When enforcing the rules becomes tiresome, just make some more.

When schoolgirls insist on wearing their skirts too short, make them wear trousers.

While getting ready for work this morning, I overheard a typically boredom inducing debate about a school that has banned girls wearing skirts because they insist on wearing them too short. It was somewhere between the weather and the impending obesity epidemic - some fat whap complaining that special offer supermarket food is loaded with fat and sugar. Mrs Bucko yelled at the TV, "Cook your own F%£king food you lazy sh5t!"

Anyway, I digress. School skirts.

A school with 1,700 pupils in Suffolk is to ban skirts and is applying a trousers-only policy from September.
Northgate High School in Ipswich has withdrawn skirts from its approved uniform for students aged 11 to 18.
The school has had to send home some girls for wearing "inappropriate" skirts and others have rolled them at the waist to make hemlines shorter.

The uniform policy at this school, as with most, is that skirts should be worn below the knee. Current fashions dictate that young girls want to wear shorter skirts, so those whose parents allow, buy skirts shorter than the regulation length, and those whose parents don't, roll their skirts up at the waist to make them shorter.

Rather than enforce the existing uniform policy and insist that skirts are below the knee, their reaction, quite a typical one, is to ban skirts altogether and make them wear trousers. Even the pupils who always followed the rules in the past.

Mr Hutton 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.

I see no mention of detentions or making them do lines (Do schools still make people do lines?). Is punishment simply not an option these days?

When I was at school we had a uniform and the pupils flouted it. It wasn't so much short skirts back in the late eighties, although some girls did roll theirs up at the waist.

The biggy back then was trainers. Uniform policy said we had to wear black shoes but most people, boys in particular, wanted to wear huge white trainers. Not too difficult to spot really, black trousers with huge glowing white feet. Also the ties. Folk used to wear their ties back to front with the thin end showing.

They never tolerated uniform violations at our school. They didn't go as far as putting us on parade every morning, but if you were spotted with a pair of trainers, a spazzy looking tie or a skirt too short you were packed off to the headmasters office to receive a detention. Where possible you were sent home to change also.

There were some people who constantly tried to get away with it but they were the same people who broke all school rules with impunity. The beginning of a school term would see a majority of people turning up decked in trainers, short skirt and slim ties, but after a few weeks, most of them gave it up as a bad job as it was too much hassle.

The other argument is that the ever reducing hemline of these girls skirts contributes to the 'sexualisation' of schoolgirls.

Girls in the 11-16 category are many things, none of them sexy.

Maybe if they came in a light peach version rather than bright orange, they may look a bit better. Maybe if all the blond ones stopped dying their roots black, they might look passably attractive.

Their makeup is a travesty. A desperate attempt to make themselves look ten years older through the inexperienced application of warpaint with a brick trowel. (When they are ten years older they will begin the process in reverse, spending silly money on slop with a name that sounds passively scientific. Say it girls. Because we're gullible!)

They make this infuriating noise that can loosely be described as giggling but is more like the little chap who sits at Jabbas side in ROTJ.

Not a real schoolgirl

And above all, they smell. Have you ever walked through a group of giggling schoolgirls, all rendered up in orange, roots died black and skirt pulled up to the kleenex assisted bra? They pong.

They ooze a very distinctive whiff. It's somewhere between running track sweat and wet dog. Have you noticed it?

If a male teacher can't concentrate on giving lessons because one of these things is showing a bit of thigh, maybe they should be re-thinking their career.

Patrick Barkham in The Guardian says:

For the war against inappropriately short school-uniform hemlines, it is the nuclear option. Like the war on drugs or the war on terror, the struggle between implacable authorities and their tirelessly inventive foes over what is worn in schools is perennial and almost certainly futile. Pupils have hitched and rolled up their skirts since time immemorial and teachers have been forced to brandish tape measures and, ultimately, suspend or expel recalcitrant teens.

If pupils have hitched and rolled up their skirts since time immemorial, what has happened now to prompt the use of the 'nuclear option'?

Is it because schools no longer suspend of expel those that flout the rules. Is it because punishment in a socialist education paradise is somehow stifling the children's development?

Is it simply because this story has indeed been played out since time immemorial and in our modern society, teachers tire of the game far too easily.

When enforcing the rules becomes too tiresome, what do you do? Make more rules.

That will work until the trousers become too tight or too low cut or too.....