Why schools are right to ban pupils from wearing designer coats

Just when I thought my trust in authority had hit the skids and would never be restored, a story popped up to remind me: I love headteachers. Woodchurch high school in Birkenhead has banned its pupils from wearing designer coats – the named brands are Canada Goose, Moncler and Pyrenex. It is not because kids are stupid, lose things or steal off each other (or that a big-ticket item more or less guarantees the worst possible result: mothers fighting in playgrounds). Rather, it is because of inequality. If some kids are walking around in £1,000 coats, those who cannot afford to “feel stigmatised, they feel left out, they feel inadequate”, says the school’s headteacher, Rebekah Phillips.

The idea that teachers are all inveterate lefties is a lingering niggle in the culture wars; when Michael Gove labelled the entire profession and all its acolytes “the blob”, his lack of regard didn’t come from nowhere. Education is widely perceived as a hotbed of anti-establishment political radicalism, starting at teacher training college, ending in the inculcation of dangerous socialism into unformed minds. While on the one hand, this is ridiculous – most teachers wouldn’t attend the revolution because they have marking to do – there is an eye of truth to it.

A huge amount of schooling, especially in the early years, is about principles: sharing; respect; cooperation; treating others as you would like to be treated yourself. The countervailing values of the market – survival of the fittest; every man for himself; commerce is king; if you’ve got it, flaunt it – might stalk unchallenged across life’s other spheres, but they never fit very easily into the school environment. And so, inevitably, the rules can come across as a little bit, you know, socialist.

It has been going on in schools since for ever. At the turn of the century, it was trainers: harsh hierarchies would come into place, where you knew you were a kingpin because that was £49.99 you were walking about in. The kid in the two-quid plimsolls would be shunned almost by reflex. Loads of schools still insist on unbranded trainers. If Canada Goose coats are a new arrival on the list, it is a reflection of their new ubiquity. Things only become a stigma risk when everyone wants them.

The depressing end note is just how many of society’s problems schools are now having to solve: kids who can’t afford breakfast, or socks; kids in temporary accommodation and going hungry in the holidays; a fresh wave of misogyny arrived from nowhere; and now, the overarching social truth that inequality is catastrophic to wellbeing. It’s like trying to do a regular job, and the job of Hercules, simultaneously. I don’t know how the blob does it.