Rachel Moore

New school year, new parents locking horns with headteachers about “too strict” and “unfair” uniform rules. 

It’s always a “matter of principle” for the parents who keep their children out of school, depriving them of crucial learning, for breaking well-publicised rules about jewellery, clothes, shoes or hair styles. 

The “principle” they pass on to their children – apart from the obvious about disregarding rules they don’t like when it suits them – is that protesting and making an almighty rumpus about a piercing, shoe style, jewellery or hair is more important to their life than education. 

Heaven help these children in the world of work. A key role of school is to prepare students for employment where respect for rules is paramount – otherwise they soon find themselves jobless.  

Speak to any employer of young people, apprentices and trainees; they have a litany of accounts of nightmare teenagers brought up to go their own way whatever the rules.

In jobs where health and safety are key, they bring attitudes that are dangerous, and potentially fatal to colleagues as well irksome to manage. 

It’s pathetic, selfish and damaging parenting to keep children out of school because they don’t like the rules.

Their arrogance that their choices are more important than a school-wide policy, and their ‘strike’ will make a headteacher back down and make an exception, is insufferable. 

They’re the adults here, tasked with bringing up their children to be responsible citizens.

They know full well that rules are imposed for a reason, not to wind up parents but to create an ordered school community where everyone complies with what is expected of them. Otherwise, it’s anarchy, staff have no control and learning is impossible. 

This week, Norfolk 12-year-old Tia Mae Brown, made national headlines for refusing to take a stud out of her upper ear when asked by a teacher and was made to sit in 'reflection' at Caister Academy, near Great Yarmouth.  

Her parents described the uniform policy as hypocritical because her male teacher has the same piercing, and they wanted the policy to be applied fairly. 

But teachers are not required to wear a uniform. If the parents’ logic is followed, students should be allowed to wear whatever the teachers turn up in – high heels, floaty dresses, bow ties and three-piece suits – leave their car in the headteacher’s space and put their feet up in the staffroom. 

It isn’t a sensible argument about fairness or “matter of principle”. It’s petulance and trouble making. 

Around the country, children are sitting at home while parents kick up a stink about dyed hair, stretch trousers, black trainers that aren’t school shoes and bracelets.  

Petitions are signed in at bans on anything other than plain black shoes that 'look like leather', coloured hairclips, and trousers "that cling to the ankle". 

If you want to teach your child a lesson, knowing when to pick fights would be of more use.  

Uniforms are used for a reason – the clue is in the name – so everyone is the same.  

As a teenager in the 1970s at a ‘progressive’ comprehensive that banned school uniform, I yearned for the simplicity and order of being told what to wear every day rather than brave the inevitable fashion show. 

School uniform rules were made to be pushed, but by the wearers, not the parents, who would always back the school. 

Skirt waistbands turned over to make minis, ties worn high or low, whatever the fashion at the time, but only by the students, out of sight of their parents, who wouldn’t dream of picking up the cudgels and attacking the school. 

That’s the big difference. A breakdown of relationships between parents and schools. 

Today, parents no longer even subscribe to the view that their children need to be in school every day.   

Absences are now 50% up on 2019 with “a seismic shift” in attitudes to attendance since the pandemic, according to a study by Public First.  

This lack respect for school and education, with parents taking their children out of school for term-time holidays post-Covid, is now “socially acceptable”. 

It’s apparent on the streets and in the supermarkets every day; school age children out and about during the school day.  

Government figures show more than a fifth of pupils in England were “persistently absent” – meaning they missed at least 10 per cent of their school sessions – in the 2022/23 academic year - significantly higher than the pre-pandemic rate of 11 per cent in 2018/19. 

While getting your child to school every day was once seen as a fundamental element of good parenting, it’s no longer the case.  

They take them in if it suits. 

They missed so much school because of Covid, and a few days because of teachers’ strikes, so what does it matter if they miss a couple of days a week now, is the attitude? 

Letting them stay at home to game, lie in bed or hang around the streets is easier and saves the early morning hassle. 

That education has become so unimportant, when nations without universal schooling would give anything for our system, good and bad, is depressing. 

These shocking statistics demand urgent solutions or even more under-educated unemployable generations lie ahead and the UK becomes even more feral.