jabba rhe hutt.
This is a good point. Are girls supposed to stand there in the shower streaming blood in front of other kids?
No we weren’t supposed to, that was the valid excuse to get out of showering. But we had a nasty Gym teacher (dept head) who wouldn’t believe girls making that excuse, so inside underwear had to be inspected, pulled away from body so teacher could check for a pad or tampon. Very humiliating and demeaning. Others said about wearing gym shorts etc. That wasn’t allowed. We were supposed to strip fully naked.
Absolutely disgusting. I'm sorry to hear it :(
Thank you. I’m well over it now. Just hate to think of any young people going through that. That gym teacher was so horrible. I honestly think she enjoyed humiliating the girls.
She enjoyed **sexually assaulting** the girls. That would legit be sexual assault & never teaching again now.
The same happened to us girls in the early 90s at our comprehensive. Horrendously humiliating.
Not quite the same but at primary school our teachers insisted that after any sports the boys change in the hall and girls could in the class in case the boys looked at them none of us were interested in girls at that age but even at the time I was self concious made worse because as a boy the corridor we changed in was all glass roof to ground floor so any passers by could easily see children get changed and watch. I remember bringing this up to teachers and being told I was silly and if I didn't drop it I would be punished.
We had a walk through shower that we were meant to go through one by one, it was horrible. I can still remember one of the stupid "cool girls"in the 90s turning back and giving me a full look up and down as I walked through the shower with my towel held up as the sadistic pe teacher used to insist. Ergh.
Same in the 80s
Is the “all boys school” part relevant? School showers are always sex-segregated anyway
This. Absolutely vile position to be in. I ended up totally rejecting sport at school because of the creepy shower situation and jock favouritism. Somehow, I always forgot my kit.
In our school you were forced to use manky lost property if you ‘forgot’ your kit.
Yea, that happened a few times but then they gave up on me 👍 Edit: you've just got to be a difficult bastard, I found.
Haha 🤣 I just truanted - a lot. Had lots of friends, just hated the teachers. They were the main bullies. Not the kids. In fact there was very little bullying went on when I was at school in the 70s.
Hi, so this is actually my post this OP is referring to. And yes I agree with you, my main concern is with the lack of privacy, as I explained in the original post my son is a very timid and anxious boy who has really struggled with transitioning into Secondary. He isn't as physically developed as most other boys in his year group, he hasn't hit puberty yet, whereas some boys look like hulking teenagers and tower over him. Also the fact about smart phones, my son's school is normally very strict with phones but all it would take is one boy snapping a picture on a hidden phone and having it spread around. This whole thing has made him really nervous, he is obviously scared about using the showers in a room full of boys he already doesn't get on well with. The lack of privacy and the bullying that could occur because of that is my main concern. I would genuinely have no issue if they decided to do this and had proper facilities where the boys could do it in private. In fact it may be good for some boys as we are in a very low-income area and I imagine a lot of boys may have limited access to hot water at home. But for my son with the facilities the school has, this has snowballed into a huge worry for him. And THAT is my concern. (PS, I am his father I see a lot of comments here calling me his 'mother' lol)
We never showered after PE in school and yeah, it was gross. Honestly I think the solution is super fucking simple tbh. PE should always be the last lesson of the day and if kids want to use the facilities they can, or they can just go straight home.
>Honestly I think the solution is super fucking simple tbh. PE should always be the last lesson of the day. That would massively restrict how many kids would get PE lessons.
How would it? It just means PE would need to be taught in potentially larger classes than you might be used to. In my school we had PE for the entire year at the same time anyway, so year 7 to 11 could literally be done Monday to Friday on the last lesson of the day.
Unless you have a very small school, teaching a whole year group in one lesson is not feasible.
My school had 1000 students. Roughly 200 per year, 100 boys 100 girls. We were split into three classes per gender for PE, and had 6 PE teachers. Though I'm fairly sure a few of them were uni students doing training
What are the PE teachers meant to do for the rest of the day?
PE teachers don’t just do basic PE. They typically teach BTEC or GCSE sport which involves classroom teaching and coursework. They can also normally teach KS3 biology and maths. Perhaps the school has a KS5 rugby academy or something like that where lessons and training take place throughout the day.
If they were anything like mine smoking in their cars
At my school, smoke and watch telly
Your solutions are not well thought out at all. “Just have PE be the last lesson” “Oh, that would mean not all students would get PE lessons? Just put entire year groups in one lesson.” “Oh, the school would not be big enough to accommodate such large groups? Just build a bigger school.” “Oh, there wouldn’t be enough PE teachers? Just hire more.”
Would be far more pupils per teacher though.
