To think that £14 for a school jumper for a 4 year old is just disgusting?

[anditwasallyellow]

AFAIK we have to buy the school logo ones although I will be checking for sure.

But £14 seems to be the going rate for a logo school jumper I can get one from Next for £8 or £4 from a supermarket but am paying double just for the school logo to be sewn on. They don't even seem to be that well made the shape is horrendous. Be bloody great when he loses it.

Just to pick up on a couple of point toomanydaisies our education system is not free we pay for it through our taxes. I seriosuly doubt that these £14 jumpers are made any more ethically than the £3 Asda ones although I will look into that. And I personally do not believe that wearing a uniform contributes anything to a childs education I think it's a very outdated idea and I don't believe that having a 'dress code' rather than a uniform would make children look scruffy, my child always looks lovely and smart in his ordinary clothes. He will however look very scruffy in these badly made awful fitting sweatshirt, they are very ugly and an awful shape. Primark make better made clothes. The jumper does not come from the school we have to buy them from the 'official school shop'.

And btw you can get a plain jumper from the same shop for £5.75 so I am basically paying £8 for a logo to be sewn on. What on earth makes people think it has been more ethically made?

I'm not against a uniform as such but I think our school uniforms are often not very practical. And I think that they should be affordable considering many children are going to lose/ruin them. I've had coats go missing at nursery, they were labelled but somebody basically took them from ds peg and never returned them. £14 is a lot of money when there is easy access to steal.

anditwasall I'm very pleased to hear you pay taxes. But should you lose your job and stop paying taxes, your children will remain at their state school. Big difference.

I am well aware of that and am very glad to live in a country where we spread the wealth. But it still doesn't mean that our education system is free.

Further to the OP's response to daisies - thanks for labelling all the children in countries like Finland and the Netherlands, who do not have school uniform, as scruffy and having no pride in their school.

I think the English obsession with uniform is symptomatic of a shallow style-over-substance culture which is holding us back - economically too. Instead of worrying about dress codes in the workplace, we should be thinking about how well and efficiently the work gets done. Same applies in schools - stop obsessing over who is wearing the wrong school cardi and start looking at the quality of the work.

£14 is a bloody rip off for a school jumper. I had to buy my DSs Logo'd jumpers from the only shop in town that sold them. They were exactly the same as the cheap non logo'd jumpers but twice as expensive.

Couldn't agree more epees was also wondering does daisies think that children in other countries where they don't wear uniforms are scruffy, or what about children in general. Personally I think ds looks much better in his usual clothes than dressed like a mini adult in badly fitting office clothes.

Think that the uniform thing just comes from our British uptightness.

I've got to say (and I don't mean it as critical to anyone personally) that I am gobsmacked at the amount of lost uniform people are talking about on here, and also the blatant dishonesty that must be rife with so many people having named uniform go missing.

I had three kids at our Australian school for four years, I'm down to two this year, and in all that time we have had ONE school jumper lost and not returned within a few days. It eventually showed up a few months later. The office will lend you unnamed stuff from lost property until it comes back if necessary, they are so sure it eventually will! Maybe I've just terrorised my kids into being careful though as school jumpers are more like 40pounds here so they would be a long time cold before I bought them another one if they couldn't borrow one.

I hate hate HATE school uniform! It discriminates appallingly against families on lower incomes ...

I am a single parent earning a below-average income. Throughout primary school, where school uniform was optional, my children did not wear it. I bought most of their clothes second hand from charity shops, and they always wore very good quality 100% cotton, to school and elsewhere. On average, what they wore cost about £10 head-to-ankle (excluding shoes - and I could afford to buy decent pairs of those because I wasn't wasting loads on uniform).

When DS1 started high school, his compulsory uniform cost me £210, which was more than my weekly wage. It included trousers, shirt, tie, blazer and black shoes with no logo; PE shorts, polo shirt, logo-ed PE socks and trainers; rugby shirt, socks and boots (he played rugby only twice ever). He had only one of everything except shirts (3) and trousers (2). Everything was synthetic and horrible quality.

