Budget-conscious parents might be tempted by cut-price school uniforms, but should they have ethical concerns about how they were sourced and who produced them?

My three-and-a-half-year-old is due to begin nursery school in September and must wear a uniform consisting of a royal blue sweater and tracksuit bottoms, white polo shirt and black shoes.

All of these items are widely available from supermarkets and are extremely cheap (from £2 per item!). I'm wondering if these cheap prices necessarily mean that they've been manufactured unethically (in sweatshops perhaps) and, if so, where can I source ethical versions? Your help would be much appreciated.

Alex, by email
The wide range of responses to this question proves just how vexing the issue of buying school uniforms can be for parents.

Despite the repeated assurances over the years from retailers and the textile industry that everything is hunky dory, there is no denying that many people's gut instinct is that super cheap clothing must be the product of sweatshops. Repeated exposures don't exactly do much to dampen these concerns.

But, as ever, such issues are far more complex than they might appear. Skinz and chaosclaire raised the important point that cheap supermarket deals on uniforms at this time of year - and the resulting price war - could mean that they are lost leaders.

That's to say, they are sold at a loss just to get more punters through the door, much in the way that popular everyday items such as milk and bananas are commonly sold at a loss.
This question also kicked off a tangential, but nonetheless interesting, discussion about whether children should be made to wear uniforms at school, or whether they should just wear whatever they want.

Grisgris and loupblanc got things going by arguing that children would be happier without uniforms. But Katali fought back arguing that uniforms help to hide inequalities of income.

Biergut agreed, saying the experience of going to school in uniform-free Germany in the 1980s was not enjoyable due to the teasing about who got to wear Boss or Barbour (!) and who didn't.

There was also a feisty debate about whether, by refusing to buy supercheap clothing, we might do people in the developing world out of the only job they can get, no matter how harsh we might judge the working conditions to be. Parttimer said:

Those jobs may not be great, but if there were preferable alternatives, the same people would presumably be doing them already. They are also unlikely to have access to unemployment benefits. All in all, we, and they, are better off if we keep buying the clothes.

Garetko, Thomas Lion and others fought back, arguing this was a somewhat naïve world-view.
Regarding potential solutions to the overall dilemma of where to source a school uniform, polhotpot suggested buying second-hand. Indeed, most schools do organise a way for parents to pass on outgrown or spare uniforms to those who might need them.

Pawan and Chorltonite pointed readers towards the ever-useful Ethical Consumer and its 2008 guide to buying school uniforms. Clean Slate came out on top by a country mile with all the supermarkets picking up pitiful scores by comparison. Sadly, it doesn't appear that Clean Slate is still operational. Its website is down and repeated attempts to reach it by phone have so far failed. (Does anyone have any further news?) Perhaps this is a salutary warning about why firms offering certain ethical guarantees will soon go under if we don't support them? (But isn't that the cloud that hangs over the whole concept of ethical consumerism? Discuss.)

Finally, I approached some of the leading supermarkets for their response, but particularly to the issue of whether they sell uniforms as loss leaders and what sweatshop-free guarantees they can offer their customers. Asda, the Walmart-owned supermarket which is currently campaigning to stop some schools forcing parents to buy uniforms from "expensive specialist suppliers", gave the fullest answer:
We sell more schoolwear each year than any other retailer. We therefore feel we have a responsibility to constantly improve quality and to keep prices low without compromise to ethical standards. Our customers can shop with a clear conscience.

There are so many reasons we can sell uniforms at such affordable prices, but the main one is the Asda 'every day low cost' business model. It is designed to reduce waste and take out costs, without compromise on quality, at every possible opportunity.

We have the lowest operating costs of all the supermarkets and we pass those savings directly on to our customers. George [Asda's clothing range] sells more uniforms than any other retailer and so therefore enjoys the benefits of economies of scale.

Not only that, we plan months to a year in advance, allowing us to use the factories at quieter times of the year when normally they don't have as much business. We don't use costly air freight to ship it into the UK either.

It is delivered in the most cost effective way possible so that doesn't affect the price customers pay. We also centrally source things like cotton, fabrics, buttons and zips in bulk to ensure that we get the best price and then we share those costs savings with our suppliers.

We don't work with any middlemen. We deal with factories directly so we have greater visibility and control over where and how our product is made. We were founder members of the Ethical Trading Initiative and our ethical processes are some of the most strict in the industry.

We have a dedicated ethics team based in the UK and in our Bangladesh office. We have teams on the ground that can conduct unannounced audits at any time on any of the factories we source from, plus we have over 16,000 official audits a year. - Guardian