Girls' skirts policed.

Yup, prancing around in knickers in front of boys is fine but wearing a skirt above your knee is just too much!

I think words like inspect are a bit emotive as they are almost suggesting that the male teacher is groping or ogling the girls. There is a school uniform policy at my dcs school where pupil's skirts, if worn must be knee length pencil skirts. You can tell just by a quick glance whether the skirt is too short or not. And yes, there are a couple of boys who wear skirts and plenty of girls who wear trousers. Kids don't like being told what to wear, so running out of lessons crying and almost claiming sexual harassment because they have been told their skirt is too short by their teacher is a little dramatic.

You see local girls around here rolling their skirts up so they barely cling under a butt cheek. Often underwear showing cause the moment you start moving, the tiny skirt rides up. I don’t need to see some kid’s pants. It’s entirely inappropriate.
Funnily enough the girls on the train who are heading to the private fee paying school seem to manage to wear their uniform correctly!

Back in my school days…15 odd years ago…I got told off for my skirt being too long. I wore a maxi skirt to hide my chunky legs. There was no rule about a maximum skirt length though so I got away with it and at least nobody saw my undercarriage.

Legs that are ok to be exposed in pe knickers, skirts, etc. But not at any other time

A picture on social media of a skirt a mother has been told is too short is about half an inch above the knee. That’s not about ensuring decency. That’s about being power mad.

Now I'm having flash backs to high school pe and bloody horrible tight gym knickers. Lining up outside the gym as all the boys traipsed out to play football.

God I hated school.

Their skirts are too short. End of.

the thing is, are they?

I agree that if someone can see your knickers your skirt’s too short. But no special rules or tape measures are required for that

they’re just legs

We had uniform knickers at my school and regular "knicker checks"!

Only for the girls, though.

It feels to me like these kids are making a mockery of things like the Me Too movement. Their skirts are too short. End of.

//

If men behaved like civilised human beings w wouldn't even need Me Too.

Jesus

clothes are clothes

all they need to do is keep you warm and decent. There are no items of clothing that males are unable to wear by virtue of being male. Ditto female

since when did schools get so regressive?

Hopefully the school has the same hard stance against young boys who think they can grope or assault a female pupil

I'm guessing probably not

If have more "sympathy" (for want of a better word) with school uniform policies if it was applied as rigorously to the teachers as it was the pupils.

Most of the arguments for uniform applies just as much to staff imo.

According to the uniform guide for this academic year on their website. It's two columns, headed Girls and Boys. The girls column only has a skirt as a possible option. The boys, only trousers.

Yes me too! With the sash that made everybody look like a sack of spuds.

We also had to present our hands/nails for inspection before going into the dinner hall. Not sure how that would go down nowadays!

My issue is not that the female students are asked to keep their skirts to a certain length, it's the way they are made to feel responsible for the male staff and male students' responses to them. The way the inspection was carried out on my friend's child and friends was humiliating and made several of them very upset. Also, at my children's school, many of the boys wear incredibly tight trousers that hug the crotch area. The boys have never been told to make any adjustments.

Yes, uniform can be policed, but it doesn't have to be done so in a way that underlines and perpetuates the societal belief that women are responsible for the sexual assaults and violence carried out against them. We have all heard the "what was she wearing?" question and we all know that rapes happen when women are wearing clothing which hides their bodies as well as clothing that doesn't.

The nuns at my school stopped arguments about skirt length by making us wear tight tunics which also acted at bust flatteners! As they were so expensive, I had to keep mine for five years, started off almost down to the floor!

Yes, it's the requirement for girls to wear a skirt, no choice to wear trousers, from one specific supplier and then treating them all as one and checking them en masse.

I don't think I've ever heard of a case where boys have been separated en masse and their trousers checked (by female teachers) to see if they are covering their pants.

The sooner schools unclench and get ok with boys wearing skirts and girls wearing trousers (for heaven’s sake), the sooner they can stop backing themselves into these stupid corners

special uniform checks for the girls? Can’t believe they didn’t see this shit storm coming

This is a tricky 1 my local High school has started something similar due to some girls coming in wearing skirts that are as short as their blazers or shorter. Honestly some are so short that they can't even walk without showing their underwear, so the rule is no shorter than mid thigh. If a teacher thinks that a skirt is to short the teacher reports it to guidance who will speak with the student and if its a repeat issue they give determinations for it. As the uniform is the same for boys and girls skirts mid thigh or longer or trousers no licra or leggings. I agree with this policy and I suspect that if this school had done similar instead of having grown men inspecting girls skirts and measuring them the girls wouldn't be protesting

It’s a local school to me and what I have heard about what is being deemed unacceptable is awful.

the uniform skirt is also apparently only available from one supplier and no length options!

The school DS goes to has a regulation skirt. It looks completely ridiculous when kids attempt to shorten it. Either they are blatantly wearing a two sizes too small skirt and busting out at the seams, or they're rolling up a kilt so it sticks out weirdly. They still do it, evidently, or I wouldn't know it looks absurd.

Yes growth spurts but oddly all the girls and boys in trousers manage to replace them before they're 3 inches too short, and most skirts are a lot more short of the requirements than that. So I think there's a large degree of deliberate boundary pushing. Which if you're going to have a uniform should be just as policed as boys are when they push boundaries e.g. tying their ties silly or wearing trainers instead of school shoes. (Though I do think all uniform ends up wasting teachers and students time and they do perfectly well on the continent without one.)

When there are a large number of children involved in the boundary pushing this is administratively difficult. Normally uniform things fall on the deputy heads so maybe there aren't enough female deputies to deal with it in a timely manner. We also wouldn't want girls to be held up in getting to their lessons.

They are upset at being singled out for uniform checks where the boys are not.

Presumably the boys would be spoken to en masse if loads of them had taken to wearing their trousers hanging down and displaying their pants.

Some boys do do this, of course, and yes, schools "police" these boys too.

Are the boys wearing skirts as well? Then why would they need to be present? Maybe these schools should start allowing girls to wear trousers as well. I have never understood why some girls roll up their skirts like that anyway. Who are they shortening them for?