How did school CP come to vanish so fast in the UK? What was the European Unions role?
I think everyone was taken by surprise at the speed with which it happened, even those who were campaigning for just such an outcome. The cane, slipper or strap were still in fairly full swing in a majority of British schools at the beginning of the 1980s, yet by mid-1987, in state schools at least, they were gone forever. However, this is not to say that nobody thought abolition would happen sooner or later. There was a widespread perception (wholly erroneous, as we know now) even in the 1960s when I was at school that corporal punishment was already dying out in most schools. “Progressive” people had been railing against it for decades, and the general assumption, both within and outside the teaching profession, was that it was only a matter of time before it faded away. The raising of the minimum school leaving age (to 16) in the early 1970s then sent the trend in the opposite direction because there were suddenly a lot more bored and fractious adolescent boys in school, and I feel
