Lockers for schools come three ways: the school buys them, the school hires them, or a supplier installs and manages them at no cost to the school and parents rent a locker by the year. Most secondary schools do not need one locker per pupil, tier height decides how many fit a run of wall, and the first decision is where the money comes from, because that is what has kept lockers out of most schools, not whether they are wanted.
If you are looking at school lockers, you are probably weighing up three things at once: what they cost, how many you need, and where the money is coming from. This page covers all three honestly, including an option a lot of schools do not know exists.
What school lockers cost
Bought outright, a school locker is typically a per-unit price plus delivery and installation, and the unit price falls as the order grows. A bank for a single year group is a modest order. Lockers for a whole secondary school is a capital project.
The number on the quote is rarely the whole cost though. Over a ten year life you also carry damaged doors, failed locks, lost keys, the admin of allocating lockers each September, and eventually replacement. We have set that out properly in the real cost of school lockers.
What size, and how many
Most secondary schools do not need one locker per pupil. Usage tends to concentrate in particular year groups, and a sensible layout matters more than a big number. Tier height is the other decision: taller lockers take a bag and a coat, shorter tiers fit more pupils into the same run of wall.
Locker sizes and layout covers the practical side, and installation covers what actually happens on the day.
The bit schools ask about last, and should ask about first
Almost every school we speak to wanted lockers years before they got them. The blocker is almost never whether lockers are a good idea. It is that they sit in the same budget queue as roofing and IT, and they lose.
So it is worth knowing that buying is not the only way to get lockers into a school.
The option most schools do not know exists
The school does not have to pay for them at all. We supply, install, maintain and manage the lockers at no cost to the school, and parents rent a locker for their child for the year, typically £23 to £39 depending on the school. That is what funds the system.
There is no purchase order, no capital line, no budget case and no maintenance liability. If a pupil leaves, the locker returns to the pool and goes to someone else. The school is never sat on stock it has paid for.
- We survey and design the layout around your corridors and year groups.
- We install at no cost to the school.
- Parents book and pay online. See how parent-funded lockers work.
- Each pupil gets a private code, sent to the parent by text and email.
- We maintain and recode them every year, so repairs and admin never reach your office.
It is an unusual model, which is why most schools have never come across it. It is also the reason schools that could never justify the capital spend end up with a full bank of lockers anyway. If you would rather see it written out plainly, here is school locker rental and the no cost to the school option.
Buying still makes sense sometimes
We are not going to pretend otherwise. If your school wants to own the lockers outright, has the capital, and is happy to carry the maintenance, buying is a perfectly reasonable decision, and we supply lockers for purchase too. Buying school lockers sets out where it is the better call.
What we would say is this: decide it on the facts rather than on the assumption that buying is the only route, because for most schools it is the funding conversation, not the lockers, that has been the obstacle.
If you are weighing lockers against phone pouches
A lot of schools arrive at lockers because they want phones out of lessons, and lockers are one way to get there. Pouches are another. The two solve slightly different problems. A locker takes the whole bag out of the corridor and the phone goes with it. A pouch keeps the phone with the pupil but sealed shut, and ours block the signal as well, so it cannot ring, buzz or connect while it is in there.
Some schools run one, some run both, pouches for the phones and lockers for the bags. What usually decides it is how your day is structured and what you want staff doing at the start of it. If that is the decision in front of you, these go through it properly.
- Phone pouches, lockers or hand-in? The straight comparison of the three methods, including who carries the liability for a damaged phone.
- Do phone pouches actually work? What the research shows, and where the evidence is thinner than the marketing.
- Do Yondr pouches block signal? One of the questions we get asked most, so it is worth a straight answer.
- Going phone free at school. How to run the rollout so the routine sticks instead of sliding.
- Writing a phone free policy. A template you can adapt, if you have already made the decision.
Safeguarding, and the questions leadership will ask
Lockers raise fair questions: who can open one, what happens in an emergency, and what stops them being misused. Those have straightforward answers, set out in school lockers and safeguarding. Designated staff can open any locker at their own school when they need to, and every emergency reveal is logged.
Locks, doors and how long they last
Three lock types dominate UK schools. Keys are cheapest and become an admin problem by half term, because pupils lose them and every replacement is a job for your office. Combination locks remove the key entirely, and the code can be reset each year for a new pupil. Digital and app-based locks cost more up front and give you an audit trail.
On the doors themselves, laminate fronts resist dents and graffiti better than thin steel and tend to look presentable for longer in a busy corridor. Steel is tougher on impact but shows every knock. Either way the honest life expectancy in a secondary school is ten to fifteen years, and the parts that fail first are hinges and locks rather than the body of the locker.
What to ask any locker supplier
Whether you buy from us or from anyone else, these are the questions that separate a good quote from a cheap one. The answers are where the real cost hides.
- What is the lead time from order to installation? Anything quoted in weeks needs to clear your summer holiday window, not your term dates.
- Is installation included, and does it include fixing to the wall? Free-standing banks in a school corridor are a safety question, not a preference.