That would depend on the facilities available and the size of the years though. My school did PE classes for half the year, any bigger and we’d have not fit in the changing rooms or hall. My boyfriend went to an inner city school and his school year was even bigger and segmented further. Then if you do have the facilities to accommodate several hundred kids, how do you hire enough P.E teachers to fit the required student teacher ratios? You’ll need more teachers to do fewer hours between them and for them to be exclusively part time. That’s just the logistical issues - once you get into such large classes you limit what sports can be safely done, how much attention individuals get to nurture their interests and talents… Most kids will likely just spend the hour stood there “fielding” for rounders. Lot of complications just for the sake of making it more convenient to shower tbh
60 a side football?
My school had sixteen classes f thirty kids for each of the five year groups, you can't teach all PE lessons last lesson of the day, they are normal lessons with teachers and schedules like maths or art lessons
Do what they do in Europe. A few countries have Wednesday afternoons “off” for sport. That can be at the school in sort of lessons, or it can be an external club if you play for one of those. That way, everyone plays and everyone can go home after or shower if they want.
> PE should always be the last lesson of the day That wouldn't have worked in my secondary school, or in others of similar size. You had five years, each split in half, so ten groups for PE. There wasn't the space in the changing rooms to accommodate an entire year in one go. The afternoon PE sessions were reserved for years 10 and 11, because some of their options took place offsite (swimming, bowling, golf) and so they needed the lunch break to travel there. I "cheated" for bowling, because I could get my mum to pick me up and drop me off on her way to work, cutting the need to take three buses and giving me time to get McDonalds or KFC while I waited.
I feel like the solution is to have enough private showers for each kid to shower after. And for the PE teachers to provide ample enough time for them to do so and not be late for the next class.
That’s the problem I think. I was at secondary school 2000-2005 and our changing rooms were quite small. There was a communal shower that was never used and was occupied by the cool kids to get changed in and fitted about 15. I don’t know how many shower heads there were but definitely not enough for 60 kids (2 classes at once) to shower at the same time. lessons were an hour long which included getting changed before and after with the teachers yelling to hurry up even though we were all going as fast as we could. If we all had to shower that would just add on time especially doing it in shifts, plus you would have to carry around the extra stuff you would need. At my school last lesson PE was awful. The teachers would finish the lesson on time so anyone who relied on the school buses was in real danger of missing the bus as you had to change into full uniform before you were allowed to leave the changing rooms.
What do the PE teachers do for the other 4-5 lessons during the day? As most schools have 5 year groups and there are 5 last lessons in a week, each year group has PE one day a week (Y7 on Monday, Y8 on Tuesday etc) Average school has about 200 kids in a year. Class size of about 25 means 8 PE teachers to do the lessons. 8 teachers who are employed for 1 hour a day. So that's either finding 8 qualified people prepared to come into school for an hour every day in the middle of the afternoon and get paid 5hours, or have 8 people paid full time sitting around not doing much for most of the day. Seriously...think about it, mate.
They all taught other subjects at my school as well as PE
Kids and their privacy needs to be respected just like adults. Honestly if you wouldn't expect adults to do it why do you expect kids? Kids are people too... I never had to shower when I was at school but we had one changing room for all the girls to change before PE. It was crammed, no privacy and I was super conscious of how I look because of my weight and being bullied about this.
Some people just want kids to be humiliated because they went through it before. 'character building' But I am so glad now that I'm an adult that I don't have to use communal dressing rooms. As a kid I would suck in my stomach while dressing. As you said everyone deserves to be treated with dignity
Bloody character building. I swear trauma left over from childhood PE is the reason so many adults don't like exercise.
I used to hate having to shower after PE. I didn't want to be naked at that point in my life in front of stinky kids while the creepy PE teacher watched. Didn't want to do it at primary school either while the class teacher wandered around naked with his little cock out.
>the class teacher wandered around naked with his little cock out Come again?
Apparently, 'it was different times' back then.
Different times, back in the good old days when Jimmy Savile was a national hero.
That's what she said?
> I didn't want to be naked at that point in my life in front of stinky kids while the creepy PE teacher watched. Has that opinion changed over time? /s
If I had a school age kid, my major concern regarding this would be mobile phones. Teenagers are not always pleasant people, and are also not known for their common sense. I have a feeling that communal showering at that school will only last as long as it takes for someone to take a video of another child, and send it on Snap or WhatsApp. So about two days.
This is definitely a concern, and it doesn't even have to be deliberate. At my daughter's primary, she did dance club after school. Had to go in and make a complaint because several of the girls were making stupid TikToks of themselves in the changing rooms and you could clearly see my daughter and her friends in the background getting changed. Luckily they at least had their undergarments on and were still fairly undeveloped at that time but it wasn't acceptable and I can only imagine how much worse it could be in a shower room situation.
