Back-to-school shopping: Back-to-school savings & cashback

4 August 2025

It’s that time of year when the working parents in your business are juggling the summer childcare rota with work, planning trips away, and organising what school uniform and school supplies they need to purchase before their children return to school in September. All of this is on top of the financial demands of summer childcare. From how to save money – even if you miss the sales – to tips on supporting children at university, this blog is a must-read for employers of working parents to understand the impact that salary-stretching employee benefits can make.

5 key take aways: How to help employees save money on the back-to-school shop

1. Reduce financial pressure through everyday discounts: Employee Discounts Schemes help parents cut costs on essential school items, including uniforms, footwear, stationery, and bags. By using discounted vouchers and cashback, employees can make significant savings on purchases they already have to make — savings that quickly add up, especially for families with more than one child.

2. Support employee wellbeing and financial resilience: With average uniform and school supply costs reaching nearly £250 per child per year, small but regular savings through discounts or cashback can ease stress for working parents.

3. Improve access to essential tech for school and beyond: The Refurbished Tech Scheme provides affordable access to laptops and phones, which are increasingly necessary for school and university. Parents can spread payments with no interest or debt risk, helping them budget better and ensure their children aren’t left behind digitally, while you boost inclusivity and reduce e-waste.

4. Flexible and accessible employee benefits: Pluxee UK's offerings are designed to be easy to use and implement, available year-round, and accessible through an app. Whether employees prefer immediate savings through vouchers or delayed savings via cashback, they have options to fit their financial habits and schedules.

5. Enhance your employer brand and EVP: By actively helping working parents manage seasonal financial pressures like back-to-school shopping, you strengthen your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). This shows you're a supportive, modern employer that understands and addresses real-life challenges, which can help improve retention, engagement, and recruitment.

If you have time to stick around, let's dive a little deeper.

Content:

When school uniform shopping becomes a financial burden

When are the back-to-school sales?

What school uniform to buy: Government regulations

Why back-to-school shopping is cheaper with Pluxee UK

How to help children pay for university

Reduce the expense of the back-to-school shop with Pluxee UK

When school uniform shopping becomes a financial burden

The Government’s ‘Cost of School Uniforms Survey 2023’, published in September 2024, claims that:

The average total expenditure on school uniform, based on the items required in the school year 2023/24 to date, was £249.58.

The report found that while 26% of parents or carers of children in secondary school had to purchase their entire uniform from specific shops or directly from the school, 76% have more freedom to buy school uniform from outlets.

When it comes to these branded items, there isn’t much opportunity to shop around for the best deal. Unless parents can purchase pre-loved school supplies or hand-me-downs from friends and family, they’ll pay hundreds of pounds each year per child.

Children grow and play, and parents will need to purchase replacements and larger sizes of clothing as needed, which is why it’s essential to help parents make savings where possible.

When are the back-to-school sales?

Back-to-school sales generally start from mid-August, with some beginning in July. Most parents will wait for as long as possible to order new uniform in case there’s an unexpected growth spurt, especially when it comes to footwear. With all the juggling the summer holidays demand, many parents may miss out, with online stock selling fast. That’s why making savings available every day through employee discounts can be such a lifeline, especially when it offers double savings!

What school uniform to buy: Government regulations

The price of school uniforms hasn’t escaped parliamentary debate, and the government introduced statutory guidance in November 2021. Whilst the guidelines don’t specify price limits, they dictate that branded items should be kept to a minimum.

According to the Department of Education...

Schools should carefully consider whether requiring a branded item is the most cost-effective way of achieving the desired result for their uniform.

On 30 June 2023, the House of Commons published a second report on school uniform costs in England. The 2023 document reiterates the 2021 guidelines, reinforcing the notion that instead of providing financial assistance for parents struggling to purchase school uniforms, schools should aim to make it affordable for all.

Jumpers, blazers, and PE kits may have to be on brand, but often, bags, shoes, shirts, skirts, and trousers just need to be a specific colour, meaning parents can shop around for the best deals.

Why back-to-school shopping is cheaper with Pluxee UK

When you partner with Pluxee UK, you can help the parents in your business get an even better deal! Our trusted and extensive retail partnerships put daily discounts within your employees’ reach, as well as the chance to earn cashback.

These aren’t gimmicks, they’re not one-offs. They're reliable and regular salary stretching opportunities on essential spending, every day of the year.

School uniform: Saving money with discounts

Our Employee Discounts Scheme allows your workforce to purchase discounted vouchers online or via our app. The price at the till remains the same. The saving comes from the employee using the voucher to pay for the goods, having saved money on the cost of the voucher itself.

With a 6% discount, a voucher worth £100 at the till – online or in-store – costs your employees £94. That’s where they see the savings and the value.

We partner with over 100 retailers, including your employees' favourite clothing brands and supermarket giants – all they need to get the best deals on non-school-branded gear.

From crisp white shirts to polo tops, trainers to smart shoes, pencil cases to calculators, coats to bags, your employees will be able to source all their school supplies via a retailer on our employee discounts platform.

If they time their shop for when the sales are on, they can get an even better deal!

Your back-to-school shopping list

When you explore all the items on the back-to-school shopping list, you can see why employees need to use every opportunity to make a saving.

The items listed below don’t cover everything parents need to purchase for the start of a new school year, but it shows how the costs add up:

1 x pack of five school shirts: £16
1 x pack containing two sets of trousers: £15
1 x pair of shoes: £40
1 x calculator: £15
1 x pack containing two sets of jogging bottoms: £10
1 x school bag: £30
Pencil case set: £20
Total cost: £146 (based on the average and approximate price of items).

