An Oxfam poll has revealed that over the 12 years a child is in education parents are forking out approximately £36,400 in kitting them out for school.

With £545.28 being spent out annually on clothing for one child you can understand why some peoples budgets are stretched to the limit come new term time if they have more than a single child to buy for.

With twins we’ve had to buy doubles of everything since they were born so as you can imagine it’s been quite costly for us most years when it comes to getting every item on the school essentials list that they’ve needed.

 Even more so when being growing young lads they have at times managed to grow out of shoes, trousers and shirts after only one terms wearing.

However we seem to have had a bit of a result this year as their growing seems to have hit a plateau and we only had to purchase a couple of new shirts and pairs of trousers to replace some garments that had seen slightly better days because everything else still fitted comfortably and looked presentable .

They were more than happy too to just replace their main stationary items like pens , pencils and geometry bits instead of having a full Technicolor pencil case reset as in previous years so all in all back to school wasn’t too much of a hassle for us in September 2017.

Which is just as well really as in the case of many schools in the area by the time September 2019 rolls around we will be expected to have kitted them out fully in the “new” uniform items that must be bought from the official school uniform stockists and can’t be bought cheaper elsewhere.

The savings we have made this year will go on purchasing new grey blazers with silvery trim and grey shirts that herald the fact they have arrived in the higher years of the school and will mean a complete wardrobe overhaul from all the black and white items they have been wearing in the last 4 years.

Don’t get me wrong though I’m not moaning about having to purchase the new uniform , I quite like  the new one in fact I think it’s very smart indeed , and with two years to replace it all by we can spread the cost of it by buying a few items at a time .

However as one of the regular customers in my shop pointed out after having to return some items she’d bought for one of the children in her family because they were now not part of the uniform list where they had been previously, I do hope that by the time 2 years have passed the items I have purchased haven’t become obsolete.