Labour this week added to its long list of things it is going to abolish should it get into power. Joining the baseline assessment, phonics check, times table test and key stage 2 Sats in the chuck-it bucket went the entire independent schools sector, academies, Ofsted, tuition fees and the “spiralling cost of school uniforms”.
The last felt a strangely small creature to squash compared with slaying the big beasts of private schools and Her Majesty’s inspectorate.
No one would deny that buying uniform is a burden on those on low salaries. But so is just about everything when you have little money. Food, housing, heating and decent wages are all even more of a problem and surely a weightier issue for government to tackle than the cost of children’s clothing for school. And what about the clothes they have to wear out of school? What are they going to do about those? After all, children spend plenty of time at home after school, at weekends and in the holidays.
In her speech to conference, the shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said that she wanted to put an end to the “spiralling” cost of uniforms that forces parents into debt and often leaves children in clothes that do not fit. “So we will set a clear price cap,” she said, “and stop the scandal of children priced out of school.”
But why now? The campaign by Emma Hardy MP to make uniform more affordable certainly resonated with many people, so it makes some political sense to double down on that. But the impression I get is that the majority of schools are being sensible and are allowing low-priced supermarket clothing. And are prices really spiralling?
It’s certainly not a new issue. At some schools, uniforms have always been expensive and it’s been a problem for as long as I can remember. Many moons ago, my own parents struggled to afford my secondary school uniform, which could be bought only from the one approved retailer in town. They were proud to see me in that “smart” blazer and skirt. I hated both with a passion and cannot wear purple or navy to this day.
It’s not only me. School uniform is an issue that raises strong emotions in everyone and is almost a national obsession. Those in other countries gaze upon us in bewilderment as each September schools go through the annual ritual of sending children home for not adhering to their uniform rules.
The latest big protest to hit the headlines was at an East Sussex school over the introduction of a gender-neutral uniform, which meant girls had to wear trousers. Why do girls always have to change what they wear? Why not offer the choice? Is it so terrifying that boys might choose to wear a skirt? Go a few hundred miles up the road and there’s no problem with men in skirts. In fact, it’s positively encouraged.
The school said that concerns had also been raised over length of girls’ skirts. It’s always girls’ clothing. No one says boys are wearing their trousers too tight or too short and showing too much hairy leg. We have an obsession with policing girls’ clothing that says more about us than it does about them.
Parents at that school complained about the cost of replacing clothes while the students were worried about the problem of cheap, throwaway clothes that have contributed to climate change. It can’t be both. Basically, both arguments are just a proxy for “we don’t like being told what to do”.
So long as most schools have a uniform, children and parents will argue and rebel over it. It wastes so much time and effort that could be devoted to more important things like teaching and learning. There’s absolutely no evidence that it drives up academic performance, behaviour or attendance. Labour should have gone further and called for school uniforms to be abolished, too.
@AnnMroz
This article originally appeared in the 27 September 2019 issue under the headline “Uniform: the sexist obsession that belongs in the chuck-it bucket”
