Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the effect on the level of poverty of the affordability of school uniform costs.

No school uniform should be so expensive as to leave pupils or their families feeling unable to apply to a school. The Government is pleased to support the Private Members' Bill to ‘make provision for guidance to schools about the cost aspects of school uniform policies’, which was recently introduced to Parliament on 5 February 2020. This demonstrates the Government’s commitment to ensuring that school uniform costs are reasonable.

It is for the governing body of a school (or in the case of academies, the academy trust) to decide whether there should be a school? uniform, what it will be and how it should be sourced. To support them to do this the Department currently issues non-statutory guidance which can be found here:?https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-uniform.

Our current guidance states that? school uniform? items should be easily available for parents to purchase and schools should keep compulsory branded items to a minimum. It also states that schools should avoid single-supplier contracts, but where schools do choose to enter into such contracts, they should be subject to a regular competitive tendering process. This makes clear that we expect schools to ensure ?uniform? costs are reasonable.