Laura Craik on dreaded school hair rules

Plus Boris’s baby befuddlement and the quirks of stockpiling
Childhood hang-ups: school uniform
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Laura Craik12 March 2020

We’re all more familiar than we’d like to be with the imperatives that lead to self-isolation, but follicular isolation?

Not so much. Remember 12-year-old Chikayzea Flanders, whose Fulham school decreed that his dreadlocked hair didn’t comply with the school’s uniform and appearance policy? Only when his mother took the school to court did they relent. What a pity Chikayzea didn’t go to Townley Grammar, the Bexleyheath school where the headmaster has a more inclusive approach to hair. After consulting with pupils, Desmond Deehan has overhauled the uniform policy, concluding that since more than half of his students come from black African families, the code was racist and irrelevant.

As someone who was regularly marched to the school bogs to wash off her eyeliner, I’d say that the indignity and embarrassment of being singled out and punished for flouting school uniform rules can either make or break you. It made me, but then I’m a middle-class white girl, whose lame rebellion was never likely to scupper my future. Victimising black African pupils for hair that neither could nor should conform to white ideals of neatness and propriety is wrong.

It’s also a waste of energy. Challenging pupils about their cornrows, dreads, Afros or badly dyed purple hair takes time that could better be deployed on engaging them in things that matter — like their studies.

Rules are important: without them we’d be lawless. But the rules governing school-appropriate hair seem particularly inchoate in an age when kids are struggling to process a wider panoply of differences. More than 300 languages are spoken in London schools. Their racial and cultural diversity is their strength, but can also be a weakness, since it can be challenging for kids of all races to navigate the different sensitivities that play out in any one school day — and that’s before you’ve factored gender identity into the equation. At a time when kids are struggling to process more differences than ever, surely those that relate to hair should be accepted, not punished. Enough divides us already.

Nappy daze

‘How good are you at changing nappies?’ Phillip Schofield asked Boris Johnson on This Morning, as the nation waited with baited breath. Gold-medal amazing, you’d expect, given he’s fathered five or six children, and yet the Prime Minister was flustered. ‘I’m not going to… obviously I’m…’ he replied, before finally conceding, ‘I expect so.’ Phew.

For a moment there, I thought Boris had been about to confess he’d never changed one. Do nappy-averse men still exist in post-feminist, gender-equal 2020? Asking for a friend. Called Carrie.

Hoarding hordes

Panic buying toilet paper?
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Nothing reminds humans of their differences quite as starkly as a global pandemic. While some are going about their business with the sort of ‘f*** you, virus’ stoicism of which Londoners are rightly proud, others are acting out in the most baffling of ways. Some are in bits because they can’t get hand sanitiser delivered. Others are amassing bottled water, even though nobody has suggested covid-19 is transmitted through our water mains. And then there’s the stockpiling of toilet roll. Quite why some people feel consoled by being surrounded by an excess of bog roll, I do not know. Like chicken soup, the presence of a nine-pack of pristine white Andrex in the bathroom is a comfort thing: discuss.

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