She said they had helped around the same number of people as last year, but the costs people were dealing with had gone up.
“Last year we [helped] about the same number of people, but the uniforms were cheaper,” she said.
Sharrock said the increased cost of uniforms was further compounding issues families were facing with the cost of other essential items.
“People are experiencing the rise in the food cost, the housing cost and the petrol cost, and it’s not being leveled out with their income.”
This issue cannot be avoided for most local families, as a majority of Whanganui schools across primary, intermediate and secondary school education require students to attend in uniform.
“Most of our schools in Whanganui have school uniforms, and they are essential.”
As well as uniform costs, the requirement from many schools for pupils to have electronic devices was making school less accessible for low-income families.
“They’re also bringing out the Chromebooks and the Chromebooks are essential, and it’s actually just making it harder for people,” Sharrock said.
She said these extra costs, on top of what people were already struggling with, put added stress on families.
“It’s not fun for people to have to try to meet all these costs and still survive, and when you’re struggling to budget on a weekly basis... it’s really hard to be able to save up for a $500 dollar uniform.”
Anderson’s Uniform Store owner Darrell Smith said prices for uniforms had not significantly increased compared to last year, save for a few areas.
“There have been some increases, but not drastic, and not across the board,” he said.
The areas which had increased were due to a number of reasons, chief among those being the cost of importing materials from overseas increasing dramatically.
“There’s a lot of things our suppliers have been dealing with, especially the cost of getting stuff from overseas back to New Zealand,” he said.
However, he said suppliers and Anderson’s tried to absorb those cost increases as much as they could.
“We know it’s a sensitive area, so we try to keep prices as low as we possibly can.”
He said the store buys back any uniform for a school they supply to be recycled and put back on the shelf as part of their second-hand collection.
The second-hand items were a growing part of Anderson’s business, Smith said.
KidsCan CEO Julie Chapman said soaring costs were affecting children in poverty especially.
“Schools tell us they are now dealing with a ‘cost of learning’ crisis, with students’ education suffering as their families struggle to stay afloat,” she said.
This needed to be urgently addressed, Chapman said, as a good education is a child’s best chance of escaping poverty.
As well as this, she said there was a stark difference in the attitudes of children who start the school year without the tools for learning and those who do.
“Kids in poverty see that they are missing out, and that has an impact on their self-esteem and their motivation to learn.”
The ongoing cost of living crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic had made life harder for social services like Birthright as well, Sharrock said, as there were many more applicants for funding.
“The funders are getting a lot more applications in, so it’s really, really difficult to get funding these days for services and stuff that [is] actually really essential in our community,” she said.
People can make donations to Birthright and KidsCan via their websites.
