Recent press reports say that Kioni Lansbury, a 12-year-old girl, has been ordered by her school not to wear a "purity" ring — which she says she wears because she favours sexual abstinence. The school in question is The King's School at Ottery St Mary in Devon.
Well sexual abstinence is not a bad thing for a 12-year-old to believe in. And I see no reason why schools should not forbid pupils to wear jewellery. After all when I was a pupil over 50 years ago I was expected to wear a funny cap on the journey to and from school — to be doffed if I met a teacher. And as recently as the mid-1990s I worked in a school that had problems with girls' uniforms. The sixth-form girls were allowed to wear any appropriate dress in lieu of the school uniform that younger pupils were expected to wear. Needless to say some pushed the boundaries and wore things totally ridiculous in a school/work context such as miniscule skirts or pretty dresses more suitable for a night-club. As the appropriate/inappropriate boundary is rather indistinct and hard to enforce it was pointed out that it would simpler to go back to an "everyone wears uniform" rule. In the same way a rule forbidding jewellery altogether stops those who might decide to wear tiaras or earings dangling 5 inches below their ears.
But what annoyed me about this school was the reason they gave. The head teacher is quoted as saying "Kioni cannot wear the ring because it would be extremely dangerous in PE, technology, or science lessons" (usually this argument is also applied to cookery classes). Really? If schools are such a dangerous environment perhaps all pupils should be forced to wear hard hats and yellow jackets. This is the Health and Safety Brigade at work again. I have some knowledge of school science teaching and I know that many female science teachers do not remove their rings or other jewellery on entering the laboratory. And after a spell of supply teaching I can say the same of cookery teachers. The fact is that this school does not want female pupils to wear jewellery and are seeking to justify that attitude with a totally spurious reason. I'm surprised they haven't found a reason connected to global warming which is another phenomenom used to justify all sorts of things.
