30 blue jumpers

I will have one final rant about the new primary uniform before I give up... Getting down old gym clothes for Léon and Anna last week, I figured there was no point in leaving all the perfectly good and reusable, but now banned, sweatshirts in my loft. It turns out I had exactly thirty, each purchased at a cost of approximately £11. I'd love to meet the person who came up with the idea that five years into a recession was a good time to have each parent, if they have a backlog of jumpers like me, throw £330 in the bin - sorry recycling bucket. With a school roll of 600 kids, if people have on average two at the school at any one time, I guess the council and head teacher have just cost the parent body about £99K in unusable jumpers - and that's before you add the cost of buying the new (boring) grey jumpers. Given everyone needs new ones of those and there are 600 kids, five days a week at about £5 each, the total cost for just our primary is another £15K, so we're down a total of £114K on the first day. It is incredible this madness got through.

(Ok, by popular request, I'll calculate the cost of the new compulsory jacket policy too! Watch this space.)