School uniforms. France's lame-duck President has had many silly ideas - among them that introducing school uniforms would actually have the benefits claimed for them by English conservatives (despite much existing evidence to the contrary). So he started an experiment - rigged of course, - introducing uniforms in a hundred specially selected schools, with government buying the uniforms...
The preliminary results are now in, and of course the benefits claimed don't exist - although one finding is that both parents and teachers in the selected schools - which were selected precisely because they were supportive - continue to imagine them.
"The qualitative part of the survey finds that "the common uniform does not transform social relationships among students"... The standard uniform does not erase social markers, which are emphasised by other material factors, and highlighted by the inability of some families to replace a damaged or lost uniform. Both students and staff unanimously report no impact on bullying... "The common uniform reflects less a change in students' relationship to school than a collective effort by [the selected] adults to reassure and symbolise the educational framework, authority and sense of belonging they seek to promote," the study concludes. "In this sense, it acts as a mirror of [the selected] adults' expectations, values and vision of school, rather than as a tool that directly impacts learning or socialisation dynamics"."
