New shoes and ...

... lots of other stuff.

Now, the Other Blog is where I will go 'squee, I bought Daughter's schools shoes, they are ...' and link to the (probably) Startrite website. But this is about the practicalities. This is going to be, day by day*, what it's like to send your child off to a state primary school in 2008.

Daughter's school uniform consists of grey skirt, trousers or pinafore (trousers or shorts for boys), white shirt, official school cardigan or jumper; school colour gingham or candy-stripe dress in summer; white socks and black shoes. Pretty straightforward, although on describing it I was asked by a colleague if it was a private school. Is it unusual in that it specifies cardigan or jumper rather than a sweatshirt, and shirts rather than polo shirts? Oh - and there is a tie.

We were sent a guide for parents, by parents and teachers. It says to please put your child in the tie, and please put them in shirts rather than polo shirts, unless you think they'll struggle with either, or fiddle with the tie. Against which, in the safety of my own home, I rebel. Daughter is FOUR, for heaven's sake, she will fiddle with the tie, and she is not the most grown-up and independent of four-year-olds, she will struggle with a shirt. Why inflict a shirt's-worth of buttons on a child (and her teacher/teaching assistant/parent helper) when you can reduce it to a mere three buttons on a polo shirt?

Anyway, I've closely inspected the photos on the website and in the prospectus, and peered out of my living room window at the children on their way to school, and they definitely don't all wear the tie! Phew.

So, in interpretation, this is what Daughter has lined up in her wardrobe waiting for September:

- two grey pinafore dresses, selected for long zips (£10 each, cheaper ones often have short zips)
- three gingham summer dresses, one zip-up (£8) and two with buttons (£4 each), I figure it may still be warm enough for dresses in September, and if not they're in age 5-6, so should (!?) still fit next summer
- six white polo shirts (they come in packs of three, £3 per pack)
- official school cardigan (£9.50)
- five pairs of long white socks and five pairs of white ankle socks (I think £11 in total)
- plain white t-shirts for PE (£3 for a pack of three)
- black shorts for PE (£3 for two)

So that's £68.50 on basic uniform. The shoes will take it over £100, and then there'll be plimsolls to buy in the spring - they don't do PE at all in the settling-in period, which is 6.5 weeks, and after that PE is indoors in bare feet for the rest of the autumn/winter term.

It's not a fortune, but it's not inconsiderable either. But I could have economised on the pinafores, easily, and bought only the cheaper summer dresses - or no summer dresses at all. The cheapest way to do it, I would think, is to buy skirts which will do for all year round, provided not excessive growth takes place. But I think pinafores are easy to deal with for a small child, and certainly easier for a small child to keep vaguely smart - no coming untucked. And the gingham dresses are lovely in the summer. I could also have bought a generic school colour cardigan - seeing as the uniform is officially optional (I think this is a legal requirement of state schools?) I don't see how they can actually mandate a particular cardigan.

During the first of Daughter's one hour twenty minute familiarisation visits to the school, I visited the school shop for a few items. One was the cardigan, and the others were a bookbag (£3.50), water bottle (£1.50) and PE bag (£1.50). It seems no bad thing to have the bookbag so that I'll know exactly where to look for letters from school, and homework when it comes. The children are encouraged to have a water bottle to drink from as they please, and £1.50 seems like a fair price, and the school has a requirement for PE bags for the reception class (don't ask) which means most off the peg ones aren't appropriate. I was going to ask my mum to make one, but at £1.50 she couldn't undercut the school shop! She has customised it though, so it stands out a little from the rest.

There's another £6.50.

And finally, lunchtime accoutrements - Daughter wants a packed lunch. I unwisely asked her if she wanted school dinner or a lunchbox while she was happily tucking into a Waitrose cafe lunchbox, so of course she opted for a lunchbox. She is sticking to this. So she has a completely unnecessary Disney Sleeping Beauty lunch bag, which she will probably want replaced with High School Musical before Christmas, and a pink gingham reusable sandwich wrapper.

£14.00 in total.

£95.50, and no new shoes yet.

You'll also notice that the nametags are missing. I'm not counting those - hey, I have basic accountancy training, I'm not counting the cost of something that'll be used over the next ? years! Anyway, I bought most of them four years ago when Daughter started nursery. I quickly came to my senses and realised that labelling a baby/toddler/pre-schooler's 'nursery clothes' potentially means labelling ALL their clothes, and used hardly any of them. So I have a vast number of sew-in and iron-on labels at my disposal. I've used sew-in for the items that might be passed or sold on (dresses, pinafores, cardigan) and iron-on for those I expect to get trashed, and/or were extremely cheap (polo-shirts and PE kit).

* although the process actually started last May, when we visited the school, and happily decided we liked it enough not to bother visiting any others. In fact, really it started over seven years ago when, with child-rearing in mind, we bought a house not far from what we vaguely understood to be a good school.