Why we should get rid of school uniforms
In an education system that is supposed to champion choice and autonomy, what message are we really sending with strict school uniform policies?
- by Fiona Millar
A Tokyo school recently sparked international headlines when it introduced a pricey uniform branded by the fashion icon Georgio Armani – the school felt this would provide a public image in keeping with the up-market neighbourhood in which it is situated.
However, feelings about whether or not such a move was justified ran high in the local community and pupils were allegedly harassed on the Japanese capital’s streets, leading to the employment of security guards to keep them safe.
Different styles
The obsession with school uniforms has become quite a thing in the last 30 years, but I am not a fan. My own girls’ school voted to get rid of an ugly bottle green tunic and checked summer dresses in favour of a virtually non-existent dress code in the more liberal 1970s.
And I am pleased to say that policy has never been reversed, though that school would be in a minority today.
My own children went to a non-uniform primary then to two different single-sex comprehensive schools; one took the traditional blazer-and-tie approach; in the other the girls could (and still can) wear what they like, within a loose dress code, and tended towards wearing broadly similar styles reflective of the fashion trends at the time.
However there was little discernible difference in outcomes between the two schools, and evidence that uniforms lead to higher standards is flimsy.
Most of our continental neighbours manage perfectly well without them, often achieving more highly than we do when it comes to academic standards and narrowing gaps between different groups of pupils.
Introducing a uniform without improved leadership, management and teaching is unlikely to be a game changer.
Selective equality
Then there are the equally dubious equality arguments. In some ways uniform can be a great leveller – unless of course it is made by Armani or available from another selective supplier at exorbitant cost and used as part of a school’s open evening to send a subtle signal to parents about the school’s values and intake.
Then it becomes a crafty tool in the process of self-selection that smooths the school hierarchy.
Uniforms of the so called ‘better’ schools are easily recognised, investing status rather than equality into their wearers in the same way as the uniform of a poorly regarded school demonises its pupils.
Why else would the pre-pubescent prep school pupils of the South London school attended by Prince Charles consent to walk the streets in corduroy knickerbockers and boaters if it weren’t to advertise the fact that they are in some way superior to their peers? Or the boys at Eton College go to lessons in tailcoats and white bow ties?
I would agree that a poorly enforced uniform policy is probably the worst of all worlds – much better to have no uniform at all – but how much time is taken each year in enforcing pointless uniform codes? And that is not where it ends.
Divide and control
One academy has gone a dramatic step further and banned what it describes as ‘extreme’ haircuts. Another free school rules on the sorts of watches its pupils are permitted to wear. But don’t teachers have better things to do than to measure the height of a student’s hairstyle?
Of course we want our schools to be ordered, calm and productive environments; for some children even more rigid discipline may be the necessary framework within which they are more likely to succeed. But this needs to be kept in perspective.
Beneath the seductive message that uniforms are a powerful social justice tool, there is clearly the possibility that they are being used in a way that is socially divisive, about branding rather than real education, and as a form of social control.
Successive governments have talked the talk about diversity, autonomy and ridding our school system of the ‘deadening hand of uniformity’ in the last 30 years. But forcing every child to dress identically, with repressive implementation, does exactly the reverse, especially at a time when we are also driving individual creativity out of the curriculum.
It seems like this is one area where parents, and pupils, really do have no ‘choice’.
Fiona Millar is a columnist for The Guardian and a co-founder of the Local Schools Network; for more information, visit fionamillar.com or follow @schooltruth.
