Please can you suggest brand who sell wide fitting school shoes?

[2pointfourmonkeys]

I'm usually a bit last minute with school shoes, but the last couple of times we've struggled for my youngest so I thought I'd try and be early this year in the hope they'd be lots of stock.

A soul crushing hour later and we came away with nothing. 1 pair of shoes (Start-Rite) in the shop (John Lewis) fitted her high instep, wide forefoot, narrow heeled feet. A whole size bigger than they measured her (C12.5) and still a H fitting!

Went to JL thinking it would give her more choice.

Can anyone recommend a brand that is better fo wide footed kids?

Clarks
Or maybe m&s

I use Happy little soles as you can search by foot width, depth (as in, suitable for a high instep), size, colour etc That narrows it down quite easily, and then you can either go with them or look for those brands locally.

I've always found Kickers really wide fitting.

We go to an independent store and buy Ricosta.

Hush Puppies have different insoles which allow you to change the width. DD has wide feet and we always get them, they wear well too (clinkards stock them).

Some great suggestions there, thanks.

Clark's found my wide footed daughter a H Plus once, we'd tried every shop I could find before that. Dr Martens are the shoe of choice this year. I feel your pain as we spent a entire day once trying shoes and coming home empty handed!

Have you tried an independent shoe shop? There's a great one near us and she has way more sizes and choice of brands than JL.

Both dd's have high instep. Measure H where they actually have rather narrow feet on the whole. M&S seem to fit really well, and last well too, they are our go to choice. They also seem to have an insole you can remove and take a part of the underside of the front to allow a it more room. Asda are pretty decent also. Tesco do not fit in any of their styles.

Death That’s good point. It took me ages to work out dd2 had a high instep and narrow feet as Clark’s always measured her as wide and then went up a size or two to make them fit (badly). Turns out what they were measuring was height. Bobux are narrow and deep, and that’s what she wore until she learnt to tie laces - which is when depth stops being so much of an issue.

Same problem here...son measures a H+ width. Next do some wide fitting school shoes. We searched for hours yesterday and came away with nothing...then today found a pair of black Adidas school style "smart" shoes in sports direct that fit him perfectly!

@BehindATractor you have just solved a puzzle for me!

Both kids are usually hard work to find shoes for. My eldest always measures different to what we end up buying, and recently has had a lot of issues with arch pain which has gone over the holidays-trainers or bare feet mostly.

We bought the second pair of brogues she tried on today and i was flabbergasted, never twigged it would be the laces!

Now thinking the pain has been shoes that are actually too wide for her?

OP Entirely possible! Did she pull the straps really tight (so tight they break / come off)? That’s another sign that the fit is poor - either the strap is too short (because of the high instep) or their foot is sliding around in the shoe (because it’s too wide) and they’re trying to stop that happening. Laces solve the problem because you don’t run out of Velcro and you can make them tighter all over while still having the depth because the tongue just rises up.