Should skirt length matter in secondary schools?

[Holdonforsummer]

My daughter is 15 and in Year 10, she attends an all-girls comprehensive secondary school and they are obsessed with the girls’ skirt length. The skirt is like a tartan kilt and is supposed to be ‘on the knee’ but most of the girls roll their skirts to make them a bit shorter (think mid-thigh). I’m a bit on the fence about this but her school go on and on and on about it. They stop girls all the time, give detentions for short skirts, have assemblies about it, and have even been known to measure skirts and give girls long ones from the list property cupboard to wear instead. Yesterday, my daughter had just finished 5 hours of mock exams in 28 degrees and was walking home - outside school property - and was stopped by a teacher threatening detention even though she had left school. She came home furious and fed up of the whole thing. I can’t decide whether the girls just need to toe the line or whether behaviour from the school is bordering on a sexist, misogynistic obsession. YABU: the pupils need to obey the skirt rules, YANBU: The school should calm down and stop obsessing about skirt length.

i understand why girls roll up their skirts, my own daughters do this. And girls always have. But some take it to extremes. Why do they do this and why don’t parents have any say or don’t care? Why should it be left to the school to try to enforce some rules to provide the girls who take it to extremes with a bit of dignity.

and I don’t buy this “well you shouldn’t be looking”. I don’t actively look but that doesn’t mean I don’t notice.

I’m not a fan of strict school uniform rules but mid thigh or higher is a bit silly. My teen DD’s skirts have been ridiculous at times and I did have to ban her from wearing one this winter because I could see the crotch bit of her tights!
Personally I would get rid of skirts as school uniform and go for plain black trousers for all

what misogyny?

If boys decided to wear shorts showing their butt cheeks, they would not be allowed either.

Skirt length absolutely do matter. Time and a place. Most office dress code do not allowed clubbing outfits. And rightly so.

Schools are very much behind the average workplace if they are imagining offices have very formal work wear and measure skirt length!

You know full well that nobody is suggesting most offices have very formal work wear or measure skirt length 🙄.

Are you suggesting that there wouldn't be quite a lot of workplaces where the employer might have a quiet word with an employee for wearing very revealing clothes to work?

Being a frump isn't against the school rules.

Mine turns hers up once so that when she sits down the fabric doesn’t touch her skin. She wears cycling shorts underneath.

But schools seriously need to get over themselves with their approach to uniform.

There was a scandal just up the road from the local secondary school when a man in a car was found masturbating at a pull in opposite the school bus stop. He was a successful business man. The staff said that he would often pop out around 3 pm without explanation. Yuk

Rules are rules, and even if off school property they are still in uniform and represent the school. A few inches is not going to make any difference to her in terms of temp.

How? They are literally part of everyone’s body. How can you possibly walk around and not see the lower half of any person? Unless you are blind or visually impaired or simply staring at the sky as you walk. I think what you actually mean is you don’t actively look at young girl’s arses. Neither do I and I suspect most if not all people on here don’t either, however, when they are in front of you with their lower arse cheeks on show you can’t not see that. That doesn’t mean we are all looking at girl’s arses anymore than we are looking at anything else in our line of vision.

But the OP said mid length thigh. I really don't think any office I have worked at would regard a tartan, so not tight presumably, mid thigh length skirt in the summer (or any time) as an issue or inappropriate, it isn't the dark ages. I think mich of this is hyperbolic, that's the length I see most of the time, I've only ever seen two girls that were skiving in my local supermarket and they looked 16 ish with the shocking length you talk of.

Skirts on the knee look so scruffy to me. They look big, thick & long, then you have the knee high socks and then a bulky blazer over looks so drabby! All girls are different sizes and shapes it’s impossible to have skirts at the same lengths.

today in my dd school because of the weather they were allowed in with their pe kit which is a skort and top or non branded shorts. The skorts are short on every girl so most went in non branded cycling shorts. They all got put in isolation. The girls were made to turn around in front of teachers to I’m inspect what their bums looked like. The skinner girls were let off the girls with bigger bums were put in isolation. Boys were allowed to wear shorts which were branded and tops which were branded. Luckily my dd had her skort in her bag and it was a lot shorter than the shorts. The rules for girls compared to boys are considerably higher.

if It smells like bullshit ….