He walked out the front door that first day wearing £100 of cheap nasty unethically-produced clothes, instead of a tenner's-worth of decent stuff.

"Style over substance" - yes, epees! And a total distraction from what school ought to be about - which is education not fkng clothing!

And btw all that talk about uniform improving discipline is just total nonsense : if it were true, France and Spain and Sweden would be full of rioting school children...

I think that in a culture where no uniform is the norm that's great! In this culture uniform IS the norm.

The majority of primary schools where I live don't have a uniform. Lots of children look really smart. But lots don't. On school trip days or concerts etc they all wear black shoes, trousers and school t shirts. They look 100 times better and the children LOVE it! I have lots of local friends with children (that's how I know). They enjoy looking alike and smart.

I think the wider issue is that parents should support their school in every way - including uniform policy. What a lot of time must be wasted battling over the colour of a shirt, type of shoe etc.

Why do you think that we ought to support our school's uniform policy, Daisies?
Why should the school not support what the parents want in this respect?

Our school went blatantly against the (unenforceable) government guidelines on uniform, when they sought to change it. Totally in the face of the advice and recommendations set out by the DFE.

We fought it because we were seriously out of pocket, we hated the colours, we resented being ignored in the decision making process and first and foremost, it was totally, completely unnecessary.

If a school pretends to consult its parents, then goes ahead with an autocratic and arbitrary decision then they can expect a certain amount of dissent. Particularly at a time of economic difficulty for an awful lot of people - asking us to effectively bin everything we have saved from our older children and start from scratch with highly priced items is insensitive, unrealistic and frankly a bit stupid.

But then, we have one of those HTs. No one understands her motives.

And as for wasting time battling over a type of shoe - it is not us, but the teachers who make an issue of this.

I sent my child to school wearing incredibly good quality shoes which are around £50 (I got them in a sale, but still) and he wore them for about 6 months before one day, being asked to remove them and wear his plimsolls for the rest of the day.

He came out of school upset, I asked what was wrong. He had slipped over twice in the playground as his plimsolls are not outdoor shoes. He was distressed and embarrassed at being singled out like this.

I went to the teacher - she said 'they are trainers and they are not black'. I said 'we have another 6 months to wear navy shoes. You are not supposed to enforce the new uniform until then. And I would not send my childto school in trainers.' She still moaned, so I went to the HT who initially said the same thing, then backed down swiftly when I told her how much they had cost, how long he had been wearing them for, and that there was no way he would stop wearing them till they wore out.

she made a fuss that they had a small logo on them in a different colour (not trendy - just the name of the make in tiny letters) and said next time they must be completely plain.

Anyway eventually they did look a bit scruffy, and so I got him some plain black ones from clarks (exactly the same style - anything with velcro could be called a trainer, his entire class wears the same thing) and within a week they had holes in the toes.

I could not find the receipt and as they were bought in the sale too, I let him wear these items till the end of term...no complaints, I presume because they were from clarks. They had massive holes in them and looked terrible.

It makes no sense.

you use to be able to get cheaper jumpers from our local uniform shop but some one grassed them to trading standards, dont exactly know what went off but now they are the same prices as school £9 a jumper £7 a t shirt and they are difficult colours to buy too! managed to drop on a few plain ones an i will buy 1 proper set and just replace the cheaper ones gradually £2 a jumper in asda how can they charge such silly amounts for a bit of cotton sewn on a jumper

More than a touch of irony here, the children who stitched the seams on the £4 trousers will never see the inside of a school.

Theodorakis I know

It's just - how do we find out which clothes are ethically sourced and which are not?

It seems just as likely - well almost - that a jumper costing £15 is made under those conditions and just priced up because of the logo.
If the school insists we only buy from Yourschooluniform.com, what can we do about it?

