Heads need to get over their obsession with school uniform

I hated my annual back-to-school visit to the foot-measuring machine in Clarks. My feet were so wide growing up that the shop assistant would always frown as they squeezed me into clunky velcro-strap shoes while I sat there daydreaming about the flimsy Primark flats that were the height of chic at the time. Like most normal children, I hated wearing uniform of any kind. I loathed it so much, in fact, that in probably the most dissenting rebellion of my primary school years, I spent a few months wearing my own clothes under my uniform and stripping the top layer off the second I got to school.

My primary school’s uniform policy was lax; a wear-it-if-you-want kind of affair. Clearly, I was lucky. Had I been at Merchant’s Academy in Bristol, Ysgol Penglais in Aberystwyth, or Dartmoor Community College in Devon, I might have found myself sent home, put into isolation, or even made to wear a humiliating lanyard around my neck for flouting the rules. It seems that with every passing year school uniform policies across the country become more stringent and unforgiving, and I’m not the only one to notice. In a letter disseminated to Northern Ireland’s school principals last month Koulla Yiasouma, the country’s Commissioner for Children and Young People put her foot down, stating that isolating students for minor uniform infractions is not only wrong but infringes on a child’s “fundamental right to education”. I couldn’t agree more.

It’s not just that the punishment is disproportionate for the crime. It’s that each time these militant policies crop up in the press, there seems to be little thought behind how such inflexible rules will impact some students more than others, particularly those with difficult lives at home. By punishing them for missing jumpers or forgotten homework planners with shaming tactics, isolation or detention, the risk is alienating young people at a time when they need the most support.

Don’t get me wrong. Uniform on the whole is an excellent idea, especially for the most disadvantaged students. At school class and wealth differences are always hugely exaggerated, and are expressed through every available outlet from the plastic bag holding your PE kit to the branding of the food in your school lunch box. Non-uniform days were either the most exciting or anxiety-producing events in the school calendar, as the wealthier kids came decked out in head-to-toe Jack Wills and Abercrombie, while the less fortunate either “forgot” it was non-uniform day, or were ridiculed for what they did come in wearing. In one of many desperate attempts I made to fit in at school, I remember buying a knock-off Jack Wills t-shirt for £6 on ebay and wearing it at every possible opportunity. Uniform is clearly important not just for the impression it gives of a school, but for the purpose of lifting anxiety from poorer students who don’t have access to the latest trends and big-name brands.

Yet not every student has parents who will diligently wake them up each morning, make them breakfast, and give them clean uniform to wear. In 2014, the Government estimated that there were up to 2.6 million separated families in the UK, meaning that countless children across the country will be living between two different places week in and week out, sometimes miles apart. I was fortunate in that my parents separated as I was about to leave secondary school, and that they ended up only a 20 minute walk apart. Yet I still found it extraordinarily stressful trying to remember which things I needed for each day of the week, and cart them from place to place accordingly.  

As the purse strings of state schools are pulled ever-tighter by cuts in every area, the long list of items that students have to provide for themselves will increase, meaning greater room for error. I was an unabashed goody two-shoes at school, but on the few occasions I did get into trouble, it was because I’d left something at one place instead of the other, or left something behind altogether. So late on in my academic career, and as a highly organised person in general, these incidents didn’t have too negative an effect on my attitude to learning.

But imagine if I’d come from an unhappy home, or a foster home, perhaps living sporadically between two or more places. If I was frequently taken out of lessons, or made to feel embarrassed for accidental errors like bringing the wrong bag or forgetting my history book, I’d probably feel a little like the world was conspiring against me. If I was missing parts of lessons and placed into isolation, I’d be inclined to give up. I remember from many occasions that students with the excuse that they’d “left x at my dad’s” were always met with a profound lack of sympathy by teachers in school. Because separated, divorced, or single-parent families are now so common, it can be easy for adults to forget how chaotic the effect on a student’s life can be, and it is essential that teachers remember to cut them a little slack.

Of course, it would be naive, and contrary to my own experience, to suggest that there aren’t students who deliberately act out, break the rules, and feign the same excuses over and over again to push their teachers’ buttons. Discipline and adherence to the rules are essential for any school to function properly. But it sends the wrong message to first-time offenders if their excuses are aired totally, or in their eyes disbelieved. It is unfair to these students, of foster homes, low-income families, and separated parents, to punish them without asking why the error might have been made in the first place, or helping them design their own systems for getting it right next time. Without doing so, children already at risk of acting out may be pushed into behaving badly - the exact opposite of what a school uniform, and good discipline, sets out to achieve.