School uniform fails in two places. Trouser knees go first, because children kneel on tarmac and sit on floors and slide. Cuffs go second, fraying at the edge where the sleeve meets a desk ten thousand times. Everything else on the garment is usually fine. I have thrown away trousers that were perfect from the waistband to the hem apart from two holes the size of a coin.
France has been running an experiment on exactly this. Its textile repair bonus, expanded in February 2025, takes a few euros off the price of a repair at a registered workshop, funded from a pot of 154 million euros running to 2028. In the six months after the expansion it supported around 250,000 repairs. Nothing about French sewing skill changed in that period. What changed was the arithmetic: when a repair costs seven euros and a replacement costs twenty-five, people repair.
That is the finding I keep coming back to. We talk about repair as though it were a cultural deficiency, a lost skill our grandmothers had. It is mostly a price signal. For thirty years replacement has been cheaper than mending, and people responded rationally. Change the price and the behaviour changes within months.
The two repairs worth learning
A knee is easier than it looks. Turn the trouser inside out, cut a patch of iron-on interfacing or fabric that overlaps the hole by two centimetres all round, press it onto the inside, then run a loose grid of stitches across it in matching thread. From the outside you see a slightly denser patch of fabric, and only if you look. It takes about ten minutes and it usually outlasts the rest of the trouser. Do it at the first sign of thinning rather than waiting for the hole, because a thin patch takes a patch beautifully and a ragged hole does not.
A fraying cuff needs even less. Trim the loose threads flush, fold about half a centimetre of the edge under, and stitch it down all the way round. You lose half a centimetre of sleeve length, which no one will notice, and you stop the unravelling before it eats into the sleeve. Buttons and dropped hems are the third category and they are simply worth doing the evening you notice, because a dropped hem drags on the floor and abrades until the trouser is genuinely finished.
You do not need to be good at this
I trained at Polimoda and I have spent twenty years around people who sew properly, and I want to be clear that my own mending is not beautiful. My stitches are uneven. I match thread by holding the reel against the fabric under a kitchen light and I get it slightly wrong about half the time. It does not matter. Nobody inspects the inside of a nine-year-old's knee. The standard for a school garment is that it holds, not that it would pass a sample review.
Why we keep a record of it
Every garment we make carries a scannable identity, and repairs get logged against it. There are two reasons, and only one of them is about the parent. For you, a garment with a documented repair history is worth more when it is passed on or resold, because the next family can see what was done to it rather than guessing. For us, the data is a design instrument. If the same seam on the same size fails across a production lot, that is not bad luck, that is a pattern problem, and I would rather find it in the repair log than in a complaint.
Spain has no repair bonus of its own at the time of writing, and I am not going to imply that one is coming. But a local alterations shop will patch a knee for a few euros, most schools have at least one parent who sews, and a repair club run out of a classroom costs nothing but a table. The French numbers suggest the demand is already there, sitting just behind the price.