A third of parents are going into debt as a result of back to school costs, according to a report yesterday from the Irish League of Credit Unions, understandably prompting headlines and disappointed commentary to the effect that something should be done about this.
I agree, but in a spirit of charity, it has to be acknowledged that there’s a certain complexity to figuring out just what should be done about this particular issue, as whichever way you slice it, someone or something worthwhile is going to lose out.
To zoom in on school costs, both the ILCU and the Barnardos Annual School Costs Survey, to take but two sources, consistently find that among the top causes of school costs-related financial stresses are uniforms, books and voluntary contributions. The case of uniform costs is particularly interesting, in my humble opinion.
According to one of those aforementioned surveys (the Barnardos Annual School Costs Survey 2022), 74 percent of primary school parents and 93 percent of secondary school parents said that their children had to wear “crested/branded uniforms”, while 16 percent of primary school parents and 3 percent of secondary school parents said that their children had plain uniforms.
Just 10 percent of primary school parents and 5 percent of secondary school parents said their child had no uniform, so naturally, this is a cost that doesn’t apply to them, apart from whatever costs they incur in the course of their regular, old clothes shopping.
However, obviously of most interest there are the vast majority of parents, of both primary and secondary level kids, who said that there’s a mandatory crested/branded uniform, which is obviously pricier than generic, to which a crest or a brand is often ironed on after purchase.
It’s very often the case (I did a very, very quick google and found multiple cases within just minutes, at primary and secondary level) that schools have an exclusive arrangement with a particular drapery or local supplier, to which families flock as the start of the school year approaches.
(On a slight tangent, I found that my old secondary school changed its long-time uniform supplier at some point since I graduated back in 2015, which may or may not be connected to the retirement of the owner. In any case, there’s a new supplier in town now. It speaks, to me, of the depth to which that exclusive relationship often runs.)
Many schools have the approved uniform supplier listed on their website, and it’s here that the cost kicks in. Whereas you could get a generic shirt, trousers and/or jumper for likely anywhere between €60-€120 or so, it wouldn’t be unusual – based on my admittedly limited research – for a branded uniform to come in anywhere between €200-€400 or thereabouts.
It’s a dynamic that’s seen the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) write to schools advising them to allow generic uniforms, in an effort to ease the financial burdens faced by parents.
But advise is all it can ultimately do, because were the State or a State agency to go any further – say, by mandating the allowance of generic uniforms in schools across the country – they risk cutting the main source of revenue for who knows how many small businesses across the country.
Not something I would be rushing to do if I were a government minister.
Similarly, hard-pressed as schools currently are – it seems to this writer that there’s a new headline every day to that effect – mandating the retirement of voluntary contributions doesn’t seem particularly feasible either. Financial returns for schools across the country gathered by the Department of Education two years ago showed that voluntary contributions provided schools with a figure in the region of €30 million every year.
I recall from my days with The Irish Catholic newspaper, senior figures in Catholic schools bodies agreeing that somewhere around 30-50 percent of funding ultimately came from parents, as the Government, in their words, only supplies around “around 50% of running costs”.
While not a total answer to this question, what would certainly help here as in so many places would be to cut out the insane levels of waste in so many other places – let NGOs and media organisations stand or fall on their own.
Take State media regulator Coimisiún na Meán’s Local Democracy and Courts Reporting schemes, which essentially provides media outlets across the country with thousands of euros in an ostensible effort to uphold high-quality, trusted journalism, to the tune of, in its first funding round alone, €5.7 million.
That’s just one batch of schemes in a country awash with them, and you’re already a sixth of the way to providing a replacement for voluntary contributions. A man can dream of economic efficiency, anyway.
That would be one way to help parents, without cutting the legs out from under schools or small businesses.