Short shrift for this ill-thoughtout ban on school skirts

Gertrude Bell roamed the Arabian deserts in one; Mary Kingsley explored uncharted West Africa in one, while Freya Stark penetrated the fabled Valleys of the Assassins in one. The benefits of a good, thick skirt are not to be underestimated – except, it seems by the 40-odd secondary schools in England that have banned girls from wearing them. At Copleston High School, Ipswich, skirts have joined skinny jeans and facial piercings on the index of proscribed items – bestowing upon the humble skirt a subversive glamour undreamed-of since the introduction of the miniskirt.

One of the small pleasures of being a head teacher is that you can randomly decide to ban stuff, just to keep your pupils on their toes. But where justification for the skirt ban is offered, it seems to divide between grounds of decency – “the current uniform is not necessarily worn as respectfully as it should be”, said one tactful head – and gender neutrality.

Banning skirts protects the flower of English girlhood from the heinous crime of upskirting, which is undoubtedly A Good Thing. But whether imposing a ban furthers the cause of inclusiveness is a more complicated question. Trousers are not invariably flattering to the female figure – which might seem irrelevant if you are a head teacher, but not if you are a self-conscious adolescent – and while warm in winter, they are absurdly hot in summer.

Shorts, an obvious summer-term solution, seem anathema to the head teacherly mindset – which brings us full circle to a year ago, when the head of ISCA Academy in Exeter banned boys from wearing shorts, telling them, “You can always wear skirts”. They did, and very fetching they looked.

It is a century since Amelia Bloomer, the advocate of rational dress, was born. What better celebration of her gallant campaign for garments that “conduce to health, comfort and usefulness” than to agree a simple, pan-gender uniform of trousers, skirts or shorts, which would give pupils a modest degree of choice, and allow teachers to concentrate on teaching “the young idea how to shoot”.

That noble garment the waistcoat, has lately suffered something of a reverse. Introduced by King Charles II in imitation of the exquisite Persian vests admired by English visitors to the court of the Shahs, the royal innovation was noted by the diarist John Evelyn: “October 1666: To court, it being the first time his Majesty put himself solemnly into the Eastern fashion of vest...” But latterly the waistcoat has been associated mainly with snooker players, effortful hipsters and ill-advised best men.

To retrieve the reputation of the garment immortalised by Beatrix Potter in The Tailor of Gloucester might seem an impossible task. But no more so, perhaps, than the revival of England’s World Cup ambitions. Whether Gareth Southgate will achieve the latter remains to be seen, but his fondness for a natty waistcoat has done wonders for the popularity of that neglected item of suiting. M&S attributes a 35 per cent increase in waistcoat sales to “the Southgate effect”.

One doesn’t generally rely on footballing types for style notes on much beyond sleeve tattoos and dodgy hair implants. But perhaps Gareth’s resurgent waistcoat – restrained, useful (all those pockets) and modestly idiosyncratic – will be the enduring legacy of the 2018 World Cup.