Government has recognised the importance of parental engagement and intends to enshrine it further in forthcoming white papers. This is welcome, provided engagement doesn’t translate to appeasement.
At present, headteachers are spending an inordinate amount of time firefighting complaints, many of them trivial or vexatious. This diverts energy from the central task of improving teaching, learning and outcomes.
Moves to capture such complaints in one place through a central platform should help to reduce some of the burden associated with this. But if the promised guidance on what schools and parents can expect from each other doesn’t deliver the “clear expectations” the education secretary has promised, then we will rapidly reach a new state of overwhelm.
Trust in public institutions has been waning for years, and the erosion of confidence in education carries real, lasting consequences. When trust between staff, pupils and parents breaks down, the delicate balance that underpins strong school cultures begins to unravel.
Constructive parental challenge is essential. It keeps schools accountable, encourages transparency and ensures children receive the education they deserve.
But the seldom-discussed truth is that some communities instinctively trust schools and teachers more than others. This disparity is quietly acknowledged in education circles, but it is rarely confronted openly at system level.
Improving a school is never easy. Real change often requires radical transformation: challenging entrenched norms, raising expectations and shifting culture. This inevitably provokes resistance.
Some communities trust schools more than others
The onus is rightly on schools to consult, explain and build consensus around change. Yet even with strong communication, we are increasingly seeing local and national headlines and viral social media posts stoking uproar about relatively innocuous school rules.
Take uniform. Debates about footwear, jewellery or make-up seem superficial, but cultural decline in schools rarely happens in dramatic fashion. It is usually gradual: shoes become trainers, trainers become any footwear. Acrylic nails, heavy make-up, piercings: each unchallenged step signals that standards are negotiable.
Those who work in school improvement often argue that you can judge a school by its uniform. While not universally true, there is substance to the claim. How pupils present and whether a school enforces its rules are strong indicators of culture and expectations.
I helped to establish a school uniform charity and I serve as one of its trustees. I know the importance of affordability and equity. But the issue is not simply about cost; it is about consistency. A rule unenforced is not a rule at all.
The problem is that more parents are pushing back. Few openly oppose high standards or improved outcomes, yet many resist the enforcement of the very measures that make improvement possible.
In one case, a school faced hundreds of complaints (some laced with abuse and appalling racism) because it insisted on banning trainers. The leadership team was forced to divert enormous amounts of time and energy into managing the fallout.
Faced with such hostility, many heads simply relent. They compromise. Exceptions become norms. Then, whole policies collapse, and the consequences can be ugly.
This is not a matter of shoes or hairstyles. When a school cannot secure compliance with its most basic policies, it becomes much harder to command focus in the classroom, encourage attendance or ensure participation in interventions.
What some parents see as a victory against unnecessary strictness often undermines the very school improvement they demand. In some cases, progress stalls altogether.
The challenge, then, is to rebuild trust without compromising on standards. To achieve that, ministers must approach their reforms with clarity, fairness and consistency – just like school leaders do.
That means ensuring that parents understand that high expectations are not punitive, but protective. And it means being clear about what constitutes a valid complaint, not just where to take your complaint.
If we continue down the current path, where every rule is up for debate and every enforcement provokes outrage, schools will find it increasingly difficult to deliver the improvements society demands of them.
Standards matter. Culture matters. And above all, trust matters. Without it, schools will be paralysed by conflict rather than empowered to drive change – just like political leaders often seem to be.
The key however is consistency, but balanced with actual concerns. For example, recently a student was picked out for having wrong shoes after wearing them for weeks – in front of over a hundred students. Spoken to disrespectfully in front of the majority of students which were not following many aspects of the uniform policy. The lone student singled out being autistic and not understanding why she was the only one spoken to/singled out and why she was so rudely spoken to – now the student no longer trusts that teacher and doesn’t know why she is the one in trouble. According to the school anti-bullying policy, this type of situation was mentioned, so technically according their own school policy she was bullied.
She has been working on trying to get used to a different types of shoes/clothes that really affects her sensory impairments.
The school also very recently released a new prospectus video, with the new headteacher walking down a corridor and speaking with two students, both of whom were not following the school uniform policy. The students’ parent was also at a parents evening the week before with the same teachers that did not bring up the issue and it was not mentioned or reported.
In short, a policy does no good if only one child is singled out. Policies do no good if they aren’t fully implemented to every student. Policies also do no good if they include in them, that children with other needs (whereby religious, individual circumstances) can be discussed – but then be ignored. If a school is not consistence amongst the staff in their behaviour and policy following, how are children and parents expected to navigate it. Parents do not want to bother teachers or schools when everyone has busy lives and responsibilities. So it would help everyone, if schools were consistence in their own Policies, instead of leaving it to parents to remind them.
This obsession with uniform is concerning. I worked in both the private abd state sector for 40 years. Too often the enforcement of uniform ends up being petty and unconstructive…
Let the students wear “mufti.” The idea that uniform attire means the disadvantaged kids cannot be identified is nonsense. After an initial burst if excitement most students will realise that pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt is infinitely easier than trying to impress day after day.
After school who now has to wear a tie?
What a load of rubbish! Uniform is not a keystone of cultural improvement, it’s another stupid little rule on top of a load of other stupid little rules that treat every compliance forced from a child as victory. Trainers and piercings do not prevent a child from learning; what prevents a child from learning is being sent home or put in isolation because their shoes aren’t exactly right. What prevents a child from learning is teachers having to police their appearance before they can learn, and having to dedicate resources to this nonsense when resources are already tight. If the rule cannot be enforced, then instead of tightening the rule, get rid of it! Instead of labelling parental complaints vexatious and requiring them to shut up, maybe listen to the people raising the kids and work with them before you continue with your tunnel vision ideology. The school system is breaking because it is valuing quantitative results over qualitative, and every new quantitative tick box that tries to chop our children down to fit in it is another step towards cultural decline. Our entire education system is absolutely obsessed with symptoms that it calls causes when they’re actually the entirely predictable and understandable results of putting children in a military-training-type environment and expecting them to just comply.
It really concerns me that this article focuses purely on a them vrs us mentality and an obsession with uniform rather than actually learning. Many other countries manage to educate their young people regardless of acrylic nails or fancy shoes. In fact they go on to college/uni and work just fine. Collaborate with parents. Promote learning and take the weight of staff who have enough to let alone pulling kids up on uniform. Let’s just get them into school whatever they are wearing. Senior leaders need to listen to teachers on the frontline and the parents as they know what is really needed. Just for context I’m both a parent and work in schools so I see both sides.