School skirts? Why is it such an issue?

I often think if they didn't make them dress up in stereotypical menswear from waist up they wouldn't revel by rolling up their skirts to make a point from waist down!

This is a good point. I never work a skirt to school past age 6, I'm not a skirt person, but I always felt so frumpy at school. I didn’t want to look like a model but not having to wear an ill-fitting shirt, a tie, and a heavy blazer that was always too big for me would've really improved my day.

I have never seen skirts as short as I have nowadays and I lived on a road with 2 high schools, so I've seen lots of girls pounding the pavement past the house.

It is now the norm to see the bottom of their arse cheeks. Or front the front, the top of the thigh that is a bit more fleshy before the groin.
Lord only knows how they get upstairs whilst retaining any decency!!

I live in a country where all schools have uniforms however it’s only the private/religious schools that measure skirt lengths and punish for them being short. My daughter’s skirts are very short though she does have extremely long legs. I used to think I would care but she’s 16, it’s her body and this is her choice. It definitely feels sexist and body shaming to carry on about it.

I took DD to a clothes alteration shop recently to have a formal dress altered. While she was in the changing room a girl came in with a private school uniform to have it let down as she’d got into trouble for it being too short because it was above her knee. She was with her boyfriend and wearing the shortest skirt I’ve ever seen. There was full bum cheek exposed. It just highlighted to me how ridiculous these clothing rules are.

Very true.

I've always said schools should have a colour code for tops - maybe just a school logo jumper and/or hoody.

Then let them wear black bottoms of any type. They wouldn't roll their skirts up imo if they didn't have something to revel against.

I'm absolutely against the idea that girls should have to conform to prefect the men or themselves from men.

But I do wish they'd realise how ridiculous they look with their skirts rolled up shorter than their blazers!

And I wish school HTs would realise how ridiculous it looks to have girls in shirts ties and blazers.

I often think if they didn't make them dress up in stereotypical menswear from waist up they wouldn't revel by rolling up their skirts to make a point from waist down!

It’s not as simple as measuring a skirt. My DD and her friends from high school, pictured, could wear the same skirt but it would be considerably shorter on DD as you can see how high her waist is.

How on earth can it possibly impact a teenage girls education if her skirt is above her knee?

I went to secondary school in the sixties, of course we rolled out skirts. 50 years later, we seem to be having the same conversations.

Is it because adults (teachers in this case) need to impose their superiority by inventing rules for these teenagers? If so,it smacks of the beginning of a need to control. So if you cannot control the class room, at least you can set arbitrary rules, and punish if they aren't followed. Makes no sense to me.

But then, I've never understood rules like these. What does your haircut have to do with your education, for example? But many schools appear to have such rules, for reasons of ???? I've never been quite sure what those reasons are and how they help a child's development.

The solution is probably to make less fuss about the sort of skirts a school chooses to include in its uniform, to allow students to choose a skirt that suits their body shape or perhaps to have a decency rule e.g. no underwear should be visible (including when walking up stairs), bum cheeks should be covered and design/length must enable students to sit cross-legged on the floor without displaying their underwear.

One of my DDs is tall, has a very small waist and very long legs. In Y11 her skirt was considerably shorter than the regulation length so one of the senior teachers told her to unroll it. She explained it wasn't rolled up and showed them the waistband to prove it! The teacher was surprised that such a short skirt wasn't the result of being rolled up but apologised for doubting DD and agreed there was little to be done. It wasn't mentioned again and didn't seem to adversely affect her ability to learn or to perform well in her GCSEs. That feels like a fairly sensible approach. Had she been told to go and get an identical regulation skirt from the school office as described by a PP, it would have still been short.

A friend of mine has a yr8 at an expensive private school with knee length A line tartan skirts. She's not skinny. Poor child looks like a sack of spuds.

This is an ancient chestnut. Girls since the 60s have always had a desire to shorten their skirts as a way of rebellion. Pity the teachers who had to enforce the rules! Interesting that the girls who were told to wear trousers instead insisted it was their ‘right’ as girls to wear skirts! But while kids are rebelling this way they are not doing anything worse.

In our local, the Y7s and Y8s roll as well. Some of my Y6 girls even tried to get involved with it last year. It's about "the look" and it's seen as something all the girls do as a sign of maturity and being "ready" for secondary and boys.

Schools are getting harsher on this because, in recent years, in response to the Everyone's Invited movement, things have changed. Schools have been made responsible for removing any "sexualised banter" or talk as well as preventing those behaviours and attitudes developing in the children.

They are now judged on how well they do this and an environment where underwear and bum cheeks are visible in the corridors, classrooms and on the stairs, is not deemed acceptable.

I think uniforms are good overall, as long as they are actually affordable which isn't always the case. Girls should be allowed to wear trousers. Sure enough girls have always rolled their skirts up, it's pathetic though.

