Although girls are triumphing in their GCSE results, many are also testing the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ and ‘inappropriate’ hemlines, and pushing teachers to their wits’ end. The battle over the length of school skirts is not new. I remember being in year 10 and rolling up my navy number so that it was more mid-thigh than regulation middle of the knee, and I’m sure many generations before my friends and I were hitching up their skirts too.

This year has been particularly full of uniform themed controversy it seems. Earlier this summer a boy from Impington Village School in Cambridgeshire wore a skirt to school in the hot weather in protset against the school’s ban on shorts. A few moths before that, pupils at Christ’s Hospital voted to keep their extremely traditional uniform, which some deem fusty and old fashioned.

School uniforms were introduced during the reign of Henry VIII, with the hope that they would improve discipline. However, pupils always manage to find ways of customising their apparel, be it by wearing their school ties short and with a fat knot, wearing non-regulation white shirts, or carrying garish school bags.

In the 1980s girls fought for the right to wear trousers to school, but now the issue appears to have turned on its head. Girls want to wear skirts; perhaps because uniform trousers are usually shapeless and unflattering. Or, maybe because whatever the uniform, students always want an excuse to rebel.

Northgate School in Ipswisch is the latest school to ban skirts and force girls to wear trousers. Headteacher David Hutton, when interviewed about the issue said, “Unfortunately, despite contacting specific parents, sending some girls home to change, requiring others to wear a school-owned skirt for the day and repeatedly asking others to unroll their skirts at the waist, we still had some girls coming to school in inappropriate skirts.” After the girls’ failure to adhere to the school’s regualtions concerning the length of skirts, Northgate took drastic action and banned them altogether.

With certain items being banned, would it not just be better to ban uniform together? There are strong arguments on both sides. As teacher Rick Jones pointed out in an article for the Guardian, teachers waste a lot of time “hassling students about their appearance”, when they could be focussing on actually teaching. Jones also pointed out the difficulty of male teachers addressing female students about the length of their skirts. However, if all the girls wear trousers there are still problems: “at co-ed schoos wearing trousers blurs gender”. Furthermore, “there is also the danger of encouraging ladette culture”.

It is very hard to prove whether or not uniforms do actually imrove discipline at school. Some economists at the University of Houston recently published research that says atendance among pupils who wear uniform is only about 0.4% higher than their own-clothed counterparts.

Some schools argue that niforms are useful at social-levelling; if pupils ae all wearing the same clothes then differences in wealth are harder to distinguish. And yet, schools bags, shoes, coats etc, will always reveal whose parents can afford to buy designer, and whose can’t. We are deluding ourselves if we think uniforms will mask economic inequality.

Come September, no doubt girls at Northgate will find new ways to subvert the uniform regulations, even if they can no longer hitch up their skirts. And undoubtedly the ‘uniform’ or ‘no uniform’ will continue to rage among schools all over the country.