Leaving

This BBC TV film from the 1980s, set in a tough Scottish school a decade or so earlier, follows the progress of four friends who are soon to leave school and are growingly increasingly resentful of the rote learning and discipline. Punishments are meted out with a leather tawse and in the classroom scene pictured below the boys are belted for poor homework.

One boy refuses to take his belting and keeps withdrawing his hand so that the teacher misses. He is made to sit at his desk and threatened with extra cuts unless he accepts the punishment. The belting leaves him in tears.

A few days later the boys are walking to school when one of them finds a discarded 'nudie book' (probably a copy of 'Health and Efficiency'). After perusing the contents the finder sells it to a junior boy. The magazine comes to the notice of the headmaster and the boy who sold it receives an exemplary tawsing from the same somewhat sadistic teacher who had been seen punishing him and his friends earlier in the film.