Schools in Northern Ireland must give girls the choice to wear trousers as part of their uniforms as well as for PE and games, according to revised guidelines. From next year schools will no longer be able to prohibit female pupils from wearing trousers, Paul Givan, the country’s education minister, said on Friday. A law passed last year that was aimed at reducing the cost of uniforms gave girls the legal right to challenge schools that banned them from wearing trousers.
However, campaigners said the change did not go far enough and put pressure on Givan, a Democratic Unionist party member of the Northern Ireland assembly (MLA) who said his own daughters wore skirts to school, to revise the guidelines. Givan said he had to strike a balance between schools’ autonomy and the level of prescription in departmental guidelines. Other parties welcomed the change but accused the education minister of dragging his feet.
The fact that in 2026 young girls and women had to campaign for this at all will not be forgotten.” Substantial sums of public money were spent on drafting legislation to fix the minister’s error of judgment, Mathison added. A girl’s right to wear trousers should not have been controversial, said Cathy Mason, a Sinn Féin MLA. This cannot be a right that exists on paper but becomes an argument at the school gate,” she said.
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