- What happens when a lock fails in year three? Get the answer in writing, with a price.
- Who allocates lockers to pupils each September? This is the job that quietly lands on your office if nobody names an owner.
- What is the replacement cost of a single door? You will need it, and it is rarely on the quote.
- Is there a minimum order? It decides whether you can start with one year group and grow.
Under the rental model most of that list stops being your problem, because lead time, installation, failed locks, the September allocation and the replacement doors all sit with us. That is the practical difference between owning lockers and having lockers. There is more on this in our guide to choosing a school locker supplier.
Starting with one year group
You do not have to do the whole school at once, and most schools should not. Starting with a single year group tells you what take-up actually looks like at your school, where the pinch points are at break, and whether you have sited them in the right corridor. It also gives you a real number to take to governors instead of an estimate.
We would rather install fifty lockers that get used than four hundred that sit half empty, and because the school is not paying for them, there is no pressure to over-order.
School lockers near you
We install across the UK, from single secondary schools to multi-academy trusts, and we already run lockers in schools from Liverpool to London. Tell us the school and roughly how many pupils and we will come back with a layout, a plan and what it would cost, if anything. Ask us about lockers for your school.
School locker hire and rental
Schools ask for this in a few different ways: school lockers for hire, school locker rental, locker hire for schools. They all describe the same thing, and it is what we do. The school does not buy the lockers or hire them either. We install and own them, and the rental sits with the parents, one locker per child per year.
That is the practical difference from a hire agreement. There is no rental invoice to the school, no contract term to renew out of, and no equipment to hand back. If the school wants the lockers gone, they go, and it has cost the budget nothing either way.
School lockers by town: find your nearest installation
We install across the UK. These pages cover what lockers cost, how many a school needs and how close our nearest managed installation is, town by town.
North West. Birkenhead · Blackpool · Bootle · Chester · Crewe · Ellesmere Port · Formby · Huyton · Leigh · Liverpool · Nantwich · Northwich · Prescot · Preston · Runcorn · Skelmersdale · Southport · St Helens · Stoke-on-Trent · Wallasey · Warrington · Widnes · Wigan · Winsford · Wirral
Yorkshire. Accrington · Ashton-under-Lyne · Barnsley · Batley · Bingley · Blackburn · Bolton · Bradford · Brighouse · Burnley · Castleford · Colne · Crosby · Dewsbury · Doncaster · Elland · Halifax · Harrogate · Hebden Bridge · Huddersfield · Ilkley · Keighley · Leeds · Macclesfield · Manchester · Morley · Nelson · Oldham · Otley · Pontefract · Pudsey · Rochdale · Rossendale · Rotherham · Salford · Selby · Sheffield · Skipton · Stockport · Todmorden · Wakefield · Wetherby · York
Midlands. Bedford · Birmingham · Cambridge · Cannock · Corby · Coventry · Derby · Dudley · Hereford · Kettering · Kidderminster · Leicester · Northampton · Nottingham · Nuneaton · Peterborough · Rugby · Shrewsbury · Stafford · Tamworth · Telford · Walsall · Wellingborough · West Bromwich · Wolverhampton
London and the East. Barking · Basildon · Bromley · Chelmsford · Colchester · Croydon · Dartford · Enfield · Epsom · Guildford · Harlow · Harrow · Hemel Hempstead · High Wycombe · Hounslow · Ilford · Kingston upon Thames · London · Luton · Maidstone · Redhill · Reigate · Romford · Sevenoaks · Slough · Southend-on-Sea · St Albans · Stevenage · Sutton · Watford · Wembley · Woking
South East. Brighton · Burgess Hill · Crawley · Eastbourne · Hastings · Haywards Heath · Horsham · Hove · Lewes · Littlehampton · Royal Tunbridge Wells · Worthing
South. Andover · Basingstoke · Bognor Regis · Bournemouth · Chichester · Eastleigh · Fareham · Gosport · Havant · Petersfield · Poole · Portsmouth · Salisbury · Southampton · Waterlooville · Winchester
Thames Valley. Abingdon · Aylesbury · Banbury · Bicester · Didcot · Leamington Spa · Milton Keynes · Newbury · Oxford · Reading · Solihull · Witney
South West. Bath · Bridgwater · Bristol · Cardiff · Cheltenham · Chepstow · Chippenham · Cirencester · Clevedon · Evesham · Gloucester · Ledbury · Malvern · Monmouth · Newport · Portishead · Redditch · Ross-on-Wye · Stroud · Swindon · Taunton · Trowbridge · Weston-super-Mare · Worcester · Yate · Yeovil
Scotland. Alloa · Bathgate · Cumbernauld · Dundee · Dunfermline · Edinburgh · Falkirk · Glasgow · Grangemouth · Hamilton · Kirkcaldy · Livingston · Motherwell · Paisley · Perth · Stirling
Ruth Naughton. Co-founder of Locker Space, helping schools, brands and venues go phone-free without the battle. Connect with Ruth and her 10,000+ followers on LinkedIn.