Bridget Phillipson MP: No parent should be priced out at the school gates – and they won’t be
What does it really cost to send a child back to school?
Ask any parent in Sunderland and you'll get the same answer: too much.
The blazer with the badge. The jumper with the logo. The branded PE kit. Before you've bought so much as a pencil case, you can be hundreds of pounds down – multiplied by every child you have.
Schools across Sunderland are breaking up for summer, and families deserve a proper break. But I know that for too many parents, the countdown to September is a countdown to a bill they can't afford.
A third of parents are worried about uniform costs. More than a quarter have gone without heating or eating to pay for them. Nearly half will reach for a credit card this summer, and a third will turn to buy-now-pay-later.
Think about that. Parents skipping meals so their child isn't the one who stands out at the school gates.
I am not prepared to stand by while families are pushed to the wall by the price of a logo. So from September 1, thanks to legislation I introduced, the law changes.
For the first time, schools in Sunderland will face a legal limit on branded uniform: no more than three compulsory branded items, plus a branded tie in secondary schools. Everything else can come from the supermarket or the high street, where a plain jumper costs a few pounds – not several times that because of a crest stitched on the front.
The Tories and Reform see this as unwelcome ‘interference’. But this isn’t government telling parents what they need, it is Labour listening.
And we are going further, strengthening our guidance so schools must look hard at the cost of every compulsory item – the blazers and jumpers that eat up family budgets – so nothing on the uniform list is unnecessarily expensive.
From September, more schools in Sunderland will offer free breakfast clubs – a calm, settled start to the day that saves families up to £450 a year and 95 hours of morning juggling. Nine in ten parents back them. Our expanded childcare offer is saving working families an average of £8,000 a year per child, with take-up at a record high.
The help does not stop there.
From this September, free school meals are extended to every household on Universal Credit – over half a million more children eligible, saving families up to £495 a year per child. Alongside the removal of the two-child limit, that will help lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty this Parliament.
And families will benefit from Great British Summer Savings: VAT cut on days out and children's meals out all summer, free bus travel for children across England in August – and lower costs waiting at the school gates when the holidays end.
Because this is about more than logos. It is about whether a child in Sunderland starts the year confident and ready to learn, or anxious about what they are wearing. It is about whether parents face September with a plan – or with a debt.
No parent should be priced out of the school gates. No child should pay the price of a crest. From this September, they won't.