Do you label your children's school uniform, and if not why?

[ItWasnaMeGuv]

I ask because after more than 20 years working as an assistant in primary schools, still we end up with mounds of lost property which is not labelled and never, ever claimed [and frustrated emoticon].

When we find labelled items we can get them returned to their owners straight away, which is lovely. Sometimes items are clearly expensive, coats for example. I am always astounded that items like this are not claimed.

I know with my own kids, everything was labelled as I couldn't afford to keep buying replacements. I would be interested to know if there are any mumsnetters who do not label school uniforms. Why not? It is really helpful, to everyone.

I label everything. Mine are the kids who (choose!) to wear school socks in the holidays and walk about with their name labels hanging out 🤣

In primary, I used sticky labels with the kids name on the first line and my phone number on the second line. Twice I got a call about a lost item. But more importantly I could tell the kids that if they got lost they could search their clothes for a label and tell a mum/uniform to call me please. That never happened, but I liked that they had their number on themselves if they got lost and too upset to remember it. At secondary I spared them the embarrassment of the phone number.

Stickins labels were brilliant. Stick to almost anything and rarely come off.

Thanks again for your responses. I just want to add that we do not care how the name is written whether biro or label, even if faded we love a challenge and its surprising how careful squinting can eventually elicit a name. There was once a name of a child never at our school though, that was a real puzzle and we figured it had been given to a child who was at our school.

As a teacher I did my best to return clothes to their owner, a job made much more difficult without name labels.

I had this conversation more than once:
Parent: X has lost his jumper
Me: Has it got his name in it?
Parent: No but its blue aged 4-5
Me: (thinks) [like every other jumper in this room]

I have had children identify their jumper by the smell. Hopefully the aroma of the washing powder.

Having been at the same school for a very long time I could often work out which relative had handed it on.

Just to those who say it doesn't seem to matter if you label them or not don't see the 20 times a member of staff has hung a child's cardigan on their peg because they had a name in it. It really does make a massive difference. I work in a nursery with an optional uniform. A lot of the parents who send their child in their own clothes assume their child will recognise their jumper. I can stand there at the end of the day with unlabelled clothes asking who it belongs to and all the children look at me as if they have never set eyes on it before! Or often another child will recognise it and tell me, "That's X's" and X doesn't have a clue!

The time the system goes awry is when an item goes home with the wrong child by mistake. Often, if it's a school jumper, it just gets assimilated into the new family's uniform and, if no one checks the label, they don't realise it isn't their child's. I do send lots of messages home asking parents to double check labels in case their child has inadvertently picked up another child's item by mistake. I guess some parents do check as things do come back but I also know parents are busy and probably don't bother/remember/have time to check so it never comes back. Then the original owners are standing in the school demanding it be found, when it simply isn't there. I'm sure some parents think teachers enjoy stealing children's jumpers on purpose and we have a secret stash of them in a cupboard somewhere. In actual fact, we get really fed up by random items hanging around and would love to re-home items when we can.

Exactly this! I quite enjoy when parents bustle into my classroom to 'have a proper look' for a jumper because my room is a perfect rectangle with no nooks and crannies and is kept very tidy, so it is immediately obvious the jumper is either not there or I've already hung it on the child's peg. When I ask if either they or the child have checked lost property, the answer is very often no.

My DS was a primary school teacher for a while. If he found an unlabelled jumper he would ask the children who it belonged to, one of them would sniff it and know exactly whose it was. This still fascinates him even though he gave up teaching years ago.

I label everything inc stationery as dc has lots the same as their friends.
However I remember in nursery I forgot to label a jumper , dcs teacher approached me and said this is dcs , we could tell by how lovely it smells , we know your laundry smell as soon as we open the nappy bag too with the spare clothes in it.
I still remember feeling a bit weird they said that and that was 9 years ago