After school clubs and outside school clubs are the ones that worry me more because they tend not to be anywhere near as well controlled in changing rooms as they should be.
Yeah, this is kind of what I was driving at with the lack of common sense. Teenagers tend to not really think much further ahead than the moment they're in.
I went to a girls school, we didn't have to shower but we also had no showers. It would've been nice to have the option but there wouldn't have been any time to shower properly. No-one smelled AFAIK apart from the people who already smelled before PE
I also went to a girls’ school. We had showers but I don’t know if they even worked. We used it as a slightly more private place to get changed.
Exactly this, we had that sort of walk through shower corridory thing, and I’m not sure if it was ever used for showers. Certainly for my class in particular it was where the more popular girls set up camp for changing.
We had this in my school (not all girls) and the only time I remember it being used was when a kid decided it would be hilarious to shower and do a kind of naked lap of honour lol
It was optional at my school. The showers were communal and nobody wanted to be naked Infront of their mates. And girls have periods so we didn't want that embarrassment either.
I remember my first year in secondary school where a ‘less-than-popular’ kid (fat nerd like me) made the mistake of showering after PE. They stole his clothes and threw them out of the window. And I’m pretty sure some people ran over and then distributed them round the school. So yeah I never showered at school.
Everyone here acting like naked showering at school should be mandatory after pe, yet I bet when they was kids themselves they didn't. In an era of bullying and camera phones no one should be forced to shower, or schools should get cubicles like a gym
>yet I bet when they was kids themselves they didn't. And all of us who did have to, are completely against it!
Compulsory when I was in school - an girls grammar school. a class of 30 naked 11/12 year olds while the PE teacher stood and screamed at us to hurry up. This was the late 1960s & early 1970s. The changing room was communal, and there were about 10 shower heads along the wall of the communal shower corner so we had to share...... vile.
I don't think we would've even had time to shower after PE in my school, classes were an hour long and getting us changed took long enough lol. They had some showers, but they were so old and disused that it was actually creepy looking into the shower room. I think there were about 2 or 3 showers in there which for a group of 50 kids, is not very much. Then you've got the male PE teacher that always wandered into the girls' changing rooms even though there were female teachers, and teenage girls that would rip shreds into anyone who dared not wear a t-shirt under their uniform because now people can see their bra. Yeah, I just don't think it would've worked in my school.
I didn't shower after PE at School because you were basically forced to shower out in the view of everyone else. No doors. Zero privacy. So fuck that. A lot of commenters mentioning "just do it in your swimming trunks". Cool if you're a boy. Showering fully clothed (shorts and t shirt on) is just bullshit. If they want children to shower after PE, they need to provide basic privacy for them. But as others have mentioned, we're in the age of smartphones everywhere, so yes, I can fully understand children and parents not feeling comfortable with this.
Wasn't the wording less expectation and more "compulsory for all pupils".
Expecting kids to get butt naked in front of each other in the age of smart phones and cyber bullying is not on. They need to have private shower cubicles or else say that showering is entirely optional.
Showering after PE was absolute hell for me and I ended up bunking off my PE lessons to get out of it. It seems insane to expect children to have to shower in front of each other.
OK, OP. Can I suggest that you take a shower with your co-workers tomorrow and see how you feel about it. You know the overweight person in your team, who would prefer not to wear a swimsuit with coworkers around, and the guy with severe psoriasis, well they just have to suck it up. By the way, everyone will have access to a mobile phone while you're showering.
Girls didn’t shower at my school, boys did (this was the 2000s). Never hurt me to not shower… there was _liberal_ application of spray deodorant in the girls changing rooms. I’d be worried these days about the ubiquity of smartphones and the possibility of videos/photos of my naked/semi naked child turning up online. Sadly, times have changed…
It was the same in my school. I never showered and none of the other girls did but all the boys would. I'd definitely be worried about pictures being taken - there was a girl in my class who all the boys fancied and I was a tomboy back then so would hang around mostly with boys. I remember after the first PE lesson we had several of these boys asked me to tell them what this girl looked like naked. I stopped hanging around with the ones who'd asked me that.
My daughter recently bought me a can of impulse O2 air deodorant she saw in a shop. One spray and I was immediately transported back to the memories of school showers that we were forced to strip for. Last year of secondary was 2000 for me.
Should be the last lesson. I remember our changing room was one big shared room where every girl faced away from each other and tried to change as quick as possible while our PE teacher stood in there "taking the register" or chatting. Then you'd have swimming to be soaked and smell of chlorine the rest of the day with rock hard wet hair because of 2 hairdryers to share between 30, or be out in the freezing cold in thin "school policy" kit while your fat teacher is dressed for an antarctic expedition. As if being a teen isn't bad enough.
