You don't have to tell a parent that school isn't cheap. Between school fees, school uniforms, extracurriculars and stationary - the cost to send a child to school seems to get more and more expensive each year.
This is why one teacher's thorough price-check list of stationery retailers and their prices is answering prayers of tight pockets.
Miriam Fisher, a teacher from Ludlow College in Christchurch, has spent the past four years handwriting a price comparison for stationery items.
Talking to The Project, she says she does it to help out families feeling the pinch post-Christmas.
"I love stationery. I love stationery buying, but I also just hold this real tension there this time of the year. People have just come out of summer. They've just come out of Christmas. They're looking down the barrel of beginning of the year, fees of uniforms of shoes that everyone keeps growing out of."
"And the reality is that actually, sometimes it's down to the last dollar. So I think I love stationery, I love looking at the stationery lists, and I just felt like a really easy, fun thing to do for myself, but been sharing it because I was like, Actually, I, you know, why would you not?"
She also suggests that if you've got a spare few dollars during your shop, you could help other families who can't get a whole stationery list together.
"Just buy one or two extra, even if it's like an extra pack of decent pencils or a couple of extra glue sticks and just drop them into the teacher discretely at the beginning of the year and let them know it's for distribution."