@Gloriia just thinks she’s being all smart.

hey @Gloriia why don’t you turn up to work the next time you’re there with your arse hanging out your skirt and see how long it takes for someone to raise an eyebrow. Then you can be all indignant, self righteous and offended that folk aren’t blind and will notice these things and it doesn’t make us perverts.

It’s a pretty standard school rule. There’s simply no need to teenage girls to be the one deciding how short their uniform skirt should be.
Hot weather doesn’t really come into play.

Your daughter presumably signed up to the school rules when she started the school, as did you. It's a bit pathetic to sign up to something and then not do it.
If this is a hill she wants to die on, her options now are to campaign to get the rules changed, of go to a different school where they have rules she agrees with. Or she could just keep to her side of the bargain. She adheres to the rules and they educate her.

If they’re that bothered about it why don’t they just make the uniform trousers. Seems like a waste of time and energy to me.

I'm afraid this sort of thing happens if someone is that way inclined however short your skirt is. I had a picnic with my boyfriend in a London park in the early 00s and a man in a bush was looking at us doing this.

@Gloriia I'd love to know where you live?
I don't go around staring at people's backsides but you literally can't walk in public without seeing the length of other people's skirts.
Where I live there's a mix of private schools, grammar schools and academy schools - doesn't matter which school a girl is at a huge amount of those girls wear skirts so short that you can indeed see their underwear.
The only girls I see wearing a decent length skirt are girls from an all girls Catholic school with a very distinctive uniform. It's the most ugly colour uniform in the world (south londoners might know the one I mean 😁) but those girls look so much better.

"They roll their skirts to mid thigh"
I can absolutely guarantee that's a lie.
If unchallenged they will roll it so short that you can see their underwear if they bend down or when they're going upstairs.
I have colleagues who hate moving around the building when the students are for this very reason.

Noone would get away with that short a skirt in a workplace & shouldn't be like that at school. I totally understand why an increasing number of schools are making girls wear trousers.

Ok, but surely nobody chooses a school because of their dress code!

And yet they didn’t choose a different school because they agreed with this one’s dress code? Therefore they need to get over it.

My kids think I'm mad when I say I remember girls getting told off because their skirts were too long! It was the late 80s/early 90s and hippie type styles were in for the older girls.

I think it's horrible for girls self esteem & body image when they have peer pressure to have so much leg on display.

It's the age where you realize that not everyone has a perfect body & the more of your own & others is on display the more there is for them to compare to others.

I think girls develop better body image when they dress more modestly. Girls in looser fit trousers or knee length skirts has got to be better than skin tight fabrics & short skirts. It might make the ones with long slender legs feel great but for the average teen with a changing body it's going to end up with body image problems into adulthood.

My school is over several floors and a couple of buildings, my duty spot is at the bottom of a set of stairs, the amount of bare arses I see walking up the stairs because their skirts are so short and they have thongs on is ridiculous. It’s not as easy as looking away as they congregate on the stairs so part of my duty is to keep checking up too. I don’t want to see teenage girls arses, I’ve a young male colleague that feels even more uncomfortable with this, he’s asked me to speak to them because he’s worried if it comes from him it will be twisted. If I can see it the 700 other students can see it, and the 80 other staff members can see it, yes teenagers want to push boundaries but as adults we need to correct them.

Imagine if the teenage boys were purposely flashing and forcing others to see what they don’t want to see.

I think I do, yes! Is it one with different coloured blouses, all of which clash hideously with the shirt and jumper? If not, there's another Catholic school further south with a uniform almost as hideous as the one I'm thinking of.