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School memories & photos

Robert124

Recently I've been binge watching DVDS and that includes the 1968-72  series of 'Please sir' about an inner city school. And that brought back memories of my multiple schools nightmares.

These photos are downloaded from Google maps streetview.  I'm sitting comfortably at home in bed.

My first school is still standing, an old red brick victorian school, although I was initially in pre fab wooden huts behind the main building.  This school for me was an absolute nightmare and where I endured the most physical punishment and violence.

After refusing to attend for weeks and months, I was transferred to my first special school for children with language difficulties for a month and then the main school on the same site.

These two schools have been demolished, and now it's modern housing.  The buildings were worse quality than the first school and we only had outside toilets on the black tarmac school yard.

During this time I was also forced to go to a Saturday morning  catholic school.

Which is still standing.  The bullying here was so bad, I was suicidal every time I went here.

Then I went to a 1960s style middle school for about a month.  Then I refused to attend for several months, being unable to cope with school. In the 1990s this school was demolished and a police station was built on the site

Then for a year I went to  my second special school, the one on hospital grounds.  This building is still standing.  I suspect it's no longer in use.

After I year I returned to my previous middle school.

Eventually I went to secondary school.  This is still standing. Although some of its buildings have gone.  And new ones have been built behind the 1920s facade.  I never settled in this school and spent most of the time being lonely and miserable.

  • School photo at age 10.  It kind of sums up my whole approach to life generally...

  • I went to three schools in total.  My first year in primary was where the 'sense of difference' and the bullying first started. 

    I went on to secondary, where it became much worse.  It seemed as if the other pupils were all in on something that I wasn't being told.  They all knew how to play games like football and netball without needing to be told.  They'd already grasped the rules of grammar, and knew what nouns and verbs and adjectives were.  They knew how to use slide rules and log tables.  It was like we were all learning how to drive, but I was still struggling in the classroom with the theory, whereas they'd already had several actual lessons on the road.  The bullying got worse here, and I started taking time off.

    Then, when I was 14, we moved to Devon.  Somehow, I thought a 'country' school would be much quieter and better.  I was horribly wrong.  It was a jungle.  I lived in fear every day of that final 14 months of schooling.  I left just before I was 16.  Or rather, I was beaten up and hospitalised, and mum and dad refused to let me go back for my own safety.

    It was a horrible time - pretty much all of the 10 years of it.  I'd like to just forget it.  But I can't.

  • Seeing these images and reading your account is very moving. It is terrilbly sad, and an indictment of the education system, that you endured so much bullying as a schoolchild. It worries me that for many autistic children things may not be much different now.

    Some survivors of abuse in children's homes have had their stories heard after many years. Although the damage caused can never be completely undone having a voice, being believed and seeing justice done can heal some of the hurt.

    I can't begin to imagine how painful it must have been for you during your school years. You deserved acceptance, appreciation and accommodation of your strengths and differences, not abuse. We need justice for the next generations of autistic children, and for ourselves as autistic adults. Change needs to happen, and it needs to happen now.