One of Britain's leading headteachers has attacked the fashion industry for its 'deplorable' obsession with ultra-thin sizes. Clarissa Farr, high mistress of St Paul's Girls' School in London, said it was 'grossly irresponsible' to spread the notion that being very thin was desirable, a fixation that meant body image was the greatest pressure facing teenage girls. She hoped the extremity of the 'size 00' phenomenon in America, equivalent to a size two dress here, would spark a backlash.
Girls at the school read newspapers and watched the news so could not avoid seeing the industry's craze for tiny sizes, admitted Farr. Many would have read on Friday about the death of Ana Carolina Reston, the 21-year-old model from Brazil who existed on a diet of tomatoes and apples. That day 20 girls at the school met at lunch to talk about the subject.
'It is grossly irresponsible that this kind of thinking is encouraged as something desirable,' Farr said. 'It is important that schools encourage dialogue to put this in perspective.' Society's obsession with thinness, added Farr, was 'a form of fundamentalism, a form of extremism'.
The debate has raged for a month after doctors and MPs called for super-skinny models to be banned from the catwalk.
In her first interview since taking over the hugely successful London school, Farr said that headteachers had a duty to help teenagers resist the fixation: 'This is about pressure to conform.' Girls at St Paul's are encouraged to take part in sport, music or one of the school's 80 clubs and societies to prevent them focusing on their weight or smoking, drinking or taking drugs. 'We can't change society, but we can manage the pressure,' added the head.
Farr, the mother of an 11-year-old girl, said she was concerned about the marketing of designerwear to pre-teenage girls. 'The sexualisation of young girls is a real worry,' she added. 'There is a lost childhood. It is very difficult to buy clothes for pre-teenage girls that are not suggestive.'
Farr took over as high mistress this autumn after serving as president of the Girls' Schools Association (GSA). In a school where many parents pay more than £4,000 a term, 56 out of 100 girls applied to Oxford and Cambridge last year. All won places.
The notion that independent school pupils were discriminated against by top universities wanting to up the number of state school pupils was a myth, argued Farr. She said that there was concern three years ago when Bristol University was accused of operating secret quotas against private school students, but that has since been disproved. 'The Independent Schools Council conducted research that proved there was no evidence of bias against independent school candidates,' she said.
One example of how the government had harmed the state sector was by making it no longer compulsory for pupils to take a language beyond 14, a step that Farr described as 'entirely retrograde and reprehensible'.
'The independent sector is almost single-handedly supporting many university departments in modern foreign languages,' she said. At St Paul's, Mandarin is an option at 11 and many girls take three languages at GCSE.
As for the all-girl environment, Farr said: ' Girls can set themselves to do anything they wish without asking the question "Is it a girl thing, is it a boy thing?".'
In the US, there is a growing movement that argues boys and girls should be taught separately because their brains develop differently. For Farr, the argument is simpler: girls' schools can instil confidence to succeed in a society that is still dominated by men: 'Girls' schools oxygenise [girls'] aspirations - they somehow gather the knowledge that, as women, they can do anything.'
At the GSA conference last week Farr listened to evidence showing that the number of women in FTSE 100 companies was falling. It remains tough, she said, for women to achieve the 'very difficult' task of balancing a rewarding personal life alongside a career: 'Career patterns in male-dominated industries have been such that they militate very strongly against success for a woman who might want to take time to have a family, for example.'
Farr would like to see a future where employment laws give men more time to spend with their daughters, a future where women are not constrained from reaching the top, and one where the girls at St Paul's will be leaders and opinion-formers. She believes that the all-girl environment will also protect them from the increasing pressure about body image. 'I think our girls here don't feel constrained by having to impress boys or be aware of how they are being looked at. It is a kind of freedom from the need for male endorsement.'
