Crikey, school uniform is tricky ground isn’t it?! I don’t envy the people in charge who have to make decisions about what goes and what doesn’t, which items to pick, and what creative interpretations to let slide. However, despite a certain sense of empathy, I have to say that a lot of the time schools manage to get their policies on uniform completely and utterly wrong.
Take, for example, the story reported in Parent Dish about a school in North Yorkshire. Following ever decreasing hemlines, the headmaster has made moves to ban girls from wearing skirts. Yup, that is right, no more skirts in school, ever. The opposite of this is the private school near where I live, where female students have to wear maxi skirts, and are banned from wearing trousers. The bans rarely specify any gender specific requirements for boys, but I can imagine that if a male student rocked up in a skirt he would be told he was breaking the rules too.
The theory behind uniform, as you probably know, is to unify everyone. You start off on equal footing, poor students, rich students, black students, white students. The idea is to make it so that everyone fits in equally, regardless of where they came from or what clothes they can afford. It is a logic I can understand, and is probably the main reason that personally I am not actually that against the idea of uniform – especially if by 6th form you get to wear your own clothes.
However, whilst the theory may be understandable, it doesn’t really work in practice. Firstly, there shouldn’t be an enforced difference between boys and girls. After all, if you are wanting to start all students on an even keel, then the last thing you want to be doing is gender segregating, however “normal” it may seem to do so. To forbid girls from wearing certain items of clothing that boys can wear is unfair, and actually it is unfair to do it the other way too.
I can understand policies on the presentations of uniform. Wearing super short skirts puts teachers and schools in an unenviable position, and it can make sense to specify a certain skirt length, although people have to be realistic and know that there will always be ways around such rules. This is just the same type of rule as wearing your shirt tucked in or your top button done up, and as such is mainly to do with being appropriate and presentable.
However, you have to be incredibly careful with how you regulate uniforms. After all, the last thing you want to be doing is suppressing creativity and personal expression, especially in teens, for whom having a creative outlet is especially appropriate. Makeup, hairstyles, piercings and customisations are a way of life, and they are important to allow students to be individuals in a sea of identically dressed people. You don’t want cliques based on who has the right trainers, but you don’t want totally conformist clones either.
How do you resolve the uniform issues? I can’t honestly say I know. However, if someone was to tell me at school that I couldn’t wear skirts or I couldn’t wear trousers, I know there would have been hell to pay. I’m a rebel like that!
Image via Copper Kettle's Fickr