It’s still the early weeks of the year and the new students are finding their feet and making new connections. So it’s understandable that we are fielding a lot of questions around how we do things; our expectations and so on – what are the rules about X?
This has been a surprisingly difficult question to answer! Of course any group of people needs some set of agreements if it is to function, but we tend to resist detailed rules where we can. Some other schools take very different approaches. I once worked in a school that required me to read the several hundred-page staff handbook and sign a form to confirm that I had done so and would be compliant. Ever-dutiful (or perhaps it was just reluctance), I took my time. After a week or so, I was chased for the signature. I asked for more time to read it thoroughly, and was explicitly told not to bother – “Don’t actually bother reading it – just sign it and return it like everybody else does”.
Handbooks may be one thing, but the same attitude can carry over to children as well. In one school in England this year as many as 30 children missed out on their first day back in class over earrings, mismatched socks and haircuts. These stories come around every September; I recall in in 2018 it was a school banning the haircut then known as “Meet me at McDonald’s”, with pupils sent home or taught in isolation until it was restyled.
Leave aside the issue of appropriate response (is a dodgy haircut reason for isolating a pupil? Really?). Also leave aside the difficulty in specifying exactly what is acceptable and what is not (exactly how short and which styles are OK?). A much more profound issue is all about how much authority schools feel is right to impose. Of course, students need guidance in many things – some actions are utterly unacceptable. And at the same time, when they leave school we want them to be independent, responsible adults, not adults who just follow rules. So there needs to be a gradient where we work toward independence.
The deeper issue is, therefore, one of authority, and as such is located in a much broader and ever-shifting social and cultural context. I was beaten at primary school for rubbing out too hard and tearing the page of my lined exercise book; it did not occur to me or my parents to question it. That in turn was part of a bigger social context, evidenced by the fact that they went into the school once a year, were given a report, told about my failings, and then allowed to leave.
One might think that views on authority go along political persuasions, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Philosopher and bike-mechanic Matthew Crawford makes the point that the left-wing anti-authority movement of the sixties, which set about unmasking and discrediting various forms of cultural authority, cleared the ground for a right that wanted much the same total freedom for quite different reasons. For them the free actor of a free market needed only deregulation to be himself and to prosper. So the pressure has come from both sides of the political spectrum, with the result that institutions are now far more accountable than they ever have been, and schools are certainly no longer sources of unquestioned authority, operating largely as they wish.
That has to be a change for the better, though a school that does not exercise legitimate authority is of no use to anyone. The haircut rules I gave above would not have raised any eyebrows a few decades back. They rightly do now (though these days not all students have eyebrows to raise). Of course, that doesn’t mean there should be no rules; no one argues for anarchy; we need some agreement on behaviours, and at the extremes, breaches of these might call a place in the school into question. So what should we be regulating, bearing in mind that we have a wide range of cultures, a range of tastes, and much greater emphasis these days on the individual side of the individual-group axis?
The best answer, it seems to me, is to operate according to three principles:
- Default to trust; and trust students to interpret guidance about values, not rules about behaviours.
- As students get older, pass them as much autonomy as possible.
- Recognising that students making mistakes is natural and part of growing up, have structures in place to open learning conversations, not reflexively inflict punishments.
(I should add that this is easier for some schools – ours among them – than for many others, and I don’t underestimate the pressures and exigencies of other contexts).
This approach also leads to preparing students for the freedom they will have when they leave school – which is to say, we’re playing the long game of laying the foundations for successful lives, not only how they behave in school. A good mantra, I think is If it’s not illegal, immoral, anti-social, or getting in the way of learning, then it’s probably OK. It recognises the purpose of what we are trying to do – educate principled thinkers, not regulate hair length; it can be summarised in a sentence; and it can be the start of a dialogue with students. I also recognise that ‘probably’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence. That’s okay. Because it’s the start of a conversation, not the beginning of a judicial process.
So when I am asked about our rules, the mantra above is what I have been saying; and then I ask what this means for the situation at hand. That takes longer and it’s less predictable, but no two situations, like no two children, are ever quite the same. So I think it’s worth it.
References
- Prompts by Claude, graphics by Gemini.
- Crawford, M (2016) The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Hill, T (2026) Dozens of pupils kept out of class over socks & haircuts on first day at new school: The Star (Sheffield) Sept 2026
- Horton, H (2018) Pupils threatened with isolation if they sport ‘meet me at McDonald’s’ haircut: Daily Telegraph Online Feb 2018
1 Response
Great article – we see this daily, ie. Minor breeches in uniform policy by some students, who are not trouble-seekers, but wishing to express themselves. This would be a small percentage of the total, whilst most will largely accept and comply with the rulebook.
I recall my first experience working with a professional services firm in the UK in the 1990’s. The rule was that women could not wear trousers. One complied of course, if we didn’t it would have led to a disciplinary and dismissal.
Coming back to today, there are indeed two ways of looking at this – firstly, how material is it, and is it worth picking a battle over such things. Conversely, how does this affect the compliant cohort – firstly, the “if they can do it, then I can too” view, and secondly what is the point of rules if we can freely break them, hence devaluing rules per se.
The world is full of law and regulation and each of us needs to be aware of expected behaviors. Of course materiality will differ, some things are an absolute no-no. Still if something like a dress code is small, then this could be seen as small both ways – ie. how difficult is it to comply within the school/work environment, then have freedom to express oneself outside of that.
The answer is not clear – to deny education because of a haircut does seem wrong, but the consequences of action or inaction could play out quite differently later.