Where the loneliest and most desperate children gathered, and a beacon to bullies all over the playground. The buddy stop was a 6-foot tall imitation bus stop sign; the idea was that if you had no friends to play with you would stand at the buddy stop. We were encouraged in assemblies to ask the children at the buddy stop to come and join in our games.
This encouragement was roundly ignored. If you played near it, the teachers would come over and point out the lonely children and make you ask them to join in. Hence a large area of permanent emptiness formed around the buddy stop, and after a while, no children, no matter how friendless, would ever go near it.
Seeing the unused buddy stop, the teachers probably congratulated themselves on running a school with no friendless pupils. As usual, they were as wrong as I don't know what.