The rise of the school uniform

Why children are dressed alike, and what the practice has actually been for

A The oldest school uniform still in use is a long blue coat with yellow stockings, worn by pupils of an English charity school founded in the middle of the sixteenth century, and its original purpose is instructive. The garment was not intended to build pride, foster equality or improve behaviour. It was intended to identify the wearer as a recipient of charity. Blue was the cheapest available dye and the colour associated with servants and apprentices; the clothing was issued because the children's families could not provide it, and it announced that fact to anyone who saw them. Nearly five centuries later the same coat is worn by pupils at a selective and prestigious institution, and its meaning has been exactly inverted.

B The garment survived because institutions are conservative about their own symbols, and its reinterpretation was gradual: what marks out a small group eventually looks distinguished simply because the group is small. That inversion is the whole history of the subject in miniature. Uniforms spread through the English boarding schools of the nineteenth century for reasons that had nothing to do with charity and everything to do with the manufacture of belonging. These institutions were producing administrators for an empire, and the clothing was one element of a system — with the house, the team, the initiation and the elaborate internal vocabulary — designed to attach a boy's loyalty to the school rather than to his family. A distinctive costume, ideally uncomfortable and certainly expensive, did this efficiently. It also advertised the wearer's membership of a small class, which was among the points. The expense was not an unfortunate side effect of the design but a functional part of it, since a costume that any family could afford would have identified nothing. Schools founded later in imitation copied the clothing along with the houses and the mottoes, frequently without noticing that they were copying a mechanism rather than a tradition.

C State schools acquired uniforms later, and in Britain they did so at the moment when secondary education was being extended to the whole population after the Second World War. The reasoning offered was egalitarian and its logic ran directly counter to the older tradition: if everybody wears the same thing, nobody can be identified as poor by their clothing. Whether this works is an empirical question that has been asked surprisingly rarely. The evidence that exists suggests that pupils distinguish wealth quite efficiently by shoes, coats, bags and the condition of the garments themselves, and that a uniform raises the floor of visible difference rather than removing it. This is not an argument against uniforms; it is an argument against the particular claim usually made for them, and the distinction is regularly lost in a debate conducted mostly by people recalling their own schooldays.

D The other great uniform tradition developed independently and for different reasons. Japanese schools adopted Western dress in the late nineteenth century as part of a deliberate programme of modernisation, taking the boys' high-collared jacket from Prussian military tunics and, some decades later, the girls' outfit from British naval uniform. The choice of models was not sentimental. A country reorganising itself at speed selected the clothing of the institutions it regarded as most successfully organised, and the association of school with disciplined service was intentional rather than incidental. The outfits have since become so thoroughly identified with the country that they are read abroad as expressions of a national character, when they were in fact imported from Europe within living memory of their adoption.

E Most of the world, it is worth noting, does not do any of this. Uniforms are the norm across much of Asia, Africa and the former British colonies, and largely absent from continental Europe and the United States, where the dominant tradition regards state prescription of children's clothing as an interference. The geographical pattern is a fair map of colonial administration rather than of any argument about education, which is a point rarely made in national debates conducted as though the question were freshly open. Countries that have never required uniforms report no distinctive disorder in their classrooms, and countries that require them report no distinctive calm, which is the sort of observation that ought to constrain an argument and rarely does.

F Those debates now turn chiefly on two claims. The first is that uniforms improve behaviour and attainment. Studies of this are numerous, mostly small, frequently confounded by the fact that schools adopting a uniform usually change several other things simultaneously, and inconclusive when reviewed together; the effects that survive scrutiny are small and concern perception of a school rather than what happens inside it. The second claim is about cost, and here the evidence is clearer and points the other way: a compulsory uniform obtainable from a single supplier is regularly more expensive than ordinary clothing, and the burden falls on precisely the families the egalitarian argument invokes.

G What survives all this is a practice that persists for reasons its defenders rarely state. Uniforms are administratively convenient. They make a rule about clothing enforceable, which a general instruction to dress appropriately is not; they identify a child in a crowd; and they mark a boundary between the institution and the rest of a pupil's life, which schools have wanted since the sixteenth century for motives ranging from charity to conscription. The arguments have changed completely in five hundred years. The clothing has changed remarkably little.