Ellie Levenson: Crests, berets and poverty at the school gate

I've always been puzzled by people who find school uniform sexy, and by the excitement caused by the School Disco nightclub phenomenon where revellers in their twenties and thirties dress up in school uniform to party the night away. Then again, I imagine very few people turn up in the distinctly unsexy school uniform of Rush Croft School, where, until I left at the age of 15, I wore navy trousers and a green polo shirt embroidered with the school crest. Although I will sometimes wear navy, and occasionally bottle green, I will never now wear the two together in case I get flashbacks of science explorations or German conversation classes.

Our uniform did little for us in public, except to mark us out as targets for the hard kids of the rival school, so that on days when a "rumble" had been decreed, that is, an inter-school fight, you had to ensure you had alternative clothes to wear for the bus ride home.

It was, however, affordable and comfortable, unlike the one my mum had to wear. Starting grammar school in 1961, her school's uniform policy was so controlling that when kneeling the dresses had to be precisely two inches above the knee. Maroon berets with badges had to be worn in a specific way with a discipline mark imposed if you were caught wearing it incorrectly, or not wearing it at all, either inside or outside of school, with three discipline marks leading to a detention. There were rules, too, on the type of purse allowed (leather purse on a cross strap worn across the body) and the colour of knickers (navy knickers with white briefs under them).

In fact, many school uniforms seem to have an unhealthy interest in the types of knickers that are worn. Stories abound about religious schools that don't allow girls to wear patent shoes in case they reflect their underwear, though this is surely a reflection of the minds of those who make the rules than a comment on the evil powers of patent shoes.

In Liverpool, there's a school where the girls have been given the unfortunate nickname of "wheelie bins". This is because their purple uniforms are the same shade as the rubbish bins used by Liverpool City Council. This is nothing, however, compared to the independent Christ's Hospital School in Sussex where pupils are still required to wear full Tudor dress.

What these uniforms do all have in common, however, is that they don't conform to current DfES guidelines that state that uniform should be able to be bought "off the peg", ensuring that parents can shop around for the best deals. This means uniforms should be available from a number of retailers, and not need specialist crests or other distinguishing features.

Although officially it is up to a school's governing body to set whether a school has a uniform, last year's five-year plan for education stated that all schools are expected to have one in order to "help give pupils pride in their school and make them ambassadors for the school in their community".

Major retailers have responded well to this. My local supermarket stocks packs of three girl's white shirts for the astonishingly cheap price of £6, with boy's school trousers costing no more than a fiver per pair, though little seems to be available for children who are too tall or too fat to fit into these.

Despite this, however, the cost of schooling is an enormous burden on families, as a report out tomorrow from Citizens Advice is expected to show.

For despite the Government advising that all schools have a uniform, it is up to individual Local Education Authorities (LEAs) to determine whether they help worse-off families pay for this, with nearly half of all LEAs providing no assistance whatsoever to help poorer families buy school uniform, and those that do rarely taking into account the speed at which children grow and the wear and tear that takes its toll on uniform. Nor is there any uniform uniformity among those who do give grants, with each LEA setting their own eligibility requirements.

In End Child Poverty's Ten for a Million Charter, published earlier this year, the charity outlined 10 ways in which a million children could be taken out of poverty. One of these was the call to ensure poverty stops at the school gate, by increased provision for school uniform grants and activity funds. Although DfES guidelines say that the department does not consider exclusion to be an appropriate response to breaches of school uniform policy, except where it is part of a pattern of defiant behaviour generally, children who turn up without the correct uniform do face being stigmatised and bullied, which in turn can lead to an increased risk of bad behaviour and lower educational attainment.

In fact, a Citizens Advice report in 2004 found that "a significant minority of children had been sent home from school or withdrawn from the classroom because their parents had not been able to afford the correct uniform".

That silly berets and odd colours are seemingly on the way out is a good thing. But uniforms should not detract from the task of educating young people. If what a child is wearing becomes the cause for discipline, rather than how much attention they are paying or the work they are doing, then priorities are wrong.

Uniforms should facilitate education, not hinder it. In order to ensure that this is the case, they must be affordable across the board, and school uniform grants must be available to poorer families wherever they live.