Something big is about to happen to households across England. Exhausted parents at the playground, wild-eyed as they respond to work emails while their kids charge past with anarchic abandon, gather their final ounces of energy. “Liberation day is coming,” they whisper. Finally, after six weeks of summer holidays, the kids are going back to school.
But my own heady excitement at regaining some semblance of routine come September has been derailed by an adjacent exercise: procuring my daughter’s first school uniform. Call me curmudgeonly, but there’s few things I resent more than spending more than £300 to dress my four-year-old in a suit and tie.
The British obsession with forcing children into business attire from an age when they can’t yet read or write is surely a form of national delirium. School uniform undoubtedly has worthy roots. It has prevailed in most schools since the 19th century, when it was introduced as a means to reduce the appearance of socioeconomic disparities and create a sense of community and cohesion. But can we say with any conviction that uniforms in their current tradition still do that?
So extortionate they have become that some parents in England are skipping meals and turning to buy now, pay later services such as Klarna to afford them before the autumn term, according to a survey by the parenting charity Parentkind.
At the small, south London state primary my daughter attends, the blazer alone costs £38. The branded cardigan, made of 50% acrylic, is £23. These, alongside the other compulsory items on the school’s list, must be bought from one specialist uniform supplier. Delivery is another £8. Ordered the wrong size? That’s a shame – returns are at your expense, unless you would rather go to the physical store, a mere 45 minutes and two train rides away in the neighbouring borough of Croydon. The school’s secondhand uniform shop thrives but is a victim of its own success – only the most organised can snap up the available stock in the required sizes before it sells out before the summer term is even over. It’s almost like the whole process has been designed to ramp up your blood pressure by 10 points.
Government messaging says schools should make uniforms affordable and work with families who struggle to afford them. But there is no benchmark to say how they should be priced, nor any set rules that schools have to abide by. Indeed, some schools ask for as many as 10 branded items, pushing the cost of a child’s uniform with PE kit up to £400. The government recognises the problem – it has plans to limit branded student kit to three articles, plus a tie, from September 2026 in England, and the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has urged schools to bring in reasonable measures beforehand. “You don’t need a posh blazer to learn your times tables, and Shakespeare is just as inspiring in a supermarket sweater,” she wrote on X. I couldn’t agree more – especially when said blazer will probably be lost in the first week of term.
Friends tell me they uphold a quiet form of resistance. One says that after her five-year-old lost his blazer twice in a row, she simply refused to replace it until the following year and ignored the headteacher’s protests. But in other parts of the country, it has become commonplace to hear stories of children being excluded for not wearing the correct uniform. I can’t help but wonder if these incidents could have been avoided if schools simply had more accommodating rules. And of course, enforcing dress codes falls to our notoriously time-rich teachers – as if teaching in 2025 doesn’t already give them enough to contend with.
There is an argument that uniforms help to drive up standards, that being smartly dressed encourages a level of engagement with education. Or, for schools in big cities struggling to attract pupils, maybe it’s a way for them to stand out – a form of advertising their high standards. Private school-inspired uniform must appeal to some socially ambitious parents. But research on the impact of uniforms is mixed. “There is little robust evidence that introducing a school uniform will, by itself, improve academic performance, behaviour, or attendance,” says the Education Endowment Foundation. And however much uniforms have been modernised, they remain heavily gendered. New research from the University of Cambridge found school uniform policies could even be restricting young people from being active, particularly primary school-age girls.
Anecdotal evidence suggests most uniforms are made from synthetic materials, chock full of forever chemicals that are breathed in when our children get hot. As our climate becomes more unpredictable and our school buildings suddenly feel woefully unfit to cope with the changing temperatures, it feels more important than ever that our children are dressed comfortably and that the fabrics they wear are not just breathable but also sustainable.
Despite my protests, I’m not arguing for uniform to be abolished. Who could dislike its practicality on already chaotic school mornings? And I think they do achieve something unquantifiable in fostering a sense of community and cohesion. But here is my plea for reason: make them affordable, sustainable, and while we’re here make them easy to get hold of, replace and clean.
At the heart of this issue is an existential question: what is school for? For children to develop and learn? Or to mould them in a one-dimensional way? Today we accept that success and achievement can look many different ways. And it doesn’t always come dressed in a suit and tie.
