Be they state, Church or independent, schools should not go overboard with their designs of specific uniform items in a bid to establish their separate identities. Just one or two simple items, such as the school’s name on shirts or school ties, would be enough to identify the school.
By keeping this in mind schools would alleviate parents’ problems with having to shop from designated suppliers at inflated prices.
This was the salient point of comments aired at a sitting of Parliament’s Social Affairs Committee on Wednesday, following a presentation of the preliminary report on the supply of school uniforms compiled by the Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Society.
The authority has found that prices of the same uniform items in the same grade of boys’ or girls’ school can vary by as much as 393.4 per cent.
MCCAA Director-General Sylvann Aquilina Zahra said the authority had indeed noticed improvement, but not enough. It intended to hold meetings with all stakeholders before making the report final.
Stephen Cachia, College Principal of St Margaret’s College, said that with the introduction of state colleges their uniforms had become specific but not unduly so. It was obvious from the report that state schools had the lowest uniform prices.
Dr Aquilina Zahra said exclusive contracts with suppliers made for long queues in one place, sometimes on the other side of Malta, with resultant degradation of service.
Labour MP Carmelo Abela said there should also be respect for parents, who usually had to face a huge outlay at one go especially if they had more than one child changing schools. No parent would think of buying their child just one shirt, for example.
He queried the discrepancies between the authority’s findings and much lower figures supplied officially in answer to a parliamentary question.
Mr Cachia said state schools authorities did care about parents’ financial problems.
Nationalist MP Michael Gonzi asked if the authority could bring pressure to bear on prices, in view of the huge differences in some items.
Dr Aquilina Zahra said the MCCAA was talking to schools to make them understand the consequences of their ways, and was ready to investigate both schools and retailers in a bid for transparency.
Answering a question by Nationalist MP Frederick Azzopardi, she said the authority had only compared common uniform items.
Labour MP Anthony Zammit made a strong case for not going overboard in designing specific school uniforms. Besides, one had to think of rapid changes in stature when boys and girls went through puberty.
Committee chairman Edwin Vassallo (PN) commented that while the study was giving the price of a complete school uniform, there were items that had to be bought in multiple quantities. He would like more immediacy in action because while one was studying an issue, others were suffering. Was there need for new legislation?
He adjourned the meeting sine die while calling on all interested to make their comments on socialaffairs@parliament.mt