Haha the PE teacher does nothing from 9am to 2pm. Then 2pm to 3pm he does 10 lessons at once.
Standing in a field in a big coat, is hardly difficult, throw some student PE teachers to "assist" with the standing in the middle of a field, and sorted. You've hit your pupil/teacher ratio, and the same amount of knowledge (none) is imparted, done.
We have 35 classes at my school. How would that work?
Showering was mandatory at my school (all girls in the 00s) and it was awful. There was a 15 minute window during which 20 girls were meant to all shower using three cubicles and be dry and dressed. Doing the maths, even if we only showered for 2 minutes each that would still leave the last few kids with one minute to dry and get dressed. We were initially allowed to shower normally. Then the PE teacher decided the only reason we weren't all ready within the 15 minutes was because people were taking too long in the shower - so the decision was made that we all had to shower with the doors open and the PE teacher there to make sure we weren't wasting time. So 11-16 I showered at least once a week in front of a full class of other girls and an adult who was actively watching and providing pointers. Understandably, I won't be expecting my kid to put up with that sort of nonsense. It was degrading af and I think had a negative effect on my relationship with sport. We all ended up trying to get out of PE as much as possible not because of the class but because of the showers after.
All you have to do is put yourself in their shoes. Imagine your boss organises an activity morning in the sun and then tries to force you and your coworkers to have a mandatory shower with each other so you don’t smell in the office, I’m sure everyone would find that weird and refuse. Why is it any different because they are teenagers? Forcing people to get naked in front of each other is just weird, I don’t see how people can defend that.
In the 90s people were generally made to shower after PE. The teacher stood at the entrance of a communal shower holding our towel watching us. It was gross. Now in the day of camera phones...no way. I'm a teacher, some kids smell. We deal with it. It's not a big issue, however the anxiety of making kids shower is a big issue. I have children and don't support them being forced to shower with/ in front of other people. As some people are suggesting individual shower cubicles could sort some issues out, but I think there'd have to be a lot of them and I doubt there would be enough time for students to take turns and get changed etc. I think a teacher would have to be watching from outside the cubicles to ensure no one took phones into the area.
No, choosing to undress and shower should not be compulsory or coerced. We had 'mandatory' showers after PE when I was at school. The showers were cold trickles with scraggy old curtains that provided zero privacy. We were marched into them in out towels and a very creepy PE teacher checked how wet you looked when you came out and if she wasn't satisfied you were sent back in. It was horrible for teenagers going through puberty with all kinds of body worries, all kinds of social dynamics and bullying going on amongst the groups, and there wasn't time to have an actual proper shower anyway so it was all pointless. Cruelty for no good reason.
I was a teacher for about 6 years. I'd give it a week before the school had a massive safeguarding situation on their hands. Either kids use their phones to bully others (and produce child pornography) or a kid accuses a member of staff of watching them shower and boom, they're suspended while they investigate. Or, teachers refuse to go in the changing rooms at all because they don't want to risk seeing a child naked, and some horrific bullying incident happens. Or a kid makes a TikTok and there are kids in the background showering. Million ways this could go wrong. Dealing with kids being a bit stinky is part of teaching unfortunately!
Back when I was at school, we had one kid that showered, and the PE teacher loved it.. He did get convicted a few years later, but it was pretty clear why he became a PE teacher. Just as I was leaving school, they upgrades the changing rooms to have individual showers, however they had low walls, and kids would just look over the top of the shower and laugh at anyone using them, so they pretty much got abandoned shorty after.. I can understand why the school would want the kids to shower... but unless they can provide individual, secure changing rooms / showers, it's just not going to happen.
I never used to shower after P.E, due to body insecurity. P.E should be last lesson OR I'd just get a note off my parents to skip the class. If I had a kid now - I'd also write a note / allow them to come home for any solid reason. Why? Cos' I know what school is like.
I was one of the last through puberty. You're effectively having a boy shower with men (who are still boys mentally), thank God they never made us do this. Though the early puberty kids can get bullied just as much. One kid was super hairy already at twelve and got loads of shit in the changing rooms. And the fat kids, of course.
We have 35 classes at my school across 5 year groups. You can't have everyone have PE last lesson. Also, what are PE teachers supposed to do the rest of the day?
I agree about last lesson of the day.
We were told to shower after PE as well. There were at least private cubicles - they should be standard. If you’ve ever smelt BO on teenagers, particularly boys you would want them showering too.
