Dear Mr Hinds Please excuse me not addressing you with Rt Hon etc, congratulations on your new appointment to Secretary of State for Education. I'm a parent that has been writing to the DfE & my own MP Amber Rudd for a couple of years now to no avail, on the subject of the ever increasing School/Academy Uniform costs & unreasonable demands the said organisations are making regarding uniform. It is becoming a major concern not just for me & other parents but this matter was also raised by Sarah Jones the MP for Croydon Central & the Children's Society to name but 2. I can't speak for Sarah Jones enquiries with the DfE but my own have resulted after many, many letters going back & forth, finally on 20/09/17 my MP confirmed that the Govt's intention is to put the Uniform Guidance on a statutory footing when a suitable legislative opportunity arises. That is nice to hear on one hand but on the other that leaves the matter rather up in the air, does the DfE have a time frame, weeks, months or years? Which parts of the Guidelines are going to be legislated as at present its so ambiguous us parents have no way of knowing if this will help with our situation or make it worse, I have asked again & again for clarification as to what & when it is to be legislated? Also they would not tell me so I had to involve my MP what a waste of her time when they could have just answered my questions directly, not that they answered any of them even via her other than confirming the legislative intention! Poor show quite frankly from the DfE. After all they are still run using public money & should not be permitted to treat the public as nothing more than a nuisance with no rights to any information. Many others have raised this issue too such as the Children's Society has been asking for change since 2015, the CMA spent many years researching the issue & made demands to Schools/Academies to make changes to their purchase options for uniform, which has been largely ignored by an ever growing number of schools who are making their uniforms more specialised, therefore much more expensive & only available from dedicated suppliers, they are asking for more & more logo's on them right down to the PE socks, in fact Mr Hinds some schools are demanding a logo on every single stitch of the uniform leaving only the undies free from a logo! Please do not refer me to the Uniform Guidelines, I have read them I have had the DfE refer me to them every single time they have bothered to send me one of their what can only be described as 'fob off' letters, it's a shame most Head Teachers have chosen to ignore the advice within those guidelines. I know of 1 such Head that said "They are only guidelines & as such we don't have to follow them". The inconsistency of uniform demands throughout the UK is vast & unfair, we cannot pick our children's education provider by uniform code, how is it fair to parents if costs for uniform throughout the Country vary by as much as £150, even in the same town you can have a School permitting plain uniform readily available from supermarkets at low cost to the dedicated supplier only uniforms costing as much as four times that price, how is that acceptable? The cost of School uniforms should be within a few pound depending on regional price differences but not so vastly different & certainly not so different within the same region! I've heard from parents that have had demands from their Schools for PE kits costing over £55, that's JUST the PE kit! I appeal to your knowledge of Economics as to how are those sort of costs acceptable especially in our current societies financial situation, where even working parents are having to go to food banks? These exorbitant financial demands regarding uniforms make a mockery of our 'FREE' education system. The worst offenders for over designed, over logoed expensive uniforms at present are the Academies, but many plain old Schools are following suit. Some establishments are on a par with private School uniform costs. These demands on parents are unreasonable & unacceptable. I hope that you will look at this matter as a matter of urgency, I am more than happy to have a conversation with you on this but you would be the 1st Secretary for Education to engage with me directly, the past 2 hid behind the DfE & my MP. The hierarchy within the DfE refuse to engage with parents they just tell us to follow our School complaints procedures which actually tell you that if you're not satisfied with the result of your complaint, to go the DfE, what a joke. They also tell us parents it's a local matter & should remain so, they do not get involved in local matters. So if it's a local matter then why are the DfE looking to legislate the Guidelines? Contradiction is rife within the DfE in my experience. This is not a parent asking for no uniform, this is a parent asking for standardisation of uniform rules so that parents throughout the UK are on a level playing field regardless of where they live or whether their children attend a School or an Academy, with regards to the costs involved. The uniforms are usually at the whim of the Head Teacher, some parents have told me their schools have had as many as 4 uniform changes in recent years, each time a Head Teacher changes often the uniform does too, with Schools changing over to Academies so the uniform is changed as those Academies get taken over by a different Academies Trust so the uniform changes again it goes on & on. Why can schools not have Velcro attached school logo badges so they can be moved from 1 article of clothing to another or lanyards with the School logo on as they do in the working world much cheaper & easier to change too. I've heard all the reasons for uniforms & I'm not entering that argument as none of those reasons explain a £200 plus school uniform nor why it's ok to have every school with a different uniform policy vastly differing from each other! Why should we have to pay four times (plus) for logo riddled, specialised finishes & often impractical for active growing children/young person's uniforms, at the whim of a Head Teacher? Why are some of our Schools demanding smart dress shoes instead of black trainer style shoes which are impractical if you want young people to be active, dress shoes are not suitable for kicking a ball about or other such break time activities but some Schools will allow trainer style shoes, whilst others don't, why is the DfE not resolving this matter? We have an epidemic of obese young people in the UK yet they are often being forced to wear restrictive, impractical for exercise shoes by their School. Why is the DfE allowing such variations in uniform throughout the UK? I'm told the DfE prefer to give Schools autonomy, yet it interferes with pretty much everything else to do with Schools which is why Teachers have been arguing so much with the DfE for the past few years. This matter can no longer be left in the hands of the individual Schools/Academies, as far too many are abusing the autonomy they're being given regarding uniform demands. Please be the Secretary of State for Education that finally resolves this cost issue in favour of the purse of the parents throughout the UK once & for all & I respectfully urge you to do it quickly. I look forward to hearing back from you & am hopeful it will be from you & that it will be a constructive reply. Kind Regards Amanda Frier-Russell A very frustrated parent