Uniform Rubbish

I cannot be bothered to link to it, but Katherine Birbalsingh is at it again. Oh, for heaven's sake, where, exactly, do they not have school uniforms? Please read all of the following in the knowledge that my views on education are about as traditional as you could possibly imagine, and are certainly far more so than those of Michael "No Grammar Schools" Gove, who is a faithful heir of Margaret "GCSEs" Thatcher.

Reviews of Ms Birbalsingh's book (about a position which she had held for all of five weeks when she made her famous speech about it) have tended to complain of "exaggeration for effect". Exaggeration? Fabrication, more like it. At best, she feeds the hysteria in upper-middle-class London where the state school sector is concerned. But even hysterical upper-middle-class Londoners always had the wit to dress the pupils on Grange Hill in school uniforms, and still dress the teenagers on EastEnders in them. As for anywhere else, I have done supply, within the last five years or so, in something like 50 schools under solidly Labour LEAs here in the North East. Every single one of them, from the truly excellent to the bloody awful, had a school uniform.

More broadly, for example, there is the drivel about bans on Nativity plays at Christmas, a ban which is ever imposed in a handful of London Boroughs, if there. Or there is the alleged abandonment of synthetic phonics, which was taught to me in an old pit village under the headship of an erstwhile Labour Councillor from the Seventies, and under the aegis of the first local authority that Labour ever won, which it had never lost in 80 years even then, or in well over 100 now. "Trendy" teaching methods were as unknown in these parts as the abolition of school uniform would have been, or would be.

If there really are secondary schools with no uniforms, or primary schools with no Nativity plays, or ones where they do not teach reading, then I'd bet you anything that they were under the overall control of the party on which Ms Birbalsingh's is now dependent for quite possibly its last ever taste of government. Could she not just have applied for a job in a commercial school, without (I write from 16 years' cumulative experience as a school governor) making herself unemployable for life in the sector that taught her everything she knows? Or is there a much better living to be made as a bad employee and a lying Uncle Tom?