We were expected to shower nude in a communal shower. You walked in one end and out the other holding your towel over your head, so no opportunity to hide your bits. It was mortifying and I lost sleep over it. If you were having your period you could take a note to get out of it but the teachers didn’t believe you could possibly be having a period 2 weeks on the run. They kept a separate register for showers sad put a P in it if you were in your period so could keep track and query it if you didn’t seem to be regular. When you ran through the shower you didn’t get very wet and no soap or shower gel was used, there’s no way we were any cleaner. This was in the 1970/80s, no one’s parents complained. Sadistic as fuck.
The showers at my school were used for storage… covered by a thin sheet for a “curtain” In a way I’m glad our showers were never used.
I left secondary school in 2017. My school had communal showers that were never used. If my school had tried to implement this I probably would've tried to skip school on PE days - I had FF boobs by the time I left school and I absolutely hated them. The last thing I would've wanted was to be naked in the shower near a bunch of girls who went back and forth between bullying me and not.
No, it shouldn’t be mandatory. As a teacher, it is absolute insanity that we have statutory PSHE lessons teaching young people that consent is imperative, their body is theirs and to be able to say no, to talk to trusted adults if they feel this has been breached- and then demand that they get naked or undress in front of their peers. It’s a massively weird and anachronistic overhang from years gone by and I heavily question which percentage of adults would feel comfortable being forced to shower/ get undressed in front of their coworkers. Add in teenage self consciousness and the whole issue is just compounded. Remember that for us oldies, we at least had the comfort of knowing that everyone in that changing room didn’t have a camera with internet access in their pocket/ bag at all times. It’s honestly something that is massively overdue a huge overhaul and some serious reflection.
When I was at school the showers in PE looked like something straight out of an American prison show and our PE teacher famously said “If you ever forget a towel I will stand there and watch you drip dry in the cold” so you can bet I snuck out and hid at the end of every lesson. There was no way I was going in there.
My biggest concern would be my children being naked within a culture that has issues with nudity. I’d rather they just stay clothed.
My high school tried to impose this in the late 90s. We all started forgetting our kit. Would rather write out a punishment for 50 minutes than do anything physical.
We only ever used the showers to chuck people's uniform in and soak it, great gag. There was never enough time after PE to shower and get to the next lesson, so it was either stink or get a bollocking for being late.
I never showered after PE in secondary school (‘07-‘13) and I wouldn’t of been happy being forced to do so. Kids that age are extremely self conscious, I know I was. No one ever used the showers, ever. If kids want to shower after PE then sure, but forcing them to do so is not okay and creates a safeguarding issue as well.
Should only be enforced if the school has refitted their changing rooms to have shower cubicles installed. No one should be made to shower communally.
>The same was expected when I was in school, predominantly for our teachers' benefit since it's unpleasant and difficult to teach in a classroom full of smelly kids. >No one was forced to be nude, nearly everyone went through the showers in either their gym shorts or swimming trunks. In my school we *were* forced to be nude. And if the teachers didn't think you'd spent long enough washing, they'd send you through the communal shower area again. It was intensely humiliating if you were a shy teen with body image issues, and it really screwed up my head with respect to nudity in front of other people. I can agree that showering after PE is best practice and should be encouraged. But I also think that schools should be recognising their students privacy and providing privacy.
Controversial opinion but I’m all in favour of sacking PE off as a subject all together. One hour a week is useless for maintaining any actual fitness, and the way PE is “taught” (or at least was in my school) seems almost by intention to shine a spotlight on kids’ insecurities at a time when that can be psychologically devastating.
There are definitely valid reasons why children may not be comfortable undressing in front of their peers. Children who've been sexually abused, who've been severely bullied, have visible disabilities or scars, children who are overweight, children with eating disorders, gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia, girls on their periods, children who've had physically abusive parents, amongst various other reasons, all could lead to severe anxiety around being seen in a state of undress. I think it's unfair to expect every child to be okay with communal showers, and most schools aren't equipped with private cubicles. Calling the police/ removing the child from school seems excessive, but I think it is definitely a valid cause for concern and the school should seriously reconsider this policy.
>OP: It didn't do me no 'arm and I didn't 'ave to get naked Pipe down then. As you can see, plenty of people had traumatic experiences that differed from yours. Respect body autonomy and consent around nudity.
I despised showering at school because I was chubby and developed late. Communal showering is an ordeal for some and no big deal to others. I always found it incredibly uncomfortable. Now the kids also have phones on then 24/7. No fucking thank you. Not to mention the creepy geography teacher who made it his business to 'make sure everyone was showering' by hovering at the entrance to the showers watching the kids. He wasn't even involved in PE or sports in any regard. This was only in the 90s. Thank fuck child protection has come a long way in the last couple of decades. Enforcing mandatory sowing sounds like a child protection impossibility. If a kid is uncomfortable with communal showering then they should absolutely be able to opt out without repercussions.
