Lost and found: more than €10,000 are lost in one year at one school alone!

 

A small investigative exercise to try and quantify the cost of not labelling school items was carried out over the summer months. The exercise, carried out by a local Maltese PR company on our behalf, revealed numbers that were pretty shocking.

At the end of the last scholastic year, a small investigative exercise into the contents of the lost and found boxes at a number of schools and nurseries on the island year was undertaken. The sheer volume at the sample of the island’s schools was impressive.

Findings showed that the main culprits at nurseries and day-cares were unsurprisingly dummies, comforters, socks and bottle tops. In Kindergartens and Primary Schools you start to find a few more lunchboxes, water bottles, stationery, and some uniform items like tracksuit bottoms.  At an average cost of Eur29.00 per piece, the numbers started to add up.

At Secondary School the numbers shot go through the roof! Not only in terms of volume but if you had to quantify the cost of the items, the numbers were pretty impressive! One school alone had over 130 blazers and tracksuit jackets, over 100 sweaters and tracksuit bottoms, over 80 shirts and t-shirts, 40 water bottles and a large number of miscellaneous items like hairbands and school books, all without names or labels.  With 100 sweaters at approximately Eur35.00 per piece, 130 blazers at an average cost of Eur57.50 (the cost of a blazer can actually go up to about Eur70.00) that’s Eur10,000+ at one school alone!

The majority of the schools we spoke to reported that if the brothers/sisters name is on the item, they mostly manage to give it back, but the huge amount of items that never have a label is impressive.

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