What’s the worst thing you did at school?

Schooldays weren’t the best days of your life, but they were some of the loosest. At the time it felt so important – like getting a detention could really be the end of everything. In reality, getting a detention was actually quite a nice break from school.

But it was all the things you did to get those detention that are the really interesting stories.

James

At our private school in a leafy suburb of London, our head was kind enough to give us the use of their garden for lunchbreaks. We took full advantage of this and made it our spot. One day, James, who was an absolute prick, had a can of deodorant and a lighter because he thought he was a legend. He was a bit odd, and went on the rampage. He sprayed at me with fire, and singed my eyelashes off and turned my quiff blonde. He then, by accident, sprayed too much in the direction of a small palm tree. It went up in flames, and two poor year 7s were framed for it, and sentenced to four weeks of detention.

Alex 

Once I threw a bottle of piss across the playground. But there was a semi-legitimate reason for me launching a repurposed Highland Spring bottle filled with someone else’s piss across a slab of tarmac. We were at war with the gang that occupied the other corner of the playground to us. It started small, with throwing orange peels, Frubes, just simple lunchtime detritus. But soon before we knew it, we were lobbing full Capri Suns, whole apples. It was a vicious war of attrition. And just like Eisenhower deciding to end WW2 by destroying Hiroshima, I made the decision that it had to come to an end. My friend Harry went into the toilet, filling the bottle with warm, fetid teenager piss. As it left my hand and I watched it sail towards the music block, I realised I had fucked it. Was the best detention I ever sat.

Cara

So there was this really annoying girl at school, and one day in hockey practice she was being quite arrogant and it really wound me up. I went to tackle her and, unfortunately for her, she was holding the stick wrong, so I ended up breaking her fingers. Sorry not sorry.

Josh

I got to form late one day. It was the class where we’d get announcements and important information that never really mattered. It was dead quiet and I noticed that everyone was staring out the window into the playground where 300 kids were holding balloons. Obviously it was a balloon race, usually an occasion for joy, so as they all let go, I started shouting and clapping. The eyes of every one of my deathly silent classmates turn to bore into my skull. Turns out the non-important info that I had missed, was that the balloon race was in memory of Tom from the year below who had died from leukaemia that weekend.

Ellie

Our English GCSE teacher was a miserable, authority-less, whiny woman who was also an ardent Christian. When she had to teach us Paradise Lost, most of the class would goad her by asking questions like “Miss, where are the dinosaurs in this book?” She would tell anyone misbehaving that they needed to start behaving “or she’d get someone with authority to come and tell them off”. It got so bad that she cried one day. The plan to throw lots of rolls and buns at her on our last day (she was nicknamed “The Bun Lady” by one of her classes for some reason) ended up being quietly cancelled out of respect for her ongoing mental health battle.

Sam

I got in an argument with another kid in art class so took a craft knife, went under the table and started slashing up his textbooks. When I was caught, I claimed I’d only pressed the knife on the books lightly and hadn’t expected it to actually cut all the way through. Somehow, I avoided a detention.

 

Charlie

It was year 7, and me and my mates were having a fight in our form room before our teacher arrived, and they decided to lock me in a cupboard. It was absolutely rammed with stuff, so I was struggling to find my footing. Finally I managed to stand on what I thought was a stool – it wasn’t. What turned out to be an overhead projector collapsed beneath me, and one of my legs ended up in a pile of mangled glass and plastic where the quite expensive-looking projector used to be. When I was eventually let out, I sloped back to my seat and sat there guiltily – staying deadly quiet through the discovery and the “why would anyone do this” fiasco when our tutor arrived. It remained a mystery until I told her – on the last day of year 13.

Sophie

I was head girl at my boarding school, but I also had a boyfriend, and a girl has needs. Guys weren’t allowed into bedrooms so we had to be a bit more inventive. Aside from sneaking out of school, having sex in the classrooms and house loos, we also had sex in the chapel.

Lucy

Blow job in the assembly hall. Standard.

Joe

Had sex on my English teacher’s desk. Not with my English teacher.

Zoe

We were in year 10, and we’d just discovered poppers. Everyone found them really funny. In PSHE classes (no idea why) we used to sit behind our books and just sniff them. It was really weird.

Chloe

I was at an all-girls school, and in detention one week they made me and another girl clean out the hockey shed for two hours after school. The teacher had just left us to do it, so I thought it would be fun to invite a guy from the nearby boys school over. We ended up kissing and doing some other things in the shed, and he was gone before the teacher came back. That was the best detention I ever had.

George

My ex-girlfriend gave me a blow job in the chapel.

Alexander

I was one of the first people to be expelled from my primary school, for a catalogue of crimes including throwing stones at classroom windows. The worst was when I set my friend’s backpack on fire. I sprayed Lynx Africa all over it and it went alight. He was not happy.

Jake

It wasn’t anything I did, but it’s just a mad fucking story. There was one teacher everyone was scared of. She only taught sixth form, but would cover a lot of year 7 classes. She took a sabbatical after we found an audio sex tape she made, where she asked, “do you want some of my cream in your tea”. My friend made a remix of it – it’s still online somewhere. 

Becca

We made our French teacher break down by continuously chanting “je me brosse les dents” (“I clean my teeth”) over and over again. I can’t remember why. She actually started crying because we wouldn’t stop.

Max

It was a bright, clear day towards the end of Year 11 and I was on the thinnest of thin ice, this is ice that’s the width of a hair and I was stomping up and down on it while chanting “expel me, please expel me”. Anyway, me and a group of friends had nonchalantly sacked off mass in the Abbey. Instead we were in the playground playing red arse. Now, I’ve never been particularly coordinated, and on this particular afternoon I couldn’t control the ball for shit. Of course, I ended up getting my pale little white boy arse out. Of course as I pulled my trousers down in the playground, mass finished and the rest of the school left the Abbey. To return to school from the Abbey everyone had to first walk through the playground – just as I pulled my trousers down. The Deputy Head, to his eternal credit assumed I had decided to moon the entire school and him as some kind of “fuck you lot” act of defiance. As I was lead away to his office, my mates rolled around on the tarmac, loudly pissing themselves. I was suspended for three days.

Izzy

Instead of handing my Physics homework into the designated homework box, I placed a McDonald’s application form as I felt my teacher’s expertise would have been better placed elsewhere. Understandably, she wasn’t happy. I was then banned from Physics lessons for two weeks, which was literally the best possible outcome.

Liam

We used to hum so loudly that the teacher was inaudible. Once she broke down in tears and ran out.

Jack

I went to a posh boys’ school and was a member of a hip-hop collective named after a Swiss municipality: https://soundcloud.com/badragaz I wish I was joking.

Jimi

As we registered in the school playground for cross-country, I debagged one of my friends in front of at least 100 people including one of the most terrifying teachers at school. We’re not just talking about a slight debag. We’re talking about cock out and everything. I was thus given a detention for my misdemeanours, the detention letter is on my bedroom wall at home.

Graham

A broke a kid’s leg, twice. Different kids, same leg.

These are pseudonyms of reformed deliquents Oli Dugmore, Phoebe Luckhurst, Callum McCulloch, Eddie Mitchell, Jack Cummings, Will Lloyd, Cat Reid, Bella Eckert, Tom Jenkin and Daisy Bernard.