Unnecessary school items should be optional

Schools should reduce the number of uniform items and remove unnecessary items from their requirements to contain the costs for parents, according to a report by the consumers affairs authority.

“Where schools would like to include uniform items that are not strictly essential, but which may be convenient for the students to have, they should state clearly that those items are optional,” the report said.

Drawn up by the Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Authority, the report, which was issued yesterday evening after two years in the making, discusses the controversial subject of school uniforms where parents are offered limited quality but are forced to fork out money for expensive items available only from one supplier.

The authority’s recommendations, which are very similar to the suggestions it made in an original document published for public consultation, called on schools to “constantly consult” parents on their uniform policy before taking any decisions on the colour, design, quality and method of supply.

Parents should be informed of the shops selling the school uniform to give them more choice and should also be offered the possibility to buy the material while patterns and designs should be made freely available. The uniform’s pattern and design should “ideally be owned” by the school and not an individual supplier, the authority said.

This would avoid a situation where parents would need to buy new uniform items because of a change in supplier or because a new tender was issued.

The authority began its investigation after it found that the majority of schools had specific uniform accessories, such as ties, blazers and jerseys, forcing parents to buy exclusively from a particular shop or from the school itself.

The report also made recommendations to suppliers, saying that the tender winners in particular should ensure they had a stock of all sizes to avoid discrimination or discomfort to pupils who did not fall within the normal size range.

It also stressed that the difference in the cost of producing uniform items of different sizes should be reflected in the price, so that the price of a polo shirt at kindergarten should not be the same as that of secondary school students.

Uniform items for mixed gender schools should be, as much as possible, the same for boys and girls, to allow parents the option to hand down the clothes to siblings.

It hoped that the market would open up.The authority said that if the recommendations were followed, the market would not remain in the hands of a few suppliers.