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

Debate contribution by Mr Nick Mathison on 15 September 2025.

MLA

Mr Nick Mathison

Party at the time

Alliance Party

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 5099969

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank all Members for their contributions to the debate. There has been a lot of openness to take interventions and to go through the issues in considerable detail. That has helped the debate and the considerations that are now before us. First, I want to highlight the phrase that the Minister used in response to my colleague Nuala McAllister: "if the school so chooses". That is a telling phrase when we are looking at amendments that are concerned with the content of the guidelines. It has always been the Committee's concern that guidelines will come forward, particularly in the space around comfort and practicality, that may give schools permission to do certain things. We have talked about girls being able to wear trousers, and we have talked about play-based learning. There is a range of things, and the Minister suggested that permission would be given for schools to take those kinds of steps and decisions. The phrase "if the school so chooses" does not, to me, give enough comfort that the guidelines will require the schools to make interventions in those spaces. When we are thinking about the content, I would like to move beyond "if the school so chooses" and into the space of guidelines that really create a clear direction of travel in areas that the school needs to follow and must follow. That is where there is maybe some divergence around this group of amendments.

I thank the Member for the intervention. Absolutely. When we give permission to do certain things that are right and appropriate, that still leaves others who may not be afforded that right, if the school chooses not to exercise that permission. That is not an acceptable scenario. The Minister also said that there is a concern about:

" doing the right thing",

and not just being seen to do something: I absolutely take his point on that. We are all concerned that the outworking of the legislation does the right thing. The right thing is that it brings down the cost of school uniforms, and the right thing should also be that it improves the comfort and practicality of uniforms for children. I am struggling a little in that I am not quite sure what the Bill will do, other than create the guidelines, because we just do not know what the Minister will ask schools to do. He used the phrase "unfair costs", which is the language of the Bill. We all want to see unfair costs tackled, but I go back to my point that it is not clear how that will be done. The Committee's interest in bringing that degree of prescription was to ensure that we were doing the right thing and not just doing something. However, in fact, what we have before us today, in terms of the amendments selected, is not a huge suite of prescriptive interventions. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, when we look at the group 2 amendments and the content of the guidelines, we see that the Bill is still largely as it was when the Minister brought it to us, with some changes that should not keep anybody awake at night. I will add that there is the option of Further Consideration Stage. The Minister referenced concerns about language, ordering and sequencing. There is every opportunity for those issues to be ironed out at Further Consideration Stage, and I am sure that Members will engage in that process. The debate has made it clear where we have landed. We have, on the one hand, the Minister and the Department, who want a Bill that does not prescribe and relies entirely on the guidelines, and, on the other, Members who are keen on certain areas to ensure that the Bill is clear about what it will ask schools to deliver and the interventions that will be required in school uniform policies. I remain on the side that would like clarity about what schools will be asked to do, because it is that clarity that will give us assurances that the costs will come down. I will finish on a point about the Minister's sense that Members are, perhaps, behaving irresponsibly or weighing in to do something that will cause some sort of crisis in our school system. If everybody is on the same page in wanting to deal with costs and if schools want to work with the Department, I have no doubt that, if there is a little bit of prescription in the Bill that gives the Department pause for thought to ensure that the guidance includes additional things that it had perhaps not considered, to move beyond permission and into requiring schools to do certain things, the system will step up and engage with that guidance. Nobody here is trying to act or vote irresponsibly. Every Member in the Chamber wants to see the costs brought down. I commend the group 2 amendments to the House as positive interventions on affordability — we are all clear that some of the single-supplier arrangements need to be dealt with — and comfort and practicality.

858 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:08 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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