Do your sums and save money on those expensive uniforms
Just how much should and does it cost to kit out our kids for school?
Aldi and Lidl grabbed headlines earlier this summer with back-toschool ‘uniform specials’ for a fiver. This seems a world – or at least a substantial sum of money – away from the experiences of some parents.
Dublin mother Anne-Marie Murtagh, said she has to pay nearly €500 to kit out a schoolgoing ‘first year’ for her south Dublin school.
Alas, even if you could buy generic uniforms, you can’t save 99% of your uniform costs by going to Lidl or Aldi. Both backto-school ‘specials’ from Aldi and Lidl were for two shirts, a trousers or skirt and a jumper. Our mum had to purchase a much wider range of gear.
These were very real expenses for her. But not everyone had to splash out on so many items.
For the purpose of our comparison, we whittled the list down to seven items. In AnneMarie’s case buying those items from her school’s non-generic range (i.e. a specialist shop) would cost €286, which is still a fair chunk of change.
However, we looked at other colleges with non-generic uniforms too and came up with an average cost for these type of schools. And this came in at €244.
Yet even that is three times the bill for Tesco and Dunnes, which were ‘neck and next’ at around €72 respectively, while M&S was priced at €105.50. The quality of the items was not assessed and obviously that can vary.
Many schools insist on many more non-generic items such as blazers and school socks which sends the bills even higher.
Lidl and Aldi no longer have uniforms for sale, so they are not included in the survey. For the record, this list of items would have cost around €30 with either store when they were available.