Lessons in learning

September 1986, approximately 90 new students including myself walk through the gates of their new secondary school.

Our uniforms are neatly pressed, some have been purchased from the official school uniform shop and ticked off the list provided with military precision, whilst others whose parents bank balance doesn’t quite stretch to the prices of buying every item in there have managed to get pieces elsewhere that look the same but are cheaper and do the job just as well.

Some of these children will go on to become teachers, authors, doctors, solicitors, lawyers, join the police force or become high flying business people.

One will even go on to write a column for the local paper despite being told by her English teacher that she couldn’t write anything interesting or inspiring.

The one thing they will all have in common though is that while some of those on that success story list had the exact regulation school uniform , games kit , school bag and best leather shoes their parents could afford , some of them didn’t , some of them were the kids whose school wardrobe was always a cobbled together Frankenstein’s monster comprising of pieces bought from various chain stores such as BHS ,Littlewoods and Peacocks , markets ,catalogues and of course the much dreaded previously used by another member of the family “ hand me down “.

However they never let what they were clothing in their bodies in everyday to go to school and learn stand in the way of what they were trying to achieve, in fact I bet they never even crossed their minds for a minute.

For to them it just was what it was , just a uniform , something that made them all look the same and smart regardless of what shop it was bought from , nothing amazing , nothing revolutionary that made them think or behave any better , it was just there.

Yes there will always be those who try to play the system to suit themselves so a good set of rules put in place helps to prevent this occurring, however if you want your school to be achieving better grades as Matthew Tate from Hartsdown Academy in Margate keeps telling us when he appears on the news, surely it’s more important to have pupils in the school being taught rather than sending them home day after day for wearing the wrong pair of shoes?