Who’s to blame that school uniforms are absurdly expensive?

The government says its simple rule change about school uniform will save parents £70m a year – the sad thing is that it requires a law to instil some common sense, says James Moore

It is curious to me that after multiple cost-of-living crises, a surge in inflation and deep cuts to the welfare budget, parents are still being railroaded into buying horribly expensive school uniforms for their kids.

Mercifully, change is finally coming, via the Children's Wellbeing & Schools Bill, currently in the House of Lords. As well as introducing new safeguards to children’s welfare and free breakfast clubs in all state-funded primaries, it will also limit the number of branded items that headteachers can require pupils to wear, to three (excluding tie).

As measures go, it is hoped it will bring down the cost of a school uniform and save parents £50 a year per pupil.

The price of kitting out a child comes to £442 for the average secondary school student, and £343 for primary-age pupils, and can be a struggle for a significant number of parents. The Department for Education has published analysis showing that more than 4 million children will benefit from the simple rule change.

The Schoolwear Association is not best pleased at the prospect of its members losing some £70m a year in branded clothing sales. “High-quality uniforms are durable and eco-friendly, lasting longer and reducing the need for frequent replacements, thus supporting environmental sustainability,” it said.

Back in the real world, one wonders if anyone working for that august organisation has ever actually had a school-age child? Fun fact: they grow. At an astonishingly rapid rate during the teenage years. About that “high-quality, durable, eco-friendly” blazer with the school logo on the breast pocket… a growth spurt could easily put it out of use by the end of the autumn term.

It was the shoes that did it for us. The state of them at the end of a school year left us scratching our heads – it was as if they’d been pushed through a giant paper shredder.

The law of sod means it is inevitably the most expensive kit that gets wrecked first. The Schoolwear Association’s apparent rejection of generic kit, and thus the free market, also ignores another inconvenient truth: low-cost doesn’t necessarily mean low-quality. Affordable school clothes from a Tesco or a Sainsbury’s usually last just fine. Those supermarkets have a keen eye for quality, and tend to be reluctant to sell kit that falls apart in five minutes, notwithstanding the teenager’s in-built appetite for destruction.

One of my proudest moments as a school governor was to enable parents to shop for uniform at Tesco, after having been restricted to a small and often obnoxious local supplier that charged through the nose and treated its customers like dirt. As it turned out, it wasn’t a hard argument to win. The school took the point.

One can’t help but feel that the fussiness some headteachers still display over logo-spattered uniforms is little more than a power trip, a means of keeping the parents in line as well as the children.