School corporal punishment the case of teenage boys) the clothed buttocks. "Slippering"—striking the buttocks with a rubber-soled gym shoe, or plimsoll shoe—was widely used in many schools, for example King's School, Macclesfield, a boys grammar school in Cheshire. In a few English cities, a strap was used instead of the cane. In Scotland a leather strap, the tawse, administered to the palms of the hands, was universal in state schools, but some private schools used the cane. Prior to the ban in private schools in England, the "slippering" of a student at an independent boarding school was challenged in 1993 before the European
School corporal punishment Court of Human Rights. The Court ruled 5–4 in that case that the punishment was not severe enough to infringe the student's "freedom from degrading punishment" under article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The dissenting judges argued that the ritualised nature of the punishment, given after several days and without parental consent, should qualify it as "degrading punishment". "R (Williamson) v Secretary of State for Education and Employment" (2005) was an unsuccessful challenge to the prohibition of corporal punishment contained in the Education Act 1996, by several headmasters of private Christian schools who argued that it was