Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the competitive tendering policy model for school uniforms in reducing costs for parents.

Decisions about school uniform, including the decision to have one and how it is sourced, are made at school level. The Department issues advisory guidance to schools to help them formulate their policies, which can be found here: www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-uniform.

The guidance emphasises that schools should give the highest priority to cost considerations when setting school uniform policies. Exclusive single supplier contracts should be avoided unless regular tendering competitions are run where suppliers can compete for the contract and best value for parents is secured.

The Department has not made a recent formal assessment of the effectiveness of competitive tendering policies for reducing the costs of school uniform. In 2012, the Office of Fair Trading (now the Competition and Markets Authority) published a report finding parents who could shop around for school uniform could save between £5-10 on items of uniform. The Department’s own research in 2015 also found that most items of uniform tended to be substantially cheaper when they could be purchased anywhere.

The research by the Office of Fair Trading is available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140402181611/http://www.oft.gov.uk/OFTwork/markets-work/othermarketswork/school-uniforms.

The Department’s Cost of Uniform Survey is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cost-of-school-uniform-2015.