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AN ever-growing number of schools are now insisting that all school uniforms are bought through the school, often at prices at least twice those charged by established retailers with reputations to protect, but used to operating within a competitive environment.
This is the end result of a process that started with a desire that uniforms should be uniform, with a limited number of brands accepted, and seems to have ended with the school tied closely to a single manufacturer in an opaque arrangement with no details of how the profits are split and what sort of mark-up is charged by that manufacturer and what sort of mark-up is charged by the school.
The result is very expensive uniforms with any increase in quality completely unjustified by the rise in the price.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education is very clear on uniforms for Government schools. The school can set down a uniform, that is style and colour and design, but cannot fix a supplier and certainly cannot establish a monopoly, let alone a monopoly at a school shop.
When we look at uniforms, absolute standardisation is impossible. After a hundred or more washings, months or even years in the sun, colours fade.
Even a fancy blazer will be in the sun and rain and the colour will alter, even if the parent does not insist on a good scrub when it is filthy rather than taking it to a dry cleaner.
Considering that some school uniform items would pass down through several children so the youngest would be wearing clothes that were close to the end of their lives, and there was a moderately thriving second hand market, the effects of weathering, washing and fading were factored in.
Uniforms used to be very easy. There was a time when all boys wore khaki shirts and shorts and all girls a green dress. Jerseys and blazers were green.
Ties, belts, hat bands, dress badges and blazer badges varied and were particular to a school. All this was designed to make it easy to move schools: a few small items had to be bought and a bit of sewing, and the uniform of the old school was the uniform of the new school. A lot of families sewed some of the items, especially girls’ dresses.
At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, schools were allowed to have their own uniforms. Boys were still largely constrained. The khaki shirt and shorts could be varied with grey shirt and shorts, and even with a pale coloured shirt, with about half a dozen colours available.
Blazers did vary, although almost all were single colour, with no stripes, and there were less than a dozen colours to choose from.
Stockists simply widened their range. One factor allowed multiple manufacturers and home sewing. There was to start with minimal difference in the grey and khaki cloth colours for boys, and in practice none once the effects of a 100 good scrubs were included.
Almost all girls dresses were made from a David Whitehead fabric, and that textile factory made a uniform fabric for every school.
So every manufacturer had to use the same fabric, and home sewers simply went to their favourite fabric shop and bought the required number of metres of fabric for the particular school. It was simple and efficient.
Private schools had always had their own uniforms, outside the ranges prescribed for Government schools, but even here selection was fairly basic. Sometimes just two or three stockists were selected, but so long as a uniform from another source looked reasonably close to the uniform from a standard stockist, no one was going to make a federal case over it, let alone send the child home. And that was from the expensive private schools.
Then came the trouble. Schools started opening their own uniform shops. At the beginning this was just a convenience for parents. The shop was usually just a small operation that was leased out as a part-time business to a parent, and there was obviously no obligation to buy from the school.
It was convenient since lost or damaged items of uniform could be quickly replaced.
Then came the new order. Part of it appears to have been generated by a manufacturer approaching the school and working out a deal. The manufacturer and the school would both have monopolies, one to make and one to sell.
The deal was sold as a way of ensuring uniformity in school uniforms, but it quickly became obvious that there were profits to be made, large profits, and that these could be split.
One problem with the single source uniforms sold through a school is that it is extremely rare to be told just how the manufacturer was chosen, and even who did the choosing.
The actual accounts are even more opaque, so the profits and who makes them are difficult to find out. Parents are certainly not told and the possibility of corrupt deals thus does arise.
Some schools do justify the single source for uniforms with the school as the single retailer as a way of raising extra funds, in effect getting round the ban on fee and levy rises without majority parental approval backed by the extra approval needed from the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education. Uniform prices need neither, so the temptation is there.
Schools have been encouraged to find extra sources of revenue, but few in the Ministry pressing that policy would have assumed that a monopoly on supply of school uniforms would be the chosen route.
These monopolies seem illegal, and not just in terms of education policy. There are laws in Zimbabwe that bar restraint of trade, cartels and deliberate formation of monopolies by having competition barred.
What is now needed is for the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education to enforce its own rules and regulations.
It can probably get round any reasonable objections, and we stress that word reasonable, by issuing a sheet of standard colours, with uniforms having to use those colours, and these days such colours can be very carefully defined so that any manufacturer can match them.
Even if every school had its own colour, they can still be defined so that any supplier can match the colour and the dye used to create it, and that removes almost all the objections.
Even fabric qualities can be precisely defined, and that removes the rest of the objections.
So long as the independent suppliers and home sewers get the colour and fabric quality right, that is all that is required.
Sneaking in a new levy, or even trying for a degree of uniformity that goes beyond the realms of reason and practicality, can be stopped. If a school wants a higher levy or a higher fee then there are procedures that can be followed, and must be followed. Sneaking them in through the back door is not one of those procedures.
Online Reporter
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