Surviving School Dress Code in Summer: Tips and Discussions for Students

2023-06-13 13:50:00

Dressing for school in the heat of the day can be a real headache. What outfit to adopt to be “decent” at school, without getting too hot? “You can’t wear football shorts, jogging shorts or even jogging“, laments a student.

Rachel, Alexia and Jade are wearing football shirts above the navel today. It’s forbidden in their establishment, but too bad: “We get a lot of comments. Sometimes they’re a little mean, especially when you put on crop-tops, but you get over it“, confides Alexia. “I think girls are much more discriminated against than boys. For us, it’s immediately more complicated to dress, it’s more difficult to find skirts that go below the knees“, believes Jade.

You have to accept the rules of the collective, but these rules are not intangible

In Belgium, there is no legal framework for dress code. Each school defines its own rules in the internal regulations. Sometimes the standard is very different from place to place: “When you live in a collective, you have to accept the rules of the collective. (…) But these rules are not intangible and it is possible to discuss them in a number of places“, considers Etienne Michel, director general of the General Secretariat of Catholic Education (SeGEC).

Sometimes derogatory remarks

With the arrival of good weather, outfits at school change and so do complaints. Eden Glejser, jurist at the Comité des Élèves Francophones, regularly notes this: “Students complain about remarks made to them, derogatory remarks or even sometimes public humiliation“, she reports. “It only happens when the weather is nice unfortunately“, adds the lawyer.

However, there are recommendations in terms of outfits, in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, but they are not binding. For Eden Glejser, one solution would be to involve the students more in the development of the rules within the establishments.

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