Maybe MN could start a thrift shop forum for school uniforms, sell on second hand clothes

I don't see the problem with just having a dress code - trousers X colour, shirts Y colour, jumper Z colour and so on. Why don't schools do that? The answer can only be be that they are using the compulsory logos as a money spinner. It's school fees by stealth, and it's the dishonesty of it that I don't like.

The argument about uniform as an economic leveller only stacks up if schools mandate all uniform items - including shoes, outdoor coats etc. Children know perfectly well who wears black uniform trousers from Asda and who gets them from Next.

And I second those who refuse to believe that logo'd items are more likely to be sourced ethically.

I also just like a dress code, ie grey trousers/skirt and a blue jumper type uniform. Nothing branded but the DC's still look nice.

I buy one actual school jumper and several cheap cardigans from Sainsbury's.

Good idea Marys but we're not allowed anything unbranded now.

It seems to fly in the face of the real issue - they would be appalled if children wore things with 'Nike' emblazoned on them, just to fit in, but to have to wear something with the school logo on seems remarkably similar in terms of a concept. Just it's the adults who planned it, not the kids.

I agree that uniform makes it stand out even more who has money and who doesn't. And whose parents are coping and whose aren't. However disorganised we are, there's always something in the drawer that is clean. unfortunately it is not always school uniform. And previously, I have bought about 7 school jumpers for ds1, because it was easier than me trying to wash everything on time - now I can only afford two.

He will have days when these are not clean

I do wonder, on a separate note, if our school made these items unaffordable in order to price out the increasing number of applicants from the nearby new build, which is HA and so not as well off as the surrounding houses.

It has crossed my mind. In which case it is total bastardly behaviour by the HT. I would really not be surprised.

But as someone said earlier, uniform in primary school CANNOT be legally enforced as obligatory, so if you buy non-official stuff, there is bugger all they can do about it.

If they kick up a fuss, find out when the next Governor's surgery is and go and tell them everything you posted here.

No Marys I'm afraid it's not that simple - as I posted earlier, (miles back! ) the school is legally allowed to exclude a child if the refusal to wear uniform is persistent or defiant. By persistent I imagine it means, they continue to not wear the correct stuff once they have been asked to a few times.

If a child is excluded on these grounds, the EWO would be onto their parents like a shot. plus they would be out of school for however long.

It sucks but it's true - the governors don't give a toss here at any rate, they were behind the HT - and I found these facts out by doing a lot of research including talking to educational welfare and the ACE helpline (an educational advice line in the UK)

Sorry

I think uniforms are a good thing but I agree £14 is a lot for a jumper. Try Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys. Unfortunately nearly everything is getting more expensive at the moment and this is no exception.

Fivemonths, they would have a job excluding him if the problem is the financial situation of the family not bad behaviour. They could be accused of unfair discrimination. Most schools take a softly softly approach about such things for that reason. I would still formally approach the HT/governors again in writing. If that goes nowhere, presumably at least some other parents feel the same. You could organise a boycott of the jumper - they can't exclude children en masse. Complain to the local authority that they are discriminating against families on a financial basis. There is a lot you can do, including move schools if you feel so strongly about it.

Thanks Marys...unfortunately I have thought of most of those things.

I thought of changing schools. there aren't any others I like near here - and he was adamant he doesn't want to move.

We did organise a joint letter of complaint with 40+ signatures, (hard to get loads in the space of a few days just by word of mouth) which was largely ignored.

I then orchestrated a complaint to the governors, which resulted in a phasing in period they had initially promised, then retracted, being reinstated - but the change went through in every other respect.

Part of my complaint was focused on the financial implications. This was ignored.
I'd like to think that justice would prevail in these circumstances but it was all very biased, and then sabotaged in retrospect as the decision was not communicated to parents until a week before term...it was far too late.

And even those who had complained and who knew the outcome, still sent their children in wearing the new clothes. Only my son was wearing the original uniform, poor lad.

I don't think I've ever felt so defeated.