School uniforms are a great boon to poorer parents, Bridget Phillipson
The not-very-fancy Kent girls' school I attended aged 11-18 retained one touching affectation circa 1979: the suggested stockist for school uniform was Harrods.
I had secured a bursary, due to our straightened circumstances, but Mum and I still made the pilgrimage to Knightsbridge to buy the requisite hideous brown-and-gold blazer and jumper.
She purchased items so sturdily outsized that they not only saw me through my schooldays, but my little sister had to suffer them too. My mother was well-aware that uniform, worn dawn-to-dusk five days a week, saved money in the end – as it diminished any need for an extensive fashionable wardrobe.
I followed her lead with my own sons, even though their primary and secondary schools in Cambridge never enforced uniform strictly. Branded school polo and sweat shirts are far cheaper than the Nike equivalents that parents get pressurised to buy otherwise.
To state the obvious, it's also good for schoolchildren to feel camaraderie via the stitched logos that announce they are part of a certain institution. I'm no huge lover of pointless rules and conformity, but there's nothing for rebels to test their metal against without a few stern regulations.
All of which makes it extra-baffling that Labour is currently pushing through measures that will make it harder to enforce state school uniform, by limiting the number of branded items of clothing to three (as part of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill).
I don't recall any noisy demand for restrictions from parents, who are well served now by second-hand clothes sales and redistribution of unclaimed lost property. Yes, it might be true parents can buy cheaper shirts and trews from Asda, but if the quality is poor then it's a false economy. It's bad enough that supermarket socks feel like cardboard after two washes, but most of us stick with that Faustian pact as offspring scatter hosiery to the four winds.
Official manufacturers of school clothing, who know their wares have to meet the demands of your average school day (my younger lad minces trouser knees like Sweeney Todd ripping through a Turkish barber), will be the first to suffer via these measures. Their goods may be marginally more costly, but they're made to survive multiple washes and impromptu rugby.
The really exacting classroom expenses have long been non-school logo items like shoes, rucksacks and waterproofs. (Never ever cave in to the demand for a North Face windcheater, as I once did; some canny classmate will have it out of the gates and on to Vinted within seconds.)
But the biggest cost to society will surely be the fact it will become far harder to identify which school a pupil attends, if they don't have institutional branding. The main deterrent for pupils who cause trouble outside the playground is the very real possibility they will be identified and punished. Shopkeepers phone schools to help pinpoint pilferers and parents are reliant on recognisable ties and sweaters to narrow down kids creating havoc.
I've long remembered a summer of havoc when a group of semi-feral kids were nicking bikes, footballs and cash from smaller children in our local park. It took six parents, two community police officers, two heads and three WhatsApp groups to rein the culprits in. A feat that would have been impossible without school logos being visible.
This obsolete branding directive costs Labour nothing and benefits almost nobody. If anyone asked parents what they really wanted the answer would be simple and somewhat more expensive: a world-class education for their children.
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