To be honest with you I took no notice of pensions when I was working because it all seemed that far away. I only read up about it when I retired and was told I couldn't get the full state pension despite having 44 years of stamps.
Apparently government employees on the classic pension scheme were contracted out in 1978 and contracted back in in 2016. I worked for them from 1982 until 2014 so all my service was contracted out.
Contracting out was apparently part of the conditions of the classic scheme, we had the opportunity to switch to a less favourable scheme on numerous occasions which I assume would have been contracted in, but we would have been mad to accept the switch