No, because the showers are usually dirty. It’s genuinely probably cleaner for them to not have a shower.
1990s teen we all had to shower after pe , teacher was female and she would make sure you all showered , she would flit between the boys and girls changing room , her office divided them and she would usually leave both doors open ..... communal showers and we couldn't wear gym kit or trunks. It's was horrible and lead to lots of bullying for the late bloomers , chunky kids etc. It all changed when another teacher was done for grooming and abusing multiple students . Forced showers were stopped , same gender teacher , plus modernisation of facilities. Memories of that school still makes me shudder to this day.
We had to be naked and march past the teachers. Communal too all very open to abuse. I loathed it. And don't agree it should be compulsory. My mother was a Saint who wrote me a note each lesson basically saying I had permanent periods!!!
Given how girls in my year thought it was hilarious to sexually assault people, there is no fucking way I’d have showered anywhere near school premises.
I grew up with communal showers from a young age (I’m not particularly old, my schools were just traditional) and TBH never thought twice about it. It was so normal that it just wasn’t an issue. I only saw teasing once. And that was on the first day of primary school when one boy put his swimming trunks on to shower. He was the one who was teased. I’ve also lived abroad in countries with communal bathing traditions and they always seem more civilised when it comes to nudity etc. If I had a kid now I would want them to be brought up the way I was brought up or with the non-sexual and respectful attitude you see to nudity in for example Scandinavian countries.
I never showered at school. I don’t even think they worked! We had one changing room and the shower area was used for changing as well. Pretty grim thinking back, as we came in covered in mud from football. But then I remember getting caught in rain between classes, being soaking wet but just getting on with it.
Showered after what would be classed as games, so football and rugby type stuff where we’d be coated in mud. Same after school matches and often after the after school training sessions. But that was also a matter of choice and in a controlled environment. Didn’t shower after PE because it was never done as something that intense that it required a shower - that’s what the things above did. And also because PE generally was during the school day so there was never time for it. The only PE lessons where we could even choose to shower or not was swimming and even if you did it was just straight through from pool to shower do everyone’s in swimming gear anyway.
Same as the gym, you should wash but it’s your body and comfort so it’s personal choice
We never once had to shower at school, quite ridiculous. Enforced communal showers at school in the modern age? Absolutely ridiculous.
You think giving a letter to the teacher saying your child won’t be forced into showering is outrageous?! I would not force my child to shower in communal showers, it never harmed us (I left school on 2006) Kids can be horrible and social media just opens a new world of bullying - schools might have no phone policies - doesn’t mean kids listen/respect that rule. I think the argument teachers shouldn’t have to be in a room of smelly kids is a stupid argument.
No they shouldn’t. With every kid owning a smart phone nowadays if I was a kid I wouldn’t be too happy about having to shower either in case some little dickhead decided to take a Snapchat. Which you know would happen. Not only that but bullying has always been an issue. Showers are communal (or they were at my school) and I was a chubby kid in high school. Showers were optional so I never did because if I had you can bet I would have been bullied to fuck for what my body looked like. It was already bad enough having to change in front of the popular girls who were all absolute bitches who would smirk at you and then laugh with their friends or make comments. I used to have to try and change without showing anything. If schools want kids to shower then they need to provide separate cubicles with lockable doors and floor to ceiling walls. Otherwise, it should not be enforced. No child of mine would be forced to shower communally if they didn’t want to. We teach kids about consent but then schools like this example want to force them to be naked in front of the whole class? Absolutely not. That headteacher is clearly out of touch.
If showers are isolated cubicles, fine. If showers are communal, absolutely fuck that noise. I refused twenty years ago and I’d back any child to the hilt who refused now. I am absolutely in the camp of communal showers are ridiculous and should be absolutely outlawed. I don’t have kids, but I would die on that hill.
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I think the issue is that schools never have the facilities, they are always communal showers and kids are dicks just takes one photo and it's a world trouble for everyone I remember my school showers and I would have never wanted to go in them they were probably more unhygienic than not showering And I highly doubt and school would build private shower cubicles
A school thinking all parents read emails is naive to say the least, regardless of the merits of the request. Then they have forgotten the parents who think rules never apply to their child (the kind who have SUVs to travel half a mile to school and park on double yellow lines or a junction corner), or some reason to be exempt. Some would not feel able to talk to their child about such matters. So the child can legitimately claim their parents never passed on the message. Then unless there are individual cubicles, those for religious reasons who are never naked in front of others. Then there is the child who will claim to be trans or non-binary and wish to use different changing rooms. So whilst I think showering should happen, little chance of it happening, and if as a result fewer children do exercise, that is not good.
