‘Heartbreaking’ child poverty is getting worse, warn teachers

TEACHERS are having to wash children’s clothes and lend parents money as they complain of increased poverty among their pupils.

Staff told how they keep a washing machine and tumble dryer on site, as well as clean underwear for pupils sent to school wearing dirty garments.

One in five schools now runs a low cost food club, according to a joint survey of teachers carried out by the National Education Union and the Child Poverty Action Group.

The poll of more than 900 teachers showed that 16 per cent of schools offer free or subsidised meals, and the same proportion have a clothes bank.

Meanwhile, 4 per cent provide emergency loans to struggling parents.

Anne Swift, a head teacher in Scarborough, told the National Union of Teachers annual conference in Brighton: “We’ve had examples of parents who don’t have enough money to put in the electric meters so they don’t have enough hot water to wash the children’s clothes.”

Amanda Martin, a teacher from Portsmouth, told of a girl who was missing school. “Her tutor noticed a pattern and had a conversation,” she said. “She couldn’t afford sanitary products, she didn’t want to leave the house, she was using rolled up tissue paper from school. She was too embarrassed to talk about it.”

Ms Martin said she has always kept knickers in her cupboard and provided pencils and pencil cases, but “the difference is the number of kids you are now having to provide that for. It was always the one or two kids, now it is seven, eight, nine, 10 of those kids”.

Sixty per cent of teachers said they felt that the extent of poverty in their schools had become worse since 2015.

The Child Poverty Action Group, called it “heartbreaking for teachers”, adding that there must be a safety net to help struggling parents cope.

The Department for Education said that disadvantaged children were entitled to free school meals and, at some schools, breakfast clubs.

♦ Academies are wasting public money on “branded biscuits” and “extravagant networking buffets”, delegates at the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers annual conference heard.