Bragg, Sara; Ringrose, Jessica; (2023) Intervening in School Uniform Debates: Making Equity Matter in England. In: Shanks, Rachel, (ed.) Uniforming Schools: Materials and materialism. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland. (In press).

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Abstract

In England, the draconian policing of uniform appears to be increasingly endorsed as part of the ‘common sense’ of school leaders, education advisers and policy-makers, and it frequently makes headlines in local and national news media. Less attention is however given to the equity dimensions of uniform policies and practices in relation to diverse students, and how intersecting power relations around class, Britishness, culture, race, context, heterosexuality, cisgender rules and more come into play through the typically ‘sex’-segregated uniform. In this chapter we analyse uniform practices intersectionally and by drawing on a new materialism lens for thinking equity. We explore uniform not as imposed on inevitably already-othered bodies, but as enacting processes of differentialisation and normativisation through a range of spatial and corporeal practices. We discuss a university staff-student ‘community-engaged learning’ project to render uniform more inclusive, which showed how uniforms matter in highly diverse and complex ways. We document how we produced alternative guidance for schools and young people on uniform policies, with equity and diversity in play, and we explore what we know of how the policy has gone out into the world and how it could have, and has, been used by parents, staff and students.

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