Debate contribution: School Uniforms (Guidelines and Allowances) Bill: Consideration Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Pat Sheehan on 15 September 2025.

MLA

Mr Pat Sheehan

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

15 September 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

School Uniforms (Guidelines and Allowances) Bill: Consideration Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5099214

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I would like to be able to get up and say that I welcome the Bill as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it does not go very far at all, and that is the difficulty with it. We on the Committee had a very productive Committee Stage. The Committee heard evidence from many witnesses, including from schools, teachers, parents, the Children's Commissioner, representatives from the Human Rights Commission and others. There was an opportunity to include in the Bill affordability and equality, not just for boys and girls but for children with special needs, so that they would also win from the legislation. The Minister and his party, I have to say, were opposed to practically all the amendments that were brought forward by the Committee. That is unfortunate. What we are left with is a watered-down piece of draft legislation. We are not even sure what impact it will have. I suppose that what the Minister wanted was for the Assembly to give him the power to make guidelines. What the Committee wanted was for the Bill to be much more prescriptive, because, whatever guidelines the Minister may intend to implement at some stage, another Minister could come in and change those guidelines. If the Bill were more prescriptive and issues such as affordability and equality were included in it, we would be in a much stronger position. The amendments in group 1 ensure that any guidance that comes out of the Bill is not only written but enforced and monitored. I will speak briefly in support of amendment Nos 1, 4, 8, 9, 11 and 12. I will not support the Minister's amendment No 10. Amendment No 1 puts a clear duty on the Department to review guidelines at least once every three years. Families deserve the reassurance that those rules will not gather dust on a shelf. The cost of uniforms is not static. In recent years, we have seen the impact of inflation as well as the behaviour of some schools and suppliers, all of which drives up prices for families. Recently, we saw that a school had introduced a new blazer for its high performers. No one objects to schools acknowledging excellence in their school, but what that school did was to say that, if you were a high achiever, you could get a £180 woollen blazer to show how good you had been. I listened to the Minister — this is why I am so concerned about his intentions — when he was asked about that in a radio interview, and he could not even mildly criticise what that school had done. That was very disappointing. It showed that the Minister is not really serious about building affordability into the legislation. Amendment No 4 requires guidelines to be laid before the Assembly. That is democratic oversight: pure and simple. If we want parents to trust the process, we cannot have decisions taken quietly, behind closed doors, by the Minister and his colleagues. As my colleague Daniel McCrossan said earlier, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant". Amendment No 8 forces the Department to report on uniform costs, to assess the impact of any cost cap and, if no cap is introduced, to explain why. Families deserve full transparency and a clear rationale from the Minister if no cap is introduced. Amendment No 9 gives the legislation some teeth by compelling intervention when schools ignore the rules. Is that not just simple and straightforward? If you tell a school what it has to do, and the school says, "No, we do not like that and will not do it", should there not be some sanction for that? There are already guidelines, although they are not statutory, on school uniforms and school uniform policy.

I wonder whether the Minister has spoken to any schools about implementing those guidelines. I am pretty sure that he has not.

If schools ignore statutory guidelines, what will the Minister and the Department do? Will they say, "Come on, play the game. Get your act together and implement a fair and affordable uniform policy in your school"? The school will say, "Minister, sling your hook". What will the Minister do? The days of schools ignoring such guidance cannot —

I thank the Member for his intervention, and I agree wholeheartedly. Any legislation must garner the confidence of the House in the Minister's seriousness about the intention behind it. It seems that the Minister is involved in a bit of window dressing, saying, "Look at me. I will bring in legislation that will make uniforms more affordable". In reality, we have thus far seen no evidence that that will happen. The Chair of the Committee will know that we were promised that we would see the guidelines. At one stage — probably April or May; maybe even before then — we were told that we would see them the following week. When they did not arrive, we were told, "It might take us a couple of weeks. We have to dot the i's and cross the t's". Where are the guidelines? We still have not seen them. If the Minister were serious about trying to marshal support for the legislation, the guidelines would have been available long before today. As I said, the days of schools ignoring guidance cannot continue. Families are relying on the legislation to make a difference. Amendment No 11 removes ambiguity, and amendment No 12 requires directions to schools to be published. Parents need to know when a school has been instructed and compelled to change course. I will touch on amendment No 10, tabled by the Minister. It would undermine any limited protections that the Bill might have offered to children and young people. It proposes to insert the word "undue", which, in my opinion, raises the threshold for intervention. That means that pupils could still be punished for uniform breaches as long as the punishment is not judged to be undue. The point of the Bill is to stop unfair penalties on families, not legitimise them with wriggle room. We will oppose that amendment. For Members' information, we recently spoke to a principal whose school has an excellent uniform policy. Parents are able to purchase the uniform of that school for £2 less than the uniform grant. With the Bill, the Minister could have done the same thing for every school. One of the big issues in our schools is absenteeism. Many children are absent because they have not conformed with uniform policy. That principal told us that he does not care what children wear, as long as they are in school. We should all have that attitude in trying to get our children into school, because we all know about the long tail of underachievement here. There is a wider issue. To date, as I have mentioned, neither the DUP Education Minister nor his Department has produced the draft guidelines that will accompany the Bill. Never mind that we were promised the guidelines; it is just not good practice, if we are serious about legislating properly, that the Department and the Minister should promise us guidelines but we do not get them. We are being asked to blindly trust the Minister, and we are not prepared to do that. That is exactly why we worked with others across the Chamber, particularly the Alliance Party and the SDLP, in the Education Committee, to table wide-ranging amendments so that, no matter which Minister may be in post, families could be assured of consistency and fairness regardless of who holds office. Finally, while we support this group of amendments, again, I must mention the missed opportunity. We tabled amendments on children's rights, on equality, on making reasonable accommodations for pupils with additional needs and on uniform reuse schemes, all of which were considered not to be part of the Bill and that, therefore, cannot be debated today. Perhaps, in due course, we will get an explanation of why that is the case. Sin a bhfuil le rá agam.

1,338 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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