During the pandemic the DDs has to wear PE kit on the days they had PE, they much preferred it.

I do worry about how impractical and sometimes, risky their tiny rolled up skirts are. It's pretty risky in food tech and science for example

I am a scientist. We wear labcoats in the labs to protect ourselves. In reality there's nothing in the least bit dangerous done in school science lessons but making the kids wear LEP and labcoats (or aprons in food tech) would teach good safety practice.

Rolled up skirts is one of the reasons I hate school uniform, it's so sexualised. Soon as they go to 6th form they wear nothing but jeans, trainers and baggy jumpers. Which is exactly what I wore to my (non-uniform) school back in the 80s.

My kids school allow girls to wear trousers, very few do because they don't like the fit. DD2 refuses to wear school trousers because she's curvy and petite and they are too baggy at the waist and too tight over her bum (she's a size 8). At weekends she wears leggings or petite mum jeans which suit her shape.

Also my netball skirt was indecent. But that was regulation. We wore big pants obviously, but the skirts were pleated so they always went up and the majority of the time you could see our pants.

We could wear trousers or skirts at school. I wore both, later proffered skirts and always rolled my skirt up. I used to wear black trainers instead of the usual black shoes (when I wore trousers and would cover them). It was rebellion! Blimey, just a little bit of freedom and no harm was done. When something is forbidden at that age, it makes it more exciting. I used to hear stories from my great grandmother who did the same. We had to wear ties, which was silly and had to wear a jumper in winter. I rebelled then saying I was too hot, and just wore my shirt! That was a bonkers rule too.

My dd is at a girls school. Choice of skirt or trousers. Only about 3% wear trousers and most of them are covering up for religious reasons. Most girls roll their skirts short.

The solution is: They have to wear opaque tights.

My dd has to wear a skirt because she is slender and tall and the uniform trousers won’t fit.

Sorry. No skirts ever out of school.
School = rolled up skirts as that's what 90% do

My DD Yr8 never ever wears skirts or dresses. Trousers to school tho only when very cold. She does what every other 12-15 year old does and wears a rolled up skirt. With shorts underneath

When I was at secondary school back in the late 90s if your skirt was too short you were asked to roll it down. If it was too short even after it was rolled down then you were taken to the office to sort through the lost property/spares box to find a suitable skirt to wear. No one wanted to wear the scabby spares so it worked pretty well as a deterrent. Not a 100% success rate there were always the few who were determined but it was enough to put most people off. I'm pretty sure the office staff deliberately only kept the odd/ugly/wrong coloured spares in the box so that it would be even more off putting to wear as it would be obvious to everyone.

This is such a vexed issue now.

If you have a uniform, you somehow need to enforce it. And, even if you don’t, most schools will ask 6th formers to dress professionally.

on the other hand, skirt inspections should be a thing of the past. But, if you do nothing, some of the girls actually show their bum.

I do think that only the worst offenders should be dealt with (and you really don’t need a test for these, it is nakedly obvious,).

I think tutors should have a quiet one to one word with these and ask them to dress professionally. Only if girls fail after this should they be sanctioned.

The fair alternative is trousers for all, but I know many don’t approve of this either.

My experience of a non uniform school is that hardly any girls wear skirts, its all jeans and leggings, and skirt length just isn’t an issue. In fact, the PE uniform skorts are by far the shortest skirt I’ve seen any of them wear, and unless the weather is really hot they mostly seem to put leggings underneath the skort.

I don’t think you can compare non-uniform to mufti days - its very different if you can spend the money you would have spent on school uniform on more home clothes and if you see people in their non uniform clothes all the time.

Nearly every girl wears a skirt. Probably 90% say. Years 7 and 8 don't really roll up skirts but years 9+, I'd say at least 75% do it. To a length where they can't comfortably sit cross-legged or bend over to retrieve something from the floor. Wearing the skirt the regulation length is desperately uncool. We even have shorts as an option. One person wears them. One.

What I would like to know is exactly how many girls show their knickers or bum cheeks in any given school. Is it actually a significant number/the majority or is it one of those situations based mostly on assumptions and "silly" girls?

I went to a highschool with very lax uniform rules. I can remember about 5 girls (in the whole school) wearing very short skirts, the vast majority wore jeans.

More expensive brands have length options, but supermarket brands don't.

I sell for charity, £2 each, preloved school skirts with variable waists & length, on ebay. Check it out...

The Rainford school ones are £20 new at Slaters, looks like you can buy same style on ebay new for £9 each. I imagine there's a local parents group selling them on for less preloved.

But when they're meeting friends/going clubbing, they're with peers and ones who can afford to go out and go clubbing. Believe me, the students who don't come in on non uniform days or sit in the pastoral office having a panic attack, tell us they're happy to wear uniform. And our year 11s and heads team voted only recently, in a mock parliament and keeping the uniform was passed by them.