Asda, Sainsbury’s, M&S & more: where to get the best value-for-money school uniform

If you're kitting out the kids for a return to school, where does your money go the furthest? We look at which retailers offer the best value for money.

We are just a couple of weeks away from the nation’s children heading back to school – and as a result, parents across the country are starting to think about school uniform.

School uniform can be a financial worry for parents at the best of times.

In 2018, a study by charity The Children’s Society suggested that as many as a million children live in families across England who are getting into debt in order to cover the rising cost of school uniforms.

This is likely to be a bigger worry this year as an awful lot of families have to get by on reduced incomes due to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So which stores offer the best value for money for plain school clothing?

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Crunching the numbers

Parenting website MadeForMums has just published the results of a new study into the quality of school uniforms that we can pick up from major retailers, which offers a useful insight.

Hundreds of families were asked to test the latest school uniforms on sale from the big retailers, and grade them out of 10 for quality, ease of wear, comfort and fit, washing; shrinkage and removing staining, as well as value for money.

The site then calculated an overall score for each retailer.

How the big retailers compare

Here’s how each of the stores performed in the tests from MadeForMums:

Brand	Fit	Washing	Quality	Value for money	Overall
Marks & Spencer	8.67	8.85	8.99	8.18	8.67
Next	8.47	8.60	8.74	8.09	8.48
Tu at Sainsbury’s	8.32	8.25	8.28	8.36	8.30
George at Asda	8.3	8.01	8.17	8.68	8.29
F+F at Tesco	8.22	8.29	8.25	8.31	8.24
Nutmeg at Morrisons	8.35	8.14	8.14	8.30	8.23
John Lewis	8.23	8.44	8.48	8.30	8.23
Matalan	8.03	7.87	7.73	7.93	7.89
Aldi	7.86	7.48	7.56	8.42	7.83
Lidl	7.53	7.03	6.92	7.75	7.31

As you can see, M&S romps home, scoring well in every category. The fact it managed both the top score in quality and a healthy score in value for money suggests that while it may cost a little more at the outset, you won’t regret it.

But just because you’re buying from a ‘premium’ brand, that doesn’t mean you’ll always be thrilled at the outcome ‒ all of the main supermarkets outperform John Lewis, for example.

Make the most of special offers

When it comes to purchasing school uniform, it’s not easy to consider things on a ‘price per item’ basis. After all, you may buy school shirts in packs of three, or find better offers available when buying two packs of school uniform.

Special offers that are based on buying extra items are important to bear in mind when working out where to pick up your uniform from.

As with any kind of shopping, there’s no point buying more than you actually need just to reduce the average cost per item.

But if you are going to use it ‒ and speaking personally, we could always use an extra pair of school trousers ‒ then it can prove a smart move to take advantage of a multi-buy deal.

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Cheap doesn’t equal value for money

But as a parent, if there’s one thing that I’ve learnt about school uniform it’s that simply picking up shirts and trousers from a shop as it’s the cheapest option is not always the best bet.

In fact, the uniform that we’ve bought in the past from supermarkets, while cheap, has swiftly fallen apart.

By contrast, spending a little more to get the school branded uniform, or the clothes from places like M&S or Next, has paid off as that uniform has lasted far longer.

There’s even greater benefit when you can pass that uniform down from one child to the next, as we have with our sons.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say, as I’ve been in the position where we could afford to spend more in the first instance. Nonetheless it’s an important consideration before you head straight off to the most budget-friendly retailer.