Interesting Facts

Over the last 2 days, the Hanson Academy in Bradford, West Yorkshire, has sent 215 pupils home for not adhering to school uniform rules. (The school wants pupils to dress in a blazer, smart shoes, trousers, and shirt with a correctly-tied tie, they also need to wear an id badge on a lanyard around their necks (I wonder if they have risk assessed that). The infringements included - wearing hoop earrings, the wrong kind of trousers / jackets, no tie, no id, dyed hair... Please feel free to join any of our Virtual World English sessions and dress as you like, as long as you're dressed.)

It's estimated that in the UK parents pay 45 million pounds a year too much for school uniforms because of restrictions on suppliers. (The Office of Fair Trading has called for the practice of buying uniforms from restricted suppliers to be scrapped after estimating that parents across the UK who have no choice of where they buy school uniforms are worse off by around £45 million per year. It has been estimated that compulsory school clothes and other items cost around 150 per cent more from "designated" retailers than they do in supermarkets. Most children wouldn't mind, but school uniforms are designed to be ugly.)