My Gran at Scalford Primary School

by Esther Mapletoft

My Gran went to Scalford Primary School and I talked to her about it. In 1959 there were 60 children and two teachers, Mr de Haro (Head teacher and KS2 teacher) and Mrs Pearson (infant teacher). Mr De Haro split the junior class into two classrooms (Mrs Bailey became class two teacher) but they didn’t have the screen across the middle so sometimes it was chaos.

The classrooms were very different in many ways. The tables were desks with a pot of ink and they used dippy pens to write with because biros hadn’t been invented yet. In class two and class one there were big furnaces.

Outside, there were two playgrounds - the girls had the smaller one and the boys used the big one to play football. Meanwhile the girls played circle games and skipping. The toilets were outside and they got very cold bottoms on the freezing toilet seats.

The school day was not dissimilar to ours, however whilst the boys got taught football the girls got taught how to sew and knit. You could either go home for lunch or have sandwiches or hot dinners. My gran decided not to have them because they were horrible. They were delivered from one of the high schools in a metal food canister.

There were still lots of special events like Sports day that was held across the road from my house where there are now two houses. At Christmas there was always a film show which was exciting for everyone. They also put on shows every year in Class 3.

Every morning all the children in Goadby, Wycomb and Chadwell got on the double decker bus with the secondary school children. In the winter the older boys used to sit on one side of the bus to try to push the bus over but thankfully never succeeded. One day the buses all went on strike so gran and her brother had to walk all the way from Chadwell.

In year six every pupil had to take the eleven plus to try to get into Melton Grammar School.