If your employees purchase all these items with a retailer offering a 6.5% discount off their vouchers, they’ll save £9.49 from their purchase, or £18.98 for two children.

We always say that these small savings build up when employees regularly purchase discounted vouchers, telling a bigger story and creating a more substantial savings pot. Still, sometimes it’s the small things that matter.

While shopping for what their children need, your employees could take some time for themselves and use this £18.98 to cover the price of a coffee and a slice of cake... Self-care is essential, after all.

School supplies: Cashback deals

What’s the difference between using our cashback and discounts? Which is better? Well, what we’ve established from the people using our employee discounts and prepaid, cashback-earning Pluxee Card is that it comes down to preference and choice.

We partner with more retailers via our discounts platform than we do on our cashback network, but with the majority of the large supermarket chains on both, your employees can take advantage of discounts and cashback when purchasing uniform and school supplies.

The main difference between the two is that with discounts, your employees save on the retail price because they bought a voucher to cover the full price at a discounted rate. The saving is immediate.

With cashback, they pay the full price, and then the retailer returns a portion to their prepaid card account as cashback earnings. The money doesn’t go back into their bank, so there’s no immediate savings as with discounts. The saving comes later when they can use the cashback they accumulate on their Pluxee Card towards their next purchase, reducing the amount of their personal money spent.

If we apply this approach to the shopping list we created above, they’d spend the £146 initially, then receive the £9.49 back onto their card as cashback.

Many people favour the Pluxee Card for its convenience. Keep it topped up, and then just swipe at the till, with no need to purchase a discounted voucher. For those who need to make a saving in the moment, the discounts app still makes purchasing the vouchers while on the go quick and easy.

How to help children pay for university

When considering how to financially support a child at university and help them stretch their money and yours further, you need to think outside of the box. Perhaps one of the best things about our Pluxee Card is that you can allow your employees to purchase a partner card. Whilst many employees gift this to their partner or spouse, they can give it to a child if they’re 18 years or over. The bigger the kids get, the more they cost!

Students and the bank of Mum and Dad… Many of us have been there on one or both sides of the coin.

University is expensive, especially when living away from home, so what better time to teach the workforce of tomorrow how to make their money work harder when they need it most?

Our Pluxee Card is a prepaid card powered by Visa, and recipients can use it online and in-store, wherever Visa prepaid is accepted. Parents can pay an allowance or emergency funds directly into their child’s bank account, but once it’s spent, it’s spent. If they load the money onto a Pluxee Card, their children can earn as they spend, stretching funds further.

Start your children’s financial education as soon as possible – they’ll thank you for it in the long term when they can afford more of what matters today and in their future.

Explore Refurbished Tech

In some cases, the need for parents to supply a laptop starts in secondary school, but for most, the demand for top gadgets begins at the college and university stage of life.

Our Refurbished Tech scheme helps reduce the cost by making high-quality refurbished phones and laptops more affordable. Your employees enjoy the best deals whether they buy up front or spread the cost via the salary deduction and salary sacrifice payment options.

You can read all about it in our blog, ‘Introducing our Refurbished Tech Scheme’, but we’ve summed up the key takeaways below:

It’s a cost-neutral, free-to-implement employee benefit: There are no *setup fees or headcount requirements, and we offer flexible payment options: buy upfront, salary deduction, or salary sacrifice. You can easily integrate Refurbished Tech with existing benefits platforms, and we can personalise it with your branding.

Supports employee financial wellbeing: Refurbished Tech enables employees to spread the cost of essential tech with no interest or debt risk. It also helps working parents and families afford tech (e.g. laptops for school, phones for children), reducing stress and financial burden, which can boost productivity and wellbeing.

Drives your CSR and ESG goals: Reduce e-waste and carbon footprint by promoting reuse and recycling. You can track impact via a self-serve dashboard showing CO2/e-waste reduction, contributing to environmental and social responsibility targets.
Boosts employee engagement and inclusivity: Your employees can buy, sell, trade-in, or repair tech, and even share access with friends and family. You can help make modern tech more accessible to lower-income employees or those affected by digital poverty and encourage sustainability and tech equity across your workforce.
End-to-end support and flexibility: We offer complete scheme management: customer service, marketing, delivery, and employee communications. You can host onsite events like 'Amnesty Days' to sell or trade-in old tech from the workplace, and also have the option to integrate charitable giving at checkout for added social impact.

It's no secret...

Download our cost-effective guide to strengthening your Employee Value Proposition.

Download here

Reduce the expense of the back-to-school shop with Pluxee UK

Now you know how to help reduce the cost of back-to-school shopping for the working parents in your business. Download our guide to strengthening your Employee Value Proposition above to learn how cost-effective and impactful offering these benefits can be.

Balancing work, life, and children is hard. Supporting working parents goes beyond helping them save money. Dive into the blogs below to discover how to help them achieve a work-life balance and the additional support new parents may need.

Work isn’t just about earning a living. It’s within your power to give your employees an opportunity to make the most of their lives. Be the kind of employer that makes life that bit brighter.

Get in touch

Sources: Cost of school uniform survey 2023, The House of Commons Library, Statutory Guidance on the Cost of School Uniforms.

Notes: *Terms and conditions apply.

FAQ

Who has the cheapest school supplies?

The cheapest suppliers vary depending on whether they have sales on. You’ll find that supermarkets may offer the most affordable retail price, but you may prefer the quality of something a little more expensive.