Dublin South West Sinn F\u00e9in TD, Se\u00e1n Crowe, has welcomed the news that Minister for Education, Ruair\u00ed Quinn, has committed to facilitating a survey of parents on the cost of school uniforms.<\/p>\n
Crowe has long campaigned and lobbied the Minister for Education to reduce unnecessarily high back to school costs, and in particular the rip off cost of many school uniforms.<\/p>\n
Deputy Crowe said:<\/p>\n
\u201cI welcome that the Minister for Education has agreed to survey parents on their views on the cost of school uniforms. The Minister must ensure that school uniforms are affordable to all.<\/p>\n
\u201cFamilies are being crippled by this government\u2019s austerity measures and budget cutbacks, and the last thing they should have to worry about is will they be able to afford to send their children to school.<\/p>\n
\u201cBarnardos 8th<\/sup>\u00a0annual report on back to school costs, which was published in August, found that 74% of parents of primary school children and 97% of parents of secondary school children responded that they had to buy uniforms with the school crest on them, which greatly added to the cost.<\/p>\n \u201cI am on record for having publicly called on the Education Minister Ruair\u00ed Quinn to pro- actively introduce measures to eliminate this school uniform racket.<\/p>\n \u201cMany schools view uniforms as tool of equality when everyone has to dress the same, however if they are not affordable for some they exacerbate inequality.<\/p>\n \u201cNo matter what comes from the Minister\u2019s proposed survey, he must ensure that school uniforms are affordable to all families, and begin to seriously tackle the extortionate back to school costs.<\/p>\n \u201cParents don’t want to hear any more excuses from Minister Quinn they want to hear that he is finally going to do something practical to tackle these scandalous and unacceptably high costs.\u201d<\/p>\n ENDS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dublin South West Sinn F\u00e9in TD, Se\u00e1n Crowe, has welcomed the news that Minister for Education, Ruair\u00ed Quinn, has committed to facilitating a survey of parents on the cost of school uniforms. Crowe has long campaigned and lobbied the Minister for Education to reduce unnecessarily high back to school costs, and in particular the rip […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,25,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-austerity","category-education","category-youth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1251,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions\/1251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}