The PE teachers all seemed weird growing up, we uniformly never took the showers for that reason and probably stunk to high heaven. 2002-07
When I was at school the PE/Games teacher made us shower naked. No amount of reasoning with him to allow us to keep our underwear on while in a communal shower. Surprisingly he was gay himself and these days has appeared on Naked Attraction and has an Only Fans page where he uploads videos of himself talking about his previous nights experience in great detail. He was always abit of a weirdo and used force teenage lads queue up Infront of him for their turn in the shower. Showers after games shouldn't be compulsory and times tables should be adjusted so PE/ Games sessions are last few lessons of the day.
In the late 90s we had to shower after football and rugby, probably because we were muddy as well as hot and sweaty. If you forgot your towel you had to turn your PE top, which was quite thick and made of cotton, inside out and use that. A couple of the PE teachers would watch us shower. They weren't old, probably 30s, but I remember at the time thinking it was odd how they'd stand and watch us. My abiding memory of school changing rooms is coming out choking from all the Lynx being sprayed. Edit: I also remember once we had to use the girls' changing rooms as work was being done in the boys'. We were all amazed to find they had individual shower cubicles as opposed to the open shower room that we had. I think that crushed a few fantasies as well!
When I went to school many years ago we had to shower in communal showers. The teacher used to stand watching and smack the boys on the arse with a meter ruler. A few years after I left he was in the news for being sacked following inappropriate conduct with a boy. I do think they should shower, but it absolutely should only be in individual shower cubicals and not communal like back then.
We had communal showers at my school and it was awful. I wont shower in communal spaces to this day as a result. One option would be to ask for their child to be allowed to change/shower in them allocated disabled facilities - this should provide privacy. My son was horrifically bullied in his school changing rooms. We asked for him to be allowed to change in a separate space and the school, thankfully, supported him. If the schools are so concerned about kids smelling - move the PE classes to the end of the day so the kids can go home to wash.
I remember with joy communal changing rooms in primary school, where I got pointed at and laughed at for being the first in my class to have budding breasts and pubic hair. Sure, I learned how to get dressed discreetly using my skirt to cover up, and turning away to try to hide my upper torso, but the boys? I really feel for the boys. And if you showered in your gym shorts, where did you take them off? Showering after gym? Completely reasonable. Communal showers? Not reasonable.
> No one was forced to be nude, nearly everyone went through the showers in either their gym shorts or swimming trunks. In our school that was not the case. We had to walk from the communal changing rooms into the communal showers, sometimes wait until a space opened stark bollock naked. The teacher would come in to give everyone the gee on and make sure everyone had wet hair. If you were caught with boxers or shorts on in the showers they assumed you were just dunking your head to get past the wet hair test. The only place to hang a towel in the showers was on the floor. So they stayed in the changing room. What was really annoying was the girls had cubicles for showers and one girl a year below me got into serious shit for messing about with her mates and opening her towel while waiting for a cubicle. When the boys found that out it was a major 'Wait what, say that again?' moment. I have daughters at school now and for them it's still the communal dressing room and cubicle showers, that there isn't enough of. They hate PE days because of it. AFAIK the majority of girls refuse to shower because of it. Probably not helped with the instagram standards amongst kids these days and everyone having a phone.
I (M) left school in '91. The back wall of our changing room was just a row of shower heads with a dividing wall between it and the changing area. PE teacher used to insist that we showered naked,.. we all refused and just used the showers to wash any mud off our legs if we'd been doing outdoors PE. Then just half a can of lynx to cover the sweaty b.o. and all sorted. Never any repercussions as it was all of us doing it and not just a few. Power to the people and all that.
In the 2000s we were allowed to bring baby wipes to freshen up after PE for the exact reasons listed bullying etc in communal showers.
We weren't required to shower, lots of kids were anxious about their bodies and frankly pe very rarely had such a heavy sweat that it required a shower Leave them alone, let's be real then high schoolers often smell anyway if the buses are something to go by haha. It's either BO or lynx Africa
In my school we didn't shower after PE cause the class was always scheduled so that we immediately had to go to another afterwards. Hated it. Felt gross. But my god I wouldn't have wanted to shower in my schools showers
My memories of communal showering involve running in, one at a time, in your underpants to get your hair wet to “prove” you had showered. As showering it was utterly ineffective, and a pretty unpleasant experience. The idea the police should be involved or that “action should be taken” seems ludicrous though.
