All this attention on convicted sex offenders working in schools has had me reflecting on my own time at school.

As far as I know, we had nobody on the staff who was ever convicted of any sort of sexual offence, but there were three or four of the teachers that I know of who had shagged pupils.

That is not speculation either. We knew they were doing it. Some of the other teachers knew they were doing it as well, I am sure. I would be very surprised if at least some of the parents didn’t know it. I am, however, positive that the headmaster knew nothing about it: he was a deeply religious person, a Quaker, and I don’t think he would have tolerated it.

The majority of these liaisons were between male teachers in their twenties and 5th year girls, either 16 or almost 16, but at least one was with a 4th year girl (ie 15 years old) and there was one notable example of a young female teacher carrying on with a 15-year-old boy.

I am certain in my mind that I could have been added to that list. I was in one female teacher’s flat having a beer with her on the last day of term and having a fairly good chat with her. There was a knock on her door and it turned out to be every other female member of staff en masse. They were off to the pub and were calling for her. She came back in and said she was off to the pub, but would be back in a couple of hours, and I could wait in her flat if I wanted – there were plenty more beers in the fridge.

While I didn’t mind missing the 5th year leaving party in the cricket pavilion (spiked punch and Genesis on the stereo) for an evening of conversation I didn’t fancy missing it to sit alone in a flat, so I said I would go and join the party.

She didn’t look too happy about this, and I immediately realised why when I went out, as all the other teachers started jeering and cheering, saying things like “ooh you sneaky cow” and “you said you weren’t going to do any of that”. I think they may have started drinking already.

At that point I realised I had been in a very compromising position and being a teenage boy, and in full possession of a teenage boy’s collection of hyperactive hormones, I immediately regretted having escaped from that position.

Now I look back on those days at school I know how terrible the behaviour of the staff was. Not just those committing what were breaches of trust and professional ethics, not to mention crimes in most cases, but the others who were condoning it. Those comments from the female members of staff were as good as an admission that the subject of sex with pupils had been discussed by them, possibly with the pros and cons of potential victims being weighed. For them it was a bit of a joke rather than a stigma.

Described that way, it sounds like all of us should be scarred for life. The weird thing is that us pupils made no sort of moral judgement on it. At the time it did not seem wrong. Quite a few of the older girls would flirt with the younger teachers, fighting to become ‘favourites’. If they got laid it was a sort of status-enhancer for them and the rest would be jealous. Some of the boys would even run errands for the male teachers, popping across to the girls’ dormitories to fetch the teacher’s girlfriend in the middle of the night. Being caught in the wrong dormitory was the most serious offence in the school’s rule book so doing these favours was a thrill. Nobody stopped to say “hang on. This is all wrong.”

Of course it could be argued that this made the offences all the worse: not only were some pupils taken advantage of sexually but we were all being indoctrinated to accept the fact of it. Who knows whether any of my fellow pupils were affected by thinking this behaviour is right and then went on to commit sex offences themselves?

We know that within the home there is a cycle of abuse, with many child abusers having been victims themselves, but at a boarding school the teachers are in loco parentis and there could be a similar effect.

The one effect I can say it has had on me is that I don’t have the knee-jerk reaction of demonising anyone ever found guilty of any child sex offences. I know some are evil through and through, but some will be merely flawed. The reason for that is that I did not just know the actions of these teachers, but I knew the people themselves and generally the guilty ones were some of the best teachers we had in terms of inspiring us to creative thought and academic achievement. Although I know that what they did was wrong, I also know that much else about them was right. One result has been that I see shades of grey instead of black-and-white a lot more than I would have done otherwise. On the other hand, there is another effect – I know that a sex offender does not have to look like one.

I have also been thinking lately about some of the girls. Has there been a impact on their lives? I haven’t kept in touch with them really. I did meet one who was in my class at a couple of reunions and she seemed perfectly well-adjusted, but one of the younger girls seemed a bit disturbed when I was still in touch for a year or two after I left. Its not really an easy topic of conversation to bring up is it? But I have talked to a boy who had a serious relationship with one of our teachers and although a lot of blokes joke about that sort of thing, he really regrets it and had a lot of trouble about it at the time.

I have to repeat though. We had no convicted sex offenders in the school. So how reassured are you now when you are told that there are none at your child’s school?

On a more positive and reassuring note, I do suspect that this sort of behaviour is nowhere near as widespread now. Even as I went through my five years at school I could see it declining, in the same way that ritual violence was declining. (When I started we were regularly beaten by our dormitory monitors, but by the time we were the seniors in charge of dorms there really was nothing serious.) This enlightenment continued after we left, as it did in other areas of society’s attitudes – remember the early 70s were a time of casual racism too.

By now, of course, children are much more aware too. If you took one of today’s kids back to 1975 in a Tardis and dropped them off at my old school they would be on the phone to Childline within 10 minutes. All our kids can quote you the childline number from memory. And threaten to call it if we so much as try to serve them vegetables.

One thing I have no way of knowing though – was our school typical of its time or was it an anomaly? Or was it just a boarding school thing?