following on from private school thread

[KnittedBreast]

Someone said that if people stopped buying uggs then more people would relaise how affordable it is.

If this is true, how much does private school actually cost?

Those of you with kids in private school or know about fees, what are they at start of primary school and then at secondary school or gcse year?

im genuinly interested as ive alaways been told it costs a fortune (40k a year?)

Dragonhead and LadyoftheManor - there was an investigation into school uniform a couple of years ago by the OFT. Nominating one shop to buy was deemed to be 'anti-competitive'. I can't remember the outcome, but that should have sent a warning shot across the bows of such schools who stipulate that uniform could only be bought from one shop. £15 for a blouse sounds outrageous. I would try and find out who their supplier is and buy it from them direct. I bet it would be half-price or less.

In the girls school it was only John Lewis that stocked it..in the mixed boarding school it was only the "school shop".

We had to have only navy socks, and gym knickers under our uniform (in the girls school-go figure) and they had to be bought from the school...and they were checked, as were the lengths of our skirts after every assembly.

We even had to buy our "own" hymn book for assemblies-which we weren't allowed to take home, but had to pay £12 for.

I can't remember how much our uniform was but it was not cheap and was only available from John Lewis. I have never forgiven my parents for buying me an elephant sized blazer in the first year, hoping it would last for five years ... It was also, ahem, a vile distinctive colour, so you couldn't buy any item of it on the sly from M&S: people were regularly hauled up for wearing non-regulation shirts and blouses. Plus you had to have all the games kits and hockey stick and tennis racket etc, and we had to buy our own labcoats and safety goggles for science.

Also, we were only allowed to wear brown shoes, which used to precipitate an annual family nervous breakdown, because I had a weird shoe size and always had great difficulty finding brown shoes, made worse by the fact that school shoes in the shops were invariably black or navy.

Ladyofthemanor Ah, gym knickers. Yes. We had regulation gym knickers and we did actually wear them, because if you "forgot" them, you had to wear the "school leotard" (hushed tones of dread), that was rumoured to have been around for this purpose since the 1960s and never to have been washed ...