As its recent campaign featuring Bill Nighy dancing around and drinking tea in a beautifully soft merino jumper shows, British brand and manufacturer John Smedley prides itself on making premium knitwear using natural fibers. But recently, managing director Jess Mcguire Dudley noticed a disconnect between her home and her work life: when her four-year-old son started school, she spent more than £400 on a compulsory uniform, only to discover the jumper was 98% acrylic.
“I was thinking, how can I be championing all of these things — natural fibers, traceability, craftsmanship — to the fashion industry, but then saying to my son, ‘Here’s a plastic jumper’?” says Mcguire Dudley, who became MD of John Smedley in April. “It felt so paradoxical.”
In October, John Smedley launched its School Uniform Project, inviting secondary school students from neighboring city Derby to redesign their school jumpers using 100% British wool. Through visits to local farms, wool grading and sorting facilities, Yorkshire-based spinner Laxtons (used by John Smedley) and the John Smedley factory, students have been immersed in every stage of the supply chain. The project forms part of an arts education program with Derby’s Museum of Making, which will culminate in an exhibition in March 2026. The winning school jumper design will be chosen early next year, produced by John Smedley and gifted to the entire cohort during Wool Month in October.
The project coincides with John Smedley’s renewed commitment to using British wool in its collections. As Mcguire Dudley was preparing to step into her role, she was reflecting on how to steer the business through its next chapter; Britishness and craft had long been part of the brand, and she wanted to make those values central to its future direction. John Smedley had been working with British wool since 2015, and Mcguire Dudley felt a growing responsibility to support its revival. Alongside increasing its own British wool use, John Smedley is now sponsor of the Great British Wool Revival, a project founded by think tank Fashion Roundtable in 2024 to support the industry through an open-access map of stakeholders across the supply chain.
The School Uniform Project may be a hyper-local project in its initial execution, but the implications could reach far wider. It highlights some of the structural shifts the broader fashion industry could make to meet key sustainability targets, from moving away from synthetic dependency to building more transparent supply chains that support local ecosystems, and designing products with circularity in mind. For brands, it also shows the need to rebuild closer relationships with farms, mills and manufacturers, to secure consistent quality and create the volume needed for wider natural fiber adoption.
It could also provide a blueprint for phasing out the use of toxic PFAS (or forever chemicals) in fashion, say Harriet Fletcher-Gilhuys, textiles researcher at Fashion Roundtable, and Meg Pirie, head of sustainability and regeneration policy, who are jointly leading the Great British Wool Revival project. The use of PFAS in children’s clothing has become a particular cause for concern; in July 2025, a proposed amendment to the UK’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill included banning PFAS in school uniforms and requiring a chemical digital product passport (DPP) for uniforms, but this is yet to become law.
“While school uniforms are currently cheap, they are largely synthetic, laden with fabric promises, such as ‘crease-free’ or ‘stain-resistant’, indicating that the fabric has likely been treated with a chemical finish,” say Pirie and Fletcher-Gilhuys. “Given the number of schools and the amount of school uniforms that are used each day across the UK, British wool uniforms would be a no-brainer.”
Influencing tomorrow’s consumers
John Smedley has run British wool projects with university students before, but for this project, McGuire Dudley wanted to test whether a younger cohort would care about fiber provenance, sustainability and British manufacturing — and could be empowered to change their own uniform. “The idea is to show them all of the possibilities and see what they do with it,” she says.
When I visit John Smedley in Derbyshire on November 18, I see the experiment in action. I join the dozen or so 15-year-olds on a tour, observing the dyeing, washing and pressing processes, the industrial knitting machines, and workers hand-linking arms and necks at impressive speed. Back in the showroom space, the pupils present their school jumper designs to John Smedley technical director Tim Clark and design director Pip Jenkins, who offer practical feedback and explain how each choice affects cost and recyclability. The pupils are also taught about the benefits of wool versus synthetics — such as biodegradability and breathability — and hear how farming impacts can be managed responsibly.
The students’ early concepts show an intuitive grasp of practical, circular design considerations, such as keeping it mono-material, or having detachable school emblems so the jumper can be used at the weekends. The need for this is clear: around four million school uniforms are thrown away in the UK each year, according to waste management company Business Waste.
McGuire Dudley says the project has “sparked a different way of thinking in the students”. Demand for the program surpassed expectations: “We’ve had to limit places, but it could have been much bigger, because the appetite’s there.” Importantly, the students are not burdened by the old stigma of “scratchy wool”, she notes; this generation is more interested in traceability and authenticity than nostalgic associations.
The shift makes them powerful messengers — and the hope is that they’ll take that message back to their parents, and the school. “Whether the country’s ready for it, I don t know. But our small test shows students are ready for it,” says Mcguire Dudley. “What I hope to do is use this as a case study to go to other schools and say, ‘Look, this is what you could do.’”
The cost debate
Cost remains one of the biggest barriers to using more natural fibers in school uniforms. A survey by the UK government’s Department for Education earlier this year shows a third of parents are worried about uniform cost. Parents are having to pay £442 on average to kit a child out for secondary school, and £343 for primary school. In April, the government proposed a new law that would limit the number of branded, typically more expensive, items schools can require to three, to help manage the costs.
“We will always welcome efforts to make clothing more sustainable, and it’s encouraging to see students working together on initiatives like [the John Smedley project]. However, knitwear made from 100% wool will not be suitable for every school, as woollen garments will be more expensive to purchase than knitwear typical for the classroom, and will not necessarily be any longer lasting,” says Matthew Easter, chair of the Schoolwear Association, which represents British schoolwear suppliers, who argues that current jumpers — made from a mixture of man-made and natural fibers, are tested for durability and can be handed down to siblings or to uniform swap shops.
McGuire Dudley says this is not enough of a reason to keep using synthetics. “The argument of buying plastic jumpers because they’re indestructible is moot. My son’s jumper has broken in critical places twice since September. A wool garment could last decades and decades if it’s well taken care of.” She also argues that the conversation needs to shift from upfront price to long-term value, sustainability and well-being. “Wool doesn’t need to be washed as often, it’s got wicking properties, and it’s better for the child wearing it.”
Parents and schools need to adjust their expectations, say Fletcher-Gilhuys and Pirie. They are accustomed to synthetic uniforms that behave in very specific ways. “While incredibly durable, wool performs differently in terms of garment conformity and so there would be an educational piece involved in this transition,” the duo point out. Scalability is also a factor: with current UK capacity, farmers would need to pool together their fleeces to keep processing costs down and meet minimum order quantities.
Mcguire Dudley flags that, conversely, the scale of school uniform production gives it huge potential: guaranteed, high-volume demand could underpin local manufacturing and stabilize the supply chains luxury brands rely on. Scaling this approach requires proving the model works in schools and integrating it into the curriculum. Government support could make the economics viable: if there was a mandate to make a certain proportion of school uniforms in the UK, it would guarantee volumes, which would in turn lower costs. “If you’ve got guaranteed volumes going through, you can have a much better price.” Legislation could also set material and traceability standards across the sector, she adds.
For now, Mcguire Dudley is realistic about the School Uniform Project’s scope. “This is about proving that there’s an appetite there, and that we can tell the story in an authentic way that the students understand,” she says. “It could be used to inspire other manufacturers more broadly, whether they are making school uniforms or anything else, to say, we could do this differently. We want to rally change.”
