School uniform policy’s adverse impact on equity and access to schooling

ABSTRACT

Research on the effect of school uniforms on school attendance in low income countries is scarce. Building on a meta-analysis of the available literature, this paper analyses primary survey data collected (n = 462) in Mongolia on students’ perceptions of school uniforms. The findings reveal that it is not only the cost of uniforms that matters, but also poor students’ feelings of exclusion when the majority of students in a school wear uniforms. The poor drop out from school when their symbolic association with the majority is visibly broken through their inability to afford and wear school uniforms. The study suggests that school uniform policies in low income countries are fraught with complications. Instead of creating cohesion, such policies are more likely to affect poor students’ negative perceptions of themselves and play a strong role in dropout rates.

KEYWORDS:

• School uniform policy
• education
• dropout
• access
• equity
• Mongolia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the forthcoming models, our ordinal predictors were tested for the linearity assumption using the Box-Tidwell Transformation Test. Using this technique, we determined that no linearity assumption was violated, but in the event that it was, the ordinal variable in question could have been recoded as dummy variables and as such be used for further analysis.

2. Drop out variable is a binary variable with either Yes (1) or No (0) as possible answers to the question of ‘Are there students who dropped out from your school due to high cost of school uniforms?’.