Schools need to relax some of these rules

IT seems lately that hardly a day goes by without you quite rightly publishing a report of some absurd infringement of a pupil’s rights at school, although the schools featured would argue that the pupils had infringed their school uniform and dress code.

Last Saturday you published a letter from a reader about a 12-year-old girl at Brookvale Groby being removed from classes because she wore the wrong kind of skirt - it did not have pleats in it! (“How would school react to some real disruption?, Mailbox, September 11.)

And on Monday, you published an account of 11-year-old Macie, at New College, being sent to a “reflection room” (invented by George Orwell, no doubt) because for her birthday she had a nose-piercing stud inserted (“My daughter is being unfairly punished by school over nose stud,” Mercury, September 13).

Both of these schools are good schools, but neither would ever be “outstanding” if I applied the criteria I use when travelling around the world researching schools and systems in different countries.

I am off to look at Spanish state schools in a few weeks’ time - no uniforms required - and then to Estonia where the only item of uniform is a school cap!

And the lack of a school uniform does not hold back Estonia from creating one of the best school systems in the world, fast competing with Finland (no uniforms).

Pupils in schools in England increasingly look as if they work in City of London offices and with their uniform styles modelled on grammar schools and the great public schools.

I doubt if they had a voice this would be their choice. If pupils did, little Macie could be proud of wearing her birthday nose stud at school. Dr Barry Dufour, Visiting Professor

of Education Studies, De Montfort University