Midsomer Norton school agrees to drop gendered uniforms

Fin (r) made the appeal to the school after noticing two different uniform policies for male and female students

A school has agreed to make its uniform gender-neutral following a campaign by one of its students.

Fin, 15, a pupil at Norton Hill School in Somerset, wrote to the head after noticing there were two sets of rules for boys and girls, which might cause problems to LGBTQ+ students.

"I wanted to change the rules so people didn't feel like they were breaking them," said Fin.

"Coming to school, everyone should feel accepted and comfortable.

"We didn't want to come across like we were attacking anybody or destroying a system, we just wanted to adapt it.

"The school wasn't trying to make people uncomfortable on purpose," he said.

Previously, the uniform policy had been blazers for boys, and jumpers for girls.

That has now been amended to blazers for all, with optional jumpers.

The petition to remove gendered uniforms has been welcomed by the school's deputy head teacher Tanya Gibbs.

"We had been trying to make changes for a while, Fin just highlighted things that we'd missed," she said.

'Students being themselves'

Over the last 18 months, a number of students besides Fin had approached the school, in Midsomer Norton, asking for the policy to be altered.

"The one thing for us was cost for parents, which is why we've made this change slowly because uniform is expensive," said Ms Gibbs.

"It has spurred us on to look at how we can change our PE kit to be gender-neutral too.

"Hopefully now we can work with more pupils to make them feel like they're not breaking the rules for being themselves," she added.