Any primary schools with no uniform in London (or anywhere)?

[LewishamMum]

I'm really anti school uniform. I went to a state primary outside London and there was no uniform. I did have to wear uniform from 11-16, but was then back out of it for the sixth form.

I really don't want my DD to wear uniform AT ALL when she starts school. I just think it's silly and wrong and right wing and stifles individuality. Most of the Western World gets on without them, why can't we?

I'm currently in Lewisham, but likely to be moving in the next couple of years in any event, but staying within South London. Seriously, are there any STATE schools, preferably maintained, with absolutely no uniform from 4 to 11?

We live in a European country and uniforms are very rare. I do not see any evidence of an increase in bullying or brand badgering compared to when we lived in England or with my nieces and nephews.

What was noticeable is when we were back in England at a museum in Manchester, NY DD was intrigued by the primary school uniforms on the kids we saw there from several different schools, notably that the girls had impractical skirts or summer dresses, lacy white socks and Mary Jane shoes. DD hasn't worn a skirt apart from to a wedding since she was 4 and wears trainers to school which are perfect for scooting, playing football and running around in. I know some schools allow girls to wear trousers but not many have shorts.

Well, thanks ladies, it turns out there are quite a few schools in Lewisham which are non-uniform. They are virtually all in the North West of Lewisham, which is basically the very posh part, with houses approaching a million. Only one is nearish me, and someone helpfully says they have a 500m catchment area. We are probably about twice that.

Although Lewisham's one of the poorest London borough's I live sort of in the middle, and it's pretty well-to-do. I think it really weird that the non uniform schools are all in very very middle class areas. And the poorer and even middling but still pretty good areas like my own all have uniform.

Is this because school's with poorer catchment areas are more likely to be taken over by academies? Or that traditional discipline is more important when kids don't have advantages at home? I'm not sure I buy the idea it's because middle class (or rather really rich) families are more liberal - I mean a lot of them will send their kids to private schools with straw bonnets and all sorts of nonsense. Any thoughts?

(As an aside, a few people have mentioned Steiner schools, which - providing they are State - I'm all for. There's one in Lewisham which I looked up, but it has a uniform and even a house system. Ugh. So not there then!)

I'd be really surprised if there are state Steiner schools, but I've never looked into it tbh.

OP I live in one of the posh bits and am dragging it down to my level day by day. Edmund Waller is the school mentioned nearest me. Last year its catchment was big - 2.5km I think? So not impossible to access from further away, though obviously how much of your life you want to spend in traffic is up to you to decide. It's also in an area (Telegraph Hill) which is on the face of it wealthy but really a lot of the grand houses are subdivided into eight bedsits that the council bought up in the 60s etc, and it is a very mixed area. Also feasible if you are angling for that school in particular to move to just the other side of the school in SE15 and property prices will be cheaper. I'd say that Waller has an intake representative of the breadth of the area, not least because there's a more conservative/conventional school up the hill that since opening has hoovered up a lot of the MC kids. So it's not such a straightforward picture imo.

But really - your child is very young. I'm also a bit of a forward planner but you do have lots of time still to investigate particular schools but also how much the uniform / lack of it is a hill you are willing to die on. I work with a lot of the local schools professionally - I run a food bank - and it has turned my perception of the local schools on its head tbh. Some of the wildly academic ones have dire pastoral care; some of the shabby CoE ones will do just about anything to support their school community. It's often a complex picture once you dig around a bit.

School uniform is really, really cheap if you buy from a supermarket and yes, middle class families are more liberal.

It’s a fairly common view in education that children with “more chaotic” lives outside of school need more structured and ordered school environments to help them thrive and some heads seem to think that extends to uniform. I have worked for head teachers who argued that the very challenging circumstances of the cohort meant it was extra important that we were strict about uniform, punctuality, taking care of the school site etc. to make sure they felt safe in a very predictable, orderly environment, and proud of their school. I now work in a school which is very economically advantaged and we have a very basic uniform, a tired and scruffy looking school site and I think the middle class families often view it as a bit of a badge of honour not to care about these things. Whether it makes any difference to educational outcomes one way or another is less clear. I seem to remember reading research suggesting that there was no correlation between uniform policies and outcomes.

You're right @Fourforfree

educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/evidence-summaries/teaching-learning-toolkit/school-uniform/

Lewisham has lots of non-uniform primary schools.

Brindishe Green, Brindishe Lee, Brindishe Manor, Edmund Waller, Horniman, John Ball, Kilmorie and Myatt Garden all have no/optional uniform. They aren't all in one small area of the borough. The Brindishe schools are in Lee/Hither Green, Edmund Waller and Myatt Garden are more Brockley, John Ball is Blackheath, Horniman is self-explanatory and Kilmorie is Forest Hill.

There are a number of Greenwich primaries without uniform too: Brooklands, Halstow, Meridian and Millennium. The nature of London housing is such that lots of the very expensive areas are a mixture of rented and owned houses, flats, HMOs so if attending a non-uniform school is going to be the main priority for you, you have plenty of time to organise things so you have moved within 200m or so of your target primary school by the time your child is 3.

There are schools everywhere with no uniform. Several here is oxford inc a secondary school.

Each to their own, but I am a fan of uniform, although not of expensive sports kit.

Of course a school stipulating what pupils wear matters. Without drawing analogies between schools and armies or sports teams (or hospitals or prisons), you can't really justify a school uniform in a moral, ethical or practical sense.

The argument that school uniform prevents morning arguments sounds self defeating too - there are only morning arguments about clothes if parents are policing clothes. If they don't, the argument disappears. Although if I had to wear a set of clothing mandated by an institution that was supposed to nurture my curiosity and ability to function and communicate within a social grouping, I'd probably spend my weekends arguing about my rights to choose and provoke with my clothing with any other authority figures I could find.

The argument that uniforms somehow erradicate class and income discrepancies at school are also self defeating. In the many contexts where these issues are divisive, they don't go away if everyone is wearing a uniform. The significance that might be invested in a person's sweatshirt is just invested in something else - how a person talks, what they do/know etc. And with the added straight jacket of another system of pointless control and weilding of limited authority for no demonstrable benefit, these divisions are just accerbated.

I would be interested in understanding whether any "pro uniform" parent had the freedom to choose what they wore as a school child. In most cases, it seems the people who are anti-uniform are the ones who did and/or who are aware of how the imposition of a specific set of clothing on a group of people can stiffle and limit them.

If you need an anecedote, take my experience as a poor scholarship kid in a UK private school without a uniform. This experience was never tinged with any envy at the brands my parents couldn't buy me. Instead, the people who kowtowed to brands felt like the ones without power and autonomy, while I basked in my charity shop findings, my renderings and alterations of old clothes I found in my mum's cupboard. Of course, that was another kind of freedom, and definitely one that was "bought" and was tinged with class priviledge - the liberty to choose who the world thought you were as a teenager. Never underestimate the power and importance of that..

Overall uniform is not a priority item for me to choose a school, but I cannot understand why some of the top private primaries require boys to wear shorts in winter.
Trousers would be more appropriate, imo.