The branded uniform limit became law today. From 1 September 2026, a primary school cannot require a pupil to have more than three different branded items of uniform in a school year. A secondary school gets the same three, or four if one of them is a tie. Middle schools apply the secondary limits to every pupil on roll.
Almost all the coverage over the summer framed this as a cost story, and it is one. What has had far less attention is where the duty actually sits. It sits with the board.
What the law actually says
Section 35 of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 inserts a new section 551ZA into the Education Act 1996. It was brought into force on 1 September 2026 by regulation 5(b) of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 (Commencement No. 2) (England) Regulations 2026. This is not guidance a board can have regard to and move on from. It is a hard limit, and it applies to maintained schools, academies, alternative provision academies, non-maintained special schools, pupil referral units and city technology colleges.
The wording is worth reading properly. The school "may not require" a pupil to have more than the permitted number of branded items "for use during a school year". You can still sell branded items above the limit, and you can still lend them or hand them out. What you cannot do is make them a condition of turning up or joining in.
"Branded" is wider than a logo
This is where I think a lot of schools will get caught out. The Act says an item is branded if it carries the school or trust name or logo, or if, because of its colour, design, fabric or other distinctive characteristic, it is only available from particular suppliers.
So the plain navy jumper that happens to be a specific shade nobody else stocks counts. The house colour PE top counts. So does a bag, because the Act defines school uniform as a bag and any clothing required for school or for any lesson, club, activity or event facilitated by the school.
That last phrase does a lot of work. It pulls in PE kit, and it pulls in the kit for clubs, teams, trips and performances. If a child needs a branded item to take part in something the school runs, it counts towards the total. A board that has only added up the items on the front page of the uniform list has probably undercounted.
If a child needs a branded item to take part in something the school runs, it counts towards the total.
The duty belongs to the board, not the head
Section 551ZA places the duty on "the appropriate authority". For a maintained school that is the governing body. For an academy it is the proprietor, which means the trust board. Not the headteacher, not the business manager, not the uniform supplier who has been in place for fifteen years.
In practice, the uniform list is usually drafted by staff and rubber stamped by the board once every few years, if that. That was survivable when uniform policy was a matter of local discretion. It is less comfortable now, because if the list breaks the limit, it is the board's decision that broke it.
The practical consequence is straightforward. Someone needs to bring a full, honest count of required branded items to a meeting this term, minute the decision to change or confirm the policy, and record why. A count that stops at the blazer and the jumper is not a full count.
The consultation is the part that gets skipped
The statutory guidance on the cost of school uniforms expects governing boards to consult and work closely with parents on uniform policy, and to arrive at an outcome families can actually live with. That expectation has not gone away because there is now a statutory cap. If anything the cap makes it sharper, because most schools are about to change their list, and changing a uniform list is one of the few governance decisions that costs every family money on a specific date.
I have seen how this goes wrong. A school announces a change in a newsletter in June, families who bought the old kit in May are furious, and the complaint that lands in September is not really about jumpers. It is about not being asked. By the time it reaches the board at stage two or three of the complaints procedure, the board is defending a decision it cannot evidence properly, because there is no record of who was consulted, what they said, or how it shaped the outcome.
The complaint is rarely about the jumper. It is about not being asked.
A short, well run consultation fixes most of that. Not a six week formal exercise, and not a suggestion box. A clear question, sent to every parent, open for a fixed window, with the results written up and taken to the board. That is a couple of hours of work, and it produces a document you can put in front of a complainant, an inspector, or a trust board asking why one school in the group did it differently.
What I would do this term
If your board has not already worked through this, four things are worth doing before half term.
- Count everything. Every item a pupil is required to have, including PE kit, bags, and anything needed for clubs, teams or events the school runs. Include items that are only available from one supplier even if they carry no logo.
- Decide which items stay compulsory and which become optional. Optional branded items are still allowed, provided a generic alternative is genuinely acceptable in practice and not just on paper.
- Ask parents before you finalise it, not after. Give them the shortlist and a real choice, and set a closing date.
- Minute the decision with the numbers, the consultation response and the reasoning attached. That record is what protects the board later.
Trusts have an extra job here. If your schools have historically set their own uniform lists, you now have a single statutory limit applying across all of them and a board that carries the duty for each one. Running the same consultation question across every school in the trust, at the same time, gives you a comparable set of answers and one clean evidence trail rather than nine different ones.
The wider point
Uniform is a small thing that families feel immediately. That is exactly why it is a good test of whether a board can consult properly. The boards that handle this well in the autumn term will find the same habit useful when the next thing lands, and something always lands.
We build the voting and consultation tools that schools use for this sort of thing, from parent governor elections to short policy consultations, with the audit trail produced automatically rather than assembled afterwards. If you would like to see how a uniform consultation would run at your school, have a look at choicevoting.co.uk or drop me a line. Happy to talk it through either way.