Bedford council working with schools over uniforms

A senior Bedford borough officer said the council is working with schools to help families be able to afford school uniforms.

Chris Morris, acting chief officer for education, SEND, and schools, was responding to concerns raised by a councillor at yesterday’s Children’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee (Monday, September 5).

Councillor John Wheeler (Conservative, Wootton) asked about the council’s guidance around school uniforms.

“Obviously with the cost of living and what’s going to happen, [the cost of] school uniforms is frightening.

“I know everybody has to stick to a school uniform.

“But it’s just trying to be a little bit more flexible and possibly in the guidelines just saying a white shirt [or] a white polo shirt.

“It’s being able to say to parents that you can go to Tesco’s, it can be a red top, it doesn’t have to have the school logo,” he said.

Mr Morris replied: “There has been guidance [around school uniforms] issued from the Department for Education for schools, which should have come into effect for this academic year.

“Which is really advising schools against overusing logoed school uniform around the point of ‘please minimise it as much as possible’.

“That’s something that we’ve been preaching as a local authority for quite some time now.”

“We do not want to be pricing people out or not decide to come in on a PE day because they haven’t got adequate PE kit, that’s not where we want to be.

“[So we are] working with our academies and working with our maintained schools to make sure they’re doing everything to support families, to make sure we’re doing everything we can to try and support them to be able to do that,” he said.

Councillor Wheeler added that other councils have offered help with school shoes.

“As children are in their shoes all day, cheap shoes will obviously affect their feet,” he said.

“I don’t know if this is something that Bedford Borough have done in the past or something they can think about, but assisting certain families with shoes I think will be a great asset,” he added.

Mr Morris said the council is always looking at what else it might be able to do to support families who are struggling.

“So I’ll take that back and we’ll have a consideration around what might or might not be possible for us as a local authority,” he said.

Source

Children’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee 5/9/22 via YouTube livestream