“Brace yourself,” a friend warned on Facebook last week. “The new school uniform pictures are coming.” Sure enough, my social media feeds are now saturated with pictures of sheepish children posing awkwardly for their parents before their first day of the new school year, wearing crisp uniforms.
Now let’s be clear: I enjoy these pictures. I like seeing how distant friends’ children are growing and changing. I also like getting visual confirmation that the adolescents who have been slouching on my sofa all summer casually shooting people on Call Of Duty now have something else to occupy their days – at least until half-term.
For Matthew Tate, the new head of Hartsdown Academy in Margate, Kent, school uniform has proved more of a headache. He made headlines nationally this week by standing at the school gates and turning away students whose uniform wasn’t up to standard: 50 of them on the first day of term, 20 the day after. Angry parents called him a Nazi, and complained of Gestapo tactics, which goes to show that we really should place more emphasis on history in the national curriculum. Hitler murdered millions of people, simply because they were Jewish, or otherwise failed to comply with his exacting standards; Tate was trying to stamp his authority by sending home kids who were wearing trainers. Can you spot the difference there?
It is true that it might have been a little harsh to send students home on their first day. Perhaps a warning letter would have been more diplomatic, giving harassed and cash-strapped parents a few days to go to the shops and get their kids kitted out correctly. The start of term can be a financial nightmare, and it has been reported that a company in the Midlands is offering £300 loans to help with back-to-school expenses – at an eye-watering interest rate equivalent to 200% a year. But it is also true is that nearly 900 students in an economically disadvantaged part of Kent did manage to turn up in the required outfit: in an interview, the beleaguered head claimed that in previous years, some students had been bullied for turning up in full uniform.
All of which might imply that I’m all for school uniforms. I am not. I hated mine. My teenage skin reacted badly to nylon – still does, probably, though I haven’t tested that for decades – and the hideous synthetic blouses my school imposed on me left me with two, equally devastating choices: festering acne on my back, or my mum’s triumphant solution, a thick cotton BHS vest.
The argument is that uniform levels the playing field, making all students look the same. This is nonsense. The well-off kids are the ones with the fashionably-cut skirts and trousers and expensive shoes, while the poorer kids are marked out by their scuffed Primark footwear or the worn, ankle-swinging trousers they outgrew months before. And no matter how minutely the school tries to stamp it out, individuality always finds an expression. There are many ways to knot a tie, to adjust a skirt, or casually sling a sweater round your shoulders, and these tiny signifiers speak volumes in the closed, claustrophobic world of school.
But nonetheless, research has shown that uniform can be effective. It takes away the pressure of deciding what to wear in the morning, and removes at least some of the peer pressure to wear expensive brands. Banning short skirts, high heels and tight trousers gives our children some respite from being oversexualised, and obsessively body conscious.
Uniform can also help with discipline, it gives the school an identity and hopefully pride, and it helps to identify intruders more easily, as well as truants: the head at my son’s old school in Hackney managed to boost attendance considerably, just by riding around the area on his bike at 9am, rounding up uniformed students wandering off in the wrong direction.
Detractors often point out that Scandinavian schools are consistently ranked amongst the best in the world, and that uniforms are never required there. But there are plenty of other things they don’t have, either. Constant testing of children. League tables. Crumbling school buildings. Instead, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden spend more on education as a proportion of GDP than almost any other country. In the UK, education has long been used as a political football, the constant fiddling leaving teachers running to keep up with forever-moving goalposts. Theresa May, with her plans to reintroduce grammar schools (which Scandinavians also somehow do without), is just one of a long, long line.
Hartsdown Academy is rated by Ofsted as a good school. As he starts his new job, I’d imagine Matthew Tate, like most headteachers, is striving against the odds to attain that coveted excellent grade. We can criticise him for clinging to his zero-tolerance uniform policy as some sort of magic bullet. But unless we’re willing to fund schools properly, give teachers the resources they deserve, and prioritise ensuring every child has a truly equal chance to learn and find their talents, what else has he got?
