Recently I dropped off my daughter at school. Dressed up in a tie and blazer, she squirmed with discomfort in the late summer heat. After she disappeared through the gate, I headed to my office in the City of London. Walking from the tube station to my building, I was surrounded by bankers wearing open-necked shirts and no blazers. Some wore trainers and jeans. This stark contrast reminded me that uniform policies – and much of the excessive discipline in schools – are moulding our children to fit into a world of work which no longer really exists.
My daughter later told me that she was given special dispensation to take off the blazer – but only during the 30C heat of the first week of term. She was one of the lucky ones. Other schools are far less lenient when it comes to enforcing uniform rules. Children from a school in Cornwall were given detention for taking off their blazers in the sweltering heat. A 12-year-old schoolgirl from Hull was placed into isolation this year for wearing a skirt from Asda. Kids at one school were excluded from class for wearing the wrong kind of sock.
The list of absurd rules around how children should look in British schools is almost endless. The Mumsnet website is full of stories of complicated rules being enforced by schools that seem to be increasingly intent on micromanaging the most minor aspect of children’s appearances. When schools are asked to explain their strict policies, the most widely used justification for uniforms is that they help to prepare children for the “real world” of work.
