Reflecting on the Legacy of Paisley Grammar School

London, United Kingdom Aug 22, 2026 ALN: What happened at your school? What did you see, and feel? I’m thinking of the teacher who kicked a friend of mine for some misdemeanour or other. And the R.E. teacher who hammered a kid’s head against the wall. And the belt of course – sometimes my hands, sometimes other people’s. School in the 1970s, and before, was violence: in the playground, in the classroom, everywhere. Morrissey said belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools, but he could have meant any city and any school, in the days of the belt and the cane and the foot and the fist. Good riddance to it.

Ah, but hang on: what have we also lost that was good? The violence may be vivid still, but I’m remembering other stuff too. Primaries one and two: small, friendly classes, and my teacher: the heroic, piano-playing Mrs. Reid. And the headmistress Mrs. McCombie patiently doing one-to-one reading with me (and telling me off for stomping on the flowerbeds). And the rules and procedure and strictness that was sometimes scary but reminded you where you were and what was wanted: assembly, hymns, uniform, streaming, left-side-up-the-stairs, right-side-down-the-stairs, streaming by ability (me: top for , bottom for maths), and the words that ran through it all even though we couldn’t always see them: consequences and reward.

The reason I’ve been thinking about all this stuff is because I was at Paisley Grammar the other day looking round the old school – designed by Thomas Graham Abercrombie in the Scots Renaissance style – before the whole thing is turned into flats. The new school that’s replacing it – designed by Ryder Architecture very much not in the Scots Renaissance style – opened this week and I hear the pupils who headed into the new building on Thursday were loving it, which is great.

Before the big move happened, I looked round the old building a couple of times with some former pupils, of all backgrounds and ages, and I suppose I was expecting them to rail against its closure, and complain about the decline in standards since their day, and bemoan the move to the new-build. But it didn’t actually go that way, which meant the lessons we’ll be taking away from the old Paisley Grammar aren’t quite the ones I was expecting.

Where it did go to plan was on the subject of physical discipline. Almost everyone I spoke to had been the victim of it at some point, including Hugh Nisbet, a former headmaster/rector of the Grammar who was belted when he was a pupil at the school for sheltering from the rain in a corridor that was out of bounds. Another former pupil, Rona Falconer, told me an extraordinary story about a protest she and others staged when a male teacher belted a female pupil. The girls wore daisy chains and the boys banged the lids of the desk in protest; this was the 1950s and already the idea of adults beating children was becoming rather grotesque. Former head Mr. Nisbet had the best and most devastating judgment on it: “If you were a good teacher,” he said, “you could teach without using corporal punishment.”

But another interesting question kept coming up which was why Paisley Grammar had such an excellent reputation, so much so that Margaret Thatcher intervened to prevent its merger with another school in the 1980s. In the early days, the reputation was largely because there was an entrance exam – logically, if you exclude the pupils who fail the exam, the school will do better – but the reputation lived on after the selection process was abandoned and the Grammar became a comprehensive in the 70s. Still, parents from outside the catchment were keen to get their kids in.

Speaking to the former pupils, it’s clear the social element was important. Working-class parents from all over aspired to get their children into the Grammar and many did, and it was good for them and it was good for the Grammar and it’s always been this way and it’s why league tables are deserving of the deepest suspicion. Schools in certain areas, or schools which select, or schools which attract parents keen to get their kids into the “good” schools will always look better in the tables because of the advantageous social mix: mainly parents who value qualifications and push their kids to do well. The head of a big comprehensive in a deprived part of Glasgow told me judging schools only by Highers is too narrow and schools must always be seen in their wider social context, or the judgment is unfair. I agree with him.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t lessons we can learn from schools like Paisley Grammar, specifically how they’ve changed, what they’ve kept and what they’ve ditched. It can be tempting to think schools were better when the discipline and the uniform were strict. But pupils that didn’t necessarily fit in, or were a bit different, could fall through the cracks in those days; one former pupil of the Grammar told me that when he was at the school in the 50s, he got no guidance at all on what might be the right choices for him after school and consequently he struggled for a bit to find his way. The problem was fixed to some extent by the guidance system that started to come in during the 80s and it is one of the better legacies of the comprehensives.

The trick is to get the mix right. For a long time, Paisley Grammar retained some of the habits of a more old-fashioned selective school – formal assemblies and so forth; it was also called the Grammar long after it went comprehensive and still will be at the new building. In every other respect though, the Grammar is now like any other big, mixed comprehensive with all the issues that big, mixed comprehensives have, principally discipline.

If you’ve got children, or you’ve got friends who are teachers, or you’ve been reading the letters page of The Herald, you’ll know what the current state of discipline is. Only the other week, this newspaper reported there were more than 5,200 violent incidents against teachers in Scotland over the past five years that ended in staff needing medical treatment and that’s just the figures we know about (11 local authorities “weren’t able” to reveal the figures for their patches).

And if you’ve got children, or you’ve got friends who are teachers, or you’ve been reading the letters page of The Herald, you’ll also know what some of the explanations for the state of discipline are: staff shortages, funding shortages, the pandemic, mobile phones, a shift in attitudes among parents, and more nebulously, the sense that we’re a more angry society than we were. The state of the classroom is always a reflection of the state of society more generally so yes: all of those things are true to some extent.

But the lesson of the old Paisley Grammar is quite subtle. It is not that we should return to the days when being in the wrong corridor meant the belt, or a male teacher could beat a female pupil; as Mr. Nisbet says, good teachers didn’t need corporal punishment.