I've written before about school uniform monopolies and the pricing of school uniforms (see here and here). With the school year about to start, uniform costs have been back in the news this week, but not for the reason you think. As the New Zealand Herald reported today:
A Rotorua school that took a $40,000 swing and provided all students free uniforms and stationery says it has paid off in attendance – and it’s prepared to do the same again.
Kaitao Intermediate School students each receive one formal uniform, one sports uniform and all stationery.
The school, which had about 290 enrolments for 2024 and expects that to grow, uses its annual Ministry of Education bulk operational funding to cover the costs, approved by the Board of Trustees.
School principal Phil Palfrey said providing necessities free meant there was “no reason” students could delay starting school on day one of the term...
The school introduced what he described at the time as a “radical” change last year to ease financial pressures on parents amid the cost-of-living crisis. It had also hoped to improve attendance and engage students not yet enrolled in school.
Palfrey said it resulted in an increase in students starting school during the first three weeks of the term.
It's interesting that a school would willingly give up $40,000 in order to increase student attendance at the start of the school year. Since the school would not be willing to give up its monopoly over selling uniforms unless the perceived benefits exceed the costs, we can use this information to infer how much the school values student attendance.
The school roll is 290, so that $40,000 in foregone uniform and stationery income equates to $137 per student. If we take the (very) conservative assumption that no student would attend school in the first three weeks of the year without a uniform, then that $137 'buys' three weeks of school attendance. That equates to about $46 per student-week. Given the assumption that no student would attend if they had to pay anything, this represents a lower-bound of the value of student attendance to the school.
Interestingly, it also demonstrates the meaningful credit constraints that households face at the start of the year. The school has discovered that eliminating these up-front costs (presumably $137 per student on average) has increased school attendance at the start of the year. For schools in lower socio-economic areas, a cost of $46 per student-week to increase attendance at the start of a school year seems like a bargain to me. In comparison, the free school lunch program saves families $31 per week per child (see here - $62 per week for a two-child family), and is generally regarded as successful (although, despite much rhetoric like this, I haven't seen a credible cost-benefit analysis on that policy).
School attendance at all levels has taken a hit since the pandemic and hasn't recovered to pre-pandemic levels. We should be exploring ways to improve it, and especially getting kids off to a good start at the beginning of the school year. If ending school uniform monopolies is one way to achieve this, then that simply adds more weight to my earlier arguments against those monopolies.
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