Just read the bloody uniform policy!!!

Surely the no branded footwear is there to help parents. You then don't need to spend hundreds on branded shoes!

I don't understand parents getting the hump over buying uniform. You would be spending much more if your kids were going in their own clothes and it puts everyone level. No one is standing out for the wrong reasons.

Why is it hoop jumping. They are parents, and until the child is old enough to advocate for themselves, isn’t that what they’re there for ? Even more so in the case of disabled children as they generally don’t achieve independence as early as others.

Uniforms are inherently dehumanising. Don't blame me, blame Foucault.

Yes. As long as I don’t show actual genitals or nipples and no offensive logos on t-shirts then yes.

most in my office wear jeans and trainers.

We lived in mainland EU before and didn't wear uniform and never had issues.

Well quite. It's weird how people seem to forget that in the majority of countries in Europe (and possibly the world), they manage fine without uniform.

Exactly! Bullying is rife in both uniform and non-uniform when the culture allows it. I’ve had bullying when I had to wear a uniform and without and none of the ridicule was about what I was wearing. It was about my looks, my hair, having glasses, having braces, being too nice/too friendly, etc.

I’ve seen plenty of parents complaining about bullying in schools here and have friends whose children were being bullied. One friend’s daughter was being bullied over her hair. Nothing wrong with her hair other than this girl not liking it, calling it ugly, and hoping to get a rise out of her.

And yet in countries with no school uniform tradition, people manage to cope fine with the real world despite not having had the benefit of having to dress up in hideous polyester at school.

Surely every school has much more sensible rules which give their pupils as much training in following them as they can conceivably need?

Ironically enough kickers were banned in my school because then green and red tags violated the school’s all black shoes dress code

I went to school in the seventies and the boys were not allowed long hair. If the girls had long hair they were required to have it tied back. It’s about hygiene I would have thought.

Proponents of uniform never seem able to explain how other countries seem to manage so well without them. I suspect the fact that their school staff don't have to spend hours on policing uniform also contributes to the fact that many of those countries' schools do better academically than ours.

Agree.

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. Yet they bumble on.

The parents have to recognise the child's needs and then advocate for the child. This would be the hoop-jumping in question.

Honestly if I had my way, all uniform would be gone, and the kids would have a dress code similar to an office, smart casual. I lived in Europe for years and there was no uniforms. Most of the kids where dressed perfectly well and felt comfortable.

Uniforms don't separate the haves and have nots! The kids know perfectly well

They know who has what. Dehumanising the lot of them is too high a price to pay for having them tease each other about something other than shoes, imo.

I'm not even in favour of school uniform, but to describe asking kids to wear black shoes with no logos as 'dehumanising' or 'a high price to pay' is beyond absurd.

Now if anything is ignorant tripe, your post is. It's a simple fact, in secondary schools you won't see most girls playing playground games, and making them wear different shoes cannot conceivably change that.

This! Not every autistic child gets a diagnosis and EHCP and school uniforms are a special kind of hell for those children. I know because I was one.

It isn’t jumping through hoops. The Equality Act was created in respect of the needs of disabled people, and among other things compels schools to make these types of adjustments for disabled children, so there should be no problem with access to equity. All the parent has to do is to make the school aware of their childs’ needs. If the school don’t know, they can’t make the adjustment.

YABU if you're trying to suggest the school's footwear policy is justified.

Ballet flats are a terrible choice of footwear. They're flimsy and impractical, and offer little or no arch support or protection from the elements.

The Nike shoes will probably last a lot longer than anything Clarke's has for sale at an exorbitant price.

Shoes with no logos tend to be cheap in every sense.

Shoes with logos that kids will be able to wear outside of school are a sensible thing to spend money on. The alternative is to spend money on both the cheapo school shoes and also the shoes the kids will wear outside of school. Parents are in fact saving money.

As an aside, I've never in all my years both as a student and as a parent experienced schools that didn't have lockers for students, but my years in school and as the parent of students were spent in Ireland and the US. I find it truly baffling that schools do not provide lockers and students end up carrying so much kit of all kinds around with them. It is ridiculous.

Second aside - my DCs went to a uniform-wearing elementary school where the uniform rules were very reasonable (apart from a higher cost for girls' uniforms that bit me hard in the butt) and practical. They attended a non-uniform high school. Amazingly, behaviour and academic progress tended to be pretty good in both schools. Are you sure uniforms are that important in schools?

But why use pointless rules to teach that lesson? Goodness knows, they'll encounter enough disappointments and challenges during the course of an ordinary school term without adding to them.

Proponents of uniform never seem able to explain how other countries seem to manage so well without them. I suspect the fact that their school staff don't have to spend hours on policing uniform also contributes to the fact that many of those countries' schools do better academically than ours.

Even with no uniform policy which we had in mainland Europe there are still some rules at times around large and bold labels on clothes etc.
Generally I found people there less materialistic than here and they don't care what you wear or drive etc

We have national "This Girl Can" campaigns to try to get women and girls more active and you come out with ignorant tripe like this? Yes, girls' physical activity does matter, we have a national obesity crisis and a sexed sports gap you could drive the Titanic through.

Genuinely if you have specific recommendations for cheap shoes I’d like to hear it. I tried cheating out on school shoes once. They literally fell apart within two weeks - and my boys hate football (the usual shoe killer) and don’t scoot in school shoes (the other one). An awful lot of school shoes now are outright not fit for purpose.

In the 70’s both the male pupils and teachers had long hair.
Nobody cared.
Why are haircuts such a strict part of uniform policy now?

Imo schools in the UK are all about stifling creativity and heads seem to believe that if the dc all dress the same it will somehow improve discipline.

I dislike this argument. Children are legally required to be in school (or provided with an alternative suitable education) and most people don't have a choice where they send their children to school. Therefore, parents' agreement to school uniform policy is in most cases illusory and, in any case, it is the children (who have very little power) not the parents who the school usually punishes for uniform breaches.

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.

The VW ones are not cheap about as useless but not cheap.

that would hold water if anyone actually had any real say in which school their children attended....