Exeter’s schoolboys in skirts follow a proud tradition of breaking the rules | Anne Perkins

Devising ways to assert autonomy is at the heart of the condition of being human. It is a powerful and necessary instinct and the more that it involves subverting authority, the more beguiling the challenge. From that point of view, the 30 boys at Isca community school in Exeter who were told shorts weren’t part of the uniform and decided to turn up for school on Thursday in skirts instead were merely on a rite of passage. They were – as the school wisely appears to have realised – on the journey to becoming good citizens.

The skirts, in the bold pleated tartan of the girls’ uniform, suited them so well you wonder why the school didn’t immediately adopt them as a hot-day option. Obviously the merit of skirts as a men’s fashion item (see Burberry spring/summer 2001) was not the point of the boys’ polite demonstration so much as the fact that they were not supposed to be wearing them at all.

School rules serve lots of useful purposes (or at least, I am prepared to accept that nowadays) but they invariably include some that are expressly designed to impose an institutional, identity-destroying uniformity. The name is the clue. Uniforms are the thing these days, a badge of pride for every new free school and aspiring academy, probably because getting students to obey the rules that they impose locks both sides of the conflict between order and disorder into a continuous but containable cycle. The undone top button is, as subversion goes, in a much more minor league than, say, flushing someone’s head down the lavatory.

The latter is not on the list of misdemeanours schools are supposed to record so that Ofsted can assess conduct. Those tend to be about punctuality and attendance, and while I recall finding both onerous in my time, I can see now that they are necessary. But there are rules that accustom children to the essential obligations of life in a civilised society, and there are rules that are just rules.

The creation of a behaviour tsar shortly after the 2015 election may have slipped the attention of all but those professionally obliged to know, and voters inclined to believe that schools are overflowing with delinquents. But there he is, Tom Bennett, and in March, he produced a report that concluded that standards of behaviour in schools were a national problem.

Bennett’s report, Creating a Culture, is big on uniforms as “symbolic levers” to change behaviour. It suggests small infractions are worthy of a detention. In the free school set up by one of the most high-profile advocates of classroom discipline, Katharine Birbalsingh (which has just been rated outstanding), it is considered a particular virtue that nothing, not even the accidentally dropped grape, escapes the eye of the teachers. The behaviour tsar would approve. He believes children have to be compliant to be free, and that teachers who regard orders as oppressive are harming pupils rather than helping them.

Clearly schools have to create an environment that makes learning possible and delightful and life-enhancing. For children from troubled homes, order and predictability must be a blessed relief. But it seems to me that they also have to create an environment where it is not just legitimate to be different, but acceptable. If obedience was seen as the preeminent advantage of the socialisation process for the industrial age, it is the last thing that’s useful in a world where the slogan of the new gods of Silicon Valley is to move fast and break things.

And then there is the other side of the school environment. The teachers (and ex-teachers) whom I know don’t regard the children, in or out of school uniform, as the problem. The real problem they face is the weight of bureaucracy, the shortage of cash, the cutbacks in classroom assistants and the demoralising atmosphere created by a government that thinks schools can somehow make it up to children for all the hardships imposed by austerity.

And while it is not all of the truth, nor even the principal reason for caring about discipline, it is the case that ultra-obedient pupils can be managed with fewer staff and less money. That this may not be an environment that encourages them to be original, creative, independent-minded or morally alert is neither here nor there: these are not qualities that Ofsted measures.

When he was headmaster of Ampleforth college, Cardinal Basil Hume once told a prospective parent that he regarded his role as preparing her son for death. Being naughty, breaking the rules, is part of learning which are the ones that matter. You don’t need to believe that one day you will meet your maker to hope that on your deathbed, you will be able to say that you lived as you thought right, even – or perhaps particularly – when it meant challenging authority.