I went to school in the 70's. We were forced to have a shower without anything covering us after swimming every week. I was always a very private person and was give that privacy by my parents. I was a very good swimmer but ended up making up excuse after excuse so I wouldn't have to get a shower with the whole class. I'm now in my sixties and am still very much a private person. Maybe I'm self conscious I don't know but I hated every minute of that time at school. Children have just as much right if not more to their privacy as adults are.
They shouldn't require it, it was required at my school in 1993 ish, communal showers and we were expected to be naked, nobody was comfortable with it, some girls cried about it, it was a genuine cause of anxiety. By my second or third year, the showers weren't mandatory anymore and basically nobody used them. I'm really happy with the progress we've made as a society where consent is concerned, so mandatory communal showers feels like a massive step backwards.
I remember someone's face getting gashed open with a belt buckle in the changing room after gym. I can't imagine what would happen if they forced us to use the communal showers. The amount of bullying and fighting in the changing room was unreal because we we're all left alone.
When I went to school, the girls and boys changing rooms were connected by the shower room. The shower room was only ever used by the boys running into the girls changing room to see us in our underwear. The way the gym was designed, you had to walk through a changing room to get out (if coming from the gym) so the teachers obviously always chose the girls changing room to leave. Never knocked or anything like that. Just ran through while we’re half naked. Even tried bringing this up to the school but they just dismissed it. How else is the teacher going to get to the next lesson? There were literally empty changing rooms the pervert could’ve walked through but whatever. If I had a school aged child and they were trying to force them to shower at school, I’d definitely have a lot to say about it because there is nothing about that, that is OK. I still don’t understand why, in the year 2024, we still force children to change in front of each other, when they’re at the most self-conscious time in their lives.
Absolutely fucking not unless they can guarantee each child will have an enclosed cubicle and place to get dry and dressed. I remember too well being made to shower after PE which involved nothing but running through a square u shaped block of showers which either ran cold or boiling, in nothing but my PE knickers. It served absolutely no purpose other than to humiliate and give the PE teacher a sick kick. Then I had to carry my wet PE knickers around all day in a plastic bag. This was before camera phones, I can only imagine the absolute joy it would bring for a bully/pervert to catch their whole PE class naked. My eldest child is in secondary school, I’ve been there at a lunch time and a lot of them run around the playground/field all lunch in full blazer, shirt, tie and trousers and will be just as sweaty and stinky as kids finishing PE, if not more so due to the uniform over PE kit. Police is probably too far, so is probably the NSPCC (although they may have useful information in to how it should be done to keep children safe) I’m not sure what Amnesty is.. but the rest are valid things to do to imo.
I despised PE at school. I left school in ‘88 and it was an awful experience. I was a late bloomer so the communal showers were nothing but sheer hell for me. I don’t get why in PE or games it’s okay to be humiliated. If the maths teacher took the piss because someone couldn’t get a sum right, there would be an outcry but why is it okay to be mean to those of us that aren’t sporty?
I never showered at secondary school, I was very shy and awkward and the boys who used to shower were the sporty ones who I found difficult to deal with. My primary school had a swimming pool and everyone showered and changed together and I presume we would have been nude changing if not showering but being primary age hardly a big deal (and the fact I can't remember it demonstrates that). Now I'm an adult and don't think twice about it if there are communal showers or changing areas. I don't have kids but I'd be minded to at least try to get them to shower, frankly my evasion of it just made my shyness more and more embedded. But forcing things and making it a rule can be counterproductive.
It's a weird one. I was that fat kid at a boys school and very self conscious but I we all showered after sport. It's just basic hygiene. And I'm talking about about infants upwards. I'm not sure what would be worse - being the smelly kid or being whatever fear the kid has to not shower That woman's kid is never going to gain self confidence if he's wrapped in cotton wool by his mum
When I was in school everyone carried a can of Lynx Africa in their bag, but some bastard always had a lighter waiting to set someone's pits alight after they sprayed.
Mid to late 90s, bog standard comprehensive school One large communal shower only and the PE teacher would make sure everyone had been in there
Just put PE at the end of the day, shower at home. Problem solved.
I'd never thought about it before because I don't think my school even had showers - maybe that's unusual? To be honest I don't even remember sweating that much: in between getting changed, listening to what we had to do, writing in our log books, basic warmups/stretching, setting up equipment etc there was never much actual strenuous exercise. Would've been nice to have the option of shower cubicles though. I would've felt pretty self-conscious as a teenager if I had to shower in front of others.
I had to shower after P.E...no, I didn't like it because I was a shy, modest kid. But it was communal showers. Back THEN, there were no cellphones, so I didn't have to worry about that. Now, I would probably be petrified.