Just read the bloody uniform policy!!!

Walking pace!

‘Does it matter? Most secondary schoolgirls have no intention of playing playground games anyway.’

that’s whole other issue but starting with shoes the girls can actually run about in would be a good start. They don’t turn 11 and suddenly decide they don’t want to move at anything faster than a running pace…

Fwiw most children worldwide are wearing uniforms by the looks of things

All of Africa , aisa , Australia and South America school uniform is the norm

@crochetmonkey74 I don’t know how all those countries in Europe get their children educated without schools policing clothing on a daily basis. Try it and you might like it!

But school uniforms are ridiculous. Most of countries in Europe appear to be able to run their education systems without demanding OTT uniform policies.

Making it bloody obvious to all who can't afford the latest shoes isn't necessary or kind

My experience was that people didn't know how little we had and certainly couldn't not run your face in it all the time - you can't walk past laughing at someone shoes if yours are the same

Only when the rules are reasonable.
Luckily, if they are not, there are people who don't follow them, and, sometimes after a prolonged debate, the rules change. This is called social progress. Abolition of slavery, women's rights, accepting LGBT relationships, all that stuff.

This is technically correct but the experience of thousands of SEN parents is that schools (especially many academies) think their policies trump law.

Then the parents should be taking it higher or threatening legal action - which would be successful if the school were refusing to make adjustment for a condition which qualified under the Act. I don’t necessarily disagree with making school uniform more inclusive but I struggle to see how it could be done, given the varying impact of different disabilities.

I just find it all so utterly pointless. T shirt/ jumper in whatever colour, same with bottoms. Skirt, leggings, trousers, shorts. That should be the rules.

Children know who has money and who doesn't!! They talk. And mostly, at least at primary, don't care.

Personally, I think that if we're going to have school uniform at all, we should do it properly and schools should issue kit to students, boots and all, without parents having to pay for it. Like the army does.

In my DCs' US high school, the school issued unisex PE uniforms - the only item of uniform students were required to wear. Students paid $5.00 at the start of their first year and if they didn't expand too much east and west the same kit would last them for all four years. If you forgot your PE uniform you could rent a spare for 50 cents. The school also issued speedo swimsuits for swimming class and washed and sanitised suits daily.

The uniform-wearing elementary school allowed students to wear any plain navy or navy/white athletic shorts and plain white T-shirt for PE, so I bought all of that at Walmart. Students in kindergarten and first grade wore their PE kit to school on their gym days to eliminate changing time and the hassle of lost uniform items. In winter they wore navy sweatpants.

Students could wear any outerwear they wanted - no hard-to-wash school blazers or expensive crested jackets or coats required. Instead, parents bought whatever they could afford and felt was appropriate for the climate.

I just looked up the Vivienne Westwood ones.

I agree with not allowing them.

They are £100 for a pair of ballet flats that have an obvious logo on them. Parents should have checked the policy before buying something like that.

Fashion shoes like that could easily become the 'in' thing with pressure on all the kids to have them, putting poorer families who can't afford them at a disadvantage.

They say plain black shoes without logos for a reason. School uniform is meant to be a leveller.

The Vivienne Westwood flats are nothing more than a fashion statement. Take off the badge and they are a shitty plastic dolly shoe. It's all about being seen to be wearing them. And showing off that you have a hundred quid of plastic on your feet.

Gosh you are naive
It's total hoop-jumping, advocacy and often requires evidence-gathering from medical professionals; on top of god knows what else. And some schools seem unaware of their responsibilities in regard to the EA. All to wear a soft shoe, or a boot, or a short sleeve, or unregulation skirt length. The onus should be on the schools to consider this first and design uniform and policy inclusively, or with a range of inclusive options.

@WiddlinDiddlin - or use a locker to switch shoes around in?

To be fair its ridiculous draconian rules set by people on a power trip with no clear guidance and the rules 'change' at random.

Our kids school sent out a black and white print out of 'non acceptable' shoes and 'acceptable' shoes... they all looked like identical black blobs on the paper. It said no boots/trainers but then clearly some kinds of boots/trainers in 'acceptable' and identical style shoes like brogues in both acceptable and non acceptable.

There was nothing to distinguish what they where claiming was acceptable or not. The only clear instructions where 'black' and 'no logos'.

If they object to my kids uniform they can deal with it because THEY are the ones that aren't clear what they mean. I'm not buying new shoes every other week because they decided they don't like that black pair this week and need another black pair based on rules they can't even clearly outline.

The whole concept of school uniform is absolutely ridiculous imo. As pp have said, everyone knows who the haves and have nots are (phones, bags, where you live etc. etc. etc.) and I believe it only serves to waste teachers time while forcing kids to wear clothing they wouldn't choose. (And tbh, how many adults now go to work in suits and ties?)
With the cost of living crisis, why on earth force parents to spend precious cash on clothing their kids don't want to wear (and certainly won't wear at the weekends, holidays etc. so potentially forcing more clothes to have to be bought).

The Equality Act was designed to tackle problems like this and requires schools to make reasonable adjustment for children with disabilities/special needs, and this includes uniform issues. And there doesn’t need to be a diagnosis - there just has to be significant difficulty eligible under the Act.

I can’t get annoyed at our school policy, they can have trainers and the like as long as they are fully black.

Black and white converse are particularly stated as not acceptable, which we owned, but we went out and bought new black shoes anyway. Leggings are out (and understandably so)

I drive to the school daily and the majority of kids are wearing the said converse and see through leggings 😫

You would think the magical qualities of blazers and ties would be so blindingly obvious to schools in other countries that they would be falling over themselves trying to get their students into uniforms.

In my experience (lots of exchanges French & German schools), the foreign students find our uniforms and rules about hair etc baffling and/or quaint. They always ask loads of questions about it and I've known some want to buy uniform items as souvenirs because it's such a curiosity!

There is currently very little evidence that uniforms will improves academic performance, behaviour, or attendance..

Source: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit

If only it were that easy. An astonishing number of schools, particular academies, make a big thing of "no exceptions" uniform rules and seem to struggle massively with the concept that obeying the rules - i.e. the law on equality by giving reasonable adjustments - applies to them too.

All this is the same back to school stories since my kids started high school in 2007. Probably had been going on long before then as well.

Same complaints - no logos no extreme haircuts, no short skirts etc.
I'm not a pyschic but I predict It'll be the same moans round about this time next year!!!

Yeah! Give ‘em an inch and you’ll find this year they’re wearing logo’d shoes and next year they’ll be turning up at the local baths stark naked!

Way to miss the point. The active girls who do want to play cannot if they are in ballet flats and this trains them out of the exercise habits they would have gotten into had they had proper shoes.

My footballing interest was curtailed by a broken toe incurred kicking a ball in soft shoes. I never got back into it.

No one imposes this forced idlesness on boys. I smell misogyny.