Teachers given cane go-ahead at Christian College10

The hat issue is a fairly contentious one in schools here. Nearly all primary schools now require children (and staff as well as a good example) to wear hats outside in summer. With the high rate of skin cancer in Australia, it really is a serious health issue in the summer. And we’re constantly being told by the experts that this practice should spread into secondary schools, but a lot of secondary schools are really having a hard time dealing with this issue. Queensland is, in a sense, lucky (New South Wales is too, to a somewhat more limited extent). The fact that they are much hotter than the southern states meant more schools have retained hats as part of their uniform without interruption. Here in Victoria, nearly all independent secondary schools used to require hats as part of their uniform until the late 1960s or early 1970s, but they were then abandoned by nearly all schools. Reintroducing them is much harder than if we’d retained them.