Schools and education
Corporal punishment in schools
Change documented
Official support of school discretion followed by legislative abolition.
Fact-check
1986 school discretion statements and subsequent abolition law documented; operative state-school ban began in 1987.
The evidence
Links go to the original records: Hansard, legislation, official guidance and news reports. A before-and-after pair is not always proof of a direct contradiction, so read the originals for exact wording.
Before: the earlier position
After: what changed
What the source documents claim
These are summaries from the original documents behind this archive. They have not been checked word for word. Where they differ from the fact-check above, the fact-check is the more reliable account.
Corporal Punishment in UK Schools (Pre-1986)
Document A, case 20
- Original advice
- Until 1986, UK Department of Education regulations permitted physical corporal punishment (caning and strapping) in state-funded schools as an accepted disciplinary tool.
- How it was framed
- Successive education ministers defended local authority discretion by citing traditional educational consensus and the 1967 Plowden Report's reluctance to impose an immediate statutory ban across all age groups.
- Later change
- Following developmental psychology research on childhood trauma and a landmark European Court of Human Rights ruling, Parliament abolished corporal punishment in state schools in 1986 and extended the ban to all independent schools in 1998.
Register entry 20. Last reviewed: 12 November 2026.