25 years since ITV Schools ended.

Perhaps they can pretend winding is recharging the internal battery

Schools wise, the TV on a trolley was a difficult concept for some teachers. Getting it into the room and plugged in was the easy thing. Getting the video to play and the TV on the right channel, it was always such a performance. I used to think as a seven year old, I do this all the time at home, put the TV on channel 0, insert tape, press Play, what's difficult about that?

Of course these days they have whiteboards that do everything in one solution we had six different things for and I dare say any audio visual content is streamed off YouTube in two clicks.

Did anyone else have a "TV room" at school? That's what we had at primary school rather than pushing the TV on a trolley round classrooms (though they did do that occasionally). Had posters on the wall with that year's BBC and ITV Schools/4Schools schedule too.

When I've been into my old primary school more recently (as it's now my polling station!) they've walled up the old door to it, so god knows what's in there now, or even how to get into it!

I suspect most TV Forum members of a certain age, when a teacher was showing a video, were the ones to utter the words ‘You need to adjust the tracking’ on a regular basis from the back of the class.

I seem to remember my primary school getting TV room as part of an extension that was built. it was basically an empty room with just the TV on a trolley and we all sat on the carpet floor.
It came around the time those watches with remote controls came out and a few kids who had them would drive the teachers mad.

There was also - perhaps a few years earlier - a radio-casette in the classroom and I was given the job of recording schools programmes off Radio 3... until one day I forgot.

Secondary school had a telly on a trolley on every floor and it would be stored away in a store room / teachers' office when it wasn't used, except my form tutor usually had the one on our floor in the classroom to follow the cricket scores on Ceefax.

I always assumed that schools used VHS until DVDs came along. Was this a teacher's personal collection?

My primary school was a victim of "too many kids and not enough classrooms", so one class per year (including ours at one point) was using the dining room as a classroom, though this did eventually change when the school had an extension built. But this dining-room class would have to evacuate into the hall next door half an hour or so before lunch so the lunch ladies could set up and start cooking so it was quite disruptive.

But anyway the "TV Room" was what became the entrance to this extension and it was basically just an open-ended area similar to an inside corner of a library. Which itself doubled up as something else when it wasn't used for watching TV as I think it was used as a lunch area overflow too.

Mind you it was a sign of things to come because when I started secondary school in 1993 in hindsight the school had been so underfunded and heaving with students there was a string of "temporary" portable classrooms that had been there for years, with wired in bells, heaters and electricity. This situation didn't change until well after I left the school in 1998, but those classrooms were bloody cold in the winter and bloody hot in the summer.

My secondary school was so short of space at one point that one term one of my classes was in room "UTS1" - under the stage - which you had to go through a storage area to get to.

We also regularly had classes moved to the assembly hall, which doubled as the dining room.

Why would they have ONLY used VHS? Betamax was a domestic format too in the late 70s and 80s, no reason why some schools wouldn't have used it.

When I was at secondary school (75-80) we had a Philips N1500 VCR, it was replaced by the iconic Mk 1 ‘piano keys’ JVC VHS before I left. I think most schools probably opted for VHS, and local authorities etc would have bought them centrally. Although the initial use was timeshifting ( therefore format agnostic) as the 80s proceeded there would have been pre recorded material too that would have only been available on VHS ?

LEA policy. Remember that video recorders were expensive machines so they would have been a capital purchase by a school.

My first primary school was one of the first in the LEA to have a video recorder in the early 1980s. It was a top loading Ferguson with piano keys and nearly 6 inches high. My second primary school, in a different LEA, also had a Ferguson - this time front loading. Over the years I picked up that Ferguson was the most popular make of video recorders in schools during the 1980s. Why? Ferguson only made VHS as they were internally JVC. Therefore I'm not sure if the decision of schools / LEAs was first and foremost Ferguson or VHS.

Also take into account maintenance and repairs of video recorders. Schools would have preferred makes that are familiar amongst local repairmen and where spare parts are readily available. It's therefore possible that whoever was responsible for maintaining and repairing TVs and audio equipment at schools at the time was later responsible for video recorders so would have offered recommendations on which makes to purchase.

Betamax might have been more popular in secondary schools than primary schools as video cameras and recorders were being bought by drama departments back in the 1970s. I have even received stories that some secondary schools had U-Matic machines.

In my first primary school the video recorder resided inside a lockable compartment of a fitted cupboard assembly set into the wall in a small room that contained a thermofax copier and a stencil duplicator. There was a time when burglars broke into the school but they could not break open the compartment that held the video recorder. The wood was chewed up around the edge of the door where they attempted to prise it open with a crowbar.

There were still some U-Matics kicking around when I started working at a Uni 20 years ago