Sharon Graham, a dedicated financial inclusion support officer for the families at four Glasgow secondaries, has just secured a lump sum of several thousand pounds for a family.

The mum rang Graham as a last-ditch attempt to sort out her family’s finances so they could pay their bills and stop borrowing from relatives. The family, which includes three children, one of whom is disabled, had their child benefit reduced by £120 a week in September. They assumed the change was correct. It was not.

It is, apparently, a common issue. Child benefit usually stops when a child turns 16 but, if they are in full-time education or training, families are still entitled to the support. However, to keep receiving it, contact has to be made with the Child Benefit Office.

Graham also realised the family were not receiving the extra cash to which they were entitled because one of their children is disabled. Now, they are set to receive a backdated lump sum of around £4,500 - as well as more money in their pocket every month. It is a sizeable amount but by no means a one-off - another parent’s financial situation was improved to the tune of more than £15,000 a year (see box, page 24) following Graham’s support.

Overall, between November 2019 and February this year, a Glasgow City Council pilot project, providing financial advice to families through four secondaries, has secured £715,000 in unclaimed awards, grants and benefits for parents at Bellahouston Academy, St Mungo’s High, St Paul’s High and Rosshall Academy.

At Bellahouston alone, by February, more than £400,000 had been generated for families.

If families are not claiming what they are entitled to, it quickly adds up, says Graham - something that is also apparent if you look at the UK figures.

Each year, HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions publish figures showing how many people are missing out on each benefit and how much they are losing. The total amount unclaimed across all the benefits was estimated to be around £16 billion in 2020 by entitledto, an organisation that aims to help people understand what their entitlements are and how to claim them.

Why Glasgow, in particular, would want to make ensure people claim what they are owed is clear. The city is blighted by some of the highest child poverty rates in Scotland and the scale of the challenge is significant. There are 38,000 children living in poverty in Glasgow. This represents one in every three children (34 per cent) in the city.

Now, the council has provided a further eight secondary schools and two primaries with a financial inclusion support officer, with the goal to roll out the scheme across all the local authority’s secondaries by the end of the year, using Scottish government funding allocated for addressing the impact of Covid-19.

In March and April, across all the 14 schools now on board, eight financial inclusion officers generated more than £128,000 and helped 174 families - and that was before promotion of the new roles began.

It is no wonder people struggle to understand what support they are entitled to, explains Gena Howe, the council’s child poverty manager: the system is incredibly complex.

Even the education-related benefits - free school meals, the school clothing grant and the education maintenance allowance, which gives financial support to eligible 16- to 19-year-olds who want to continue learning - have different criteria that need to be met before they can be applied for. But then you add into the mix the likes of universal credit, the personal independence payment, disability living allowance; it all becomes a minefield that it is only possible to navigate if you “know the system inside-out”, says Howe. At Bellahouston, 35 different kinds of grant and benefit have been accessed by families to date with Graham’s help.

Information about entitlements

The new scheme came into being after a grassroots child poverty action group asked Howe to produce information that could be distributed to families, outlining some of the entitlements they might be able to access. That request was made at roughly the same time as Bellahouston Academy depute headteacher Murdo Macdonald had what he describes as “a rant” to Howe over the need to get the word out to parents about the entitlements they were due.

There are a few reasons that the partnership with schools is proving so effective, says Howe. Under normal circumstances, if a family is in financial difficulty and decides to seek help, they will likely wait up to six weeks for an appointment but, with this model, help is almost immediate: families wait a couple of days at the most and benefit from having a clear point of contact.

Every school has its own named financial inclusion support officer and all publicity materials - from letters sent to family homes, to social media posts and text messages - contain their email address and mobile phone number.

The other important aspect is that the service is being promoted by the school, which families trust. And school staff often know the families who are struggling, so can refer families directly.

A trusted space

“School is a trusted space for families and this is a dedicated support for them,” says Howe. “These are benefits people are due - they just don’t know about them.

“It’s been really successful … because of the joint efforts of the school and the financial inclusion provider. The school needs to actively promote the service and that dedicated financial inclusion officer needs to be there.”

Graham echoes this, saying that because information is coming out of the school about the service, “families feel safe”. Macdonald, meanwhile, says: “When we are signposting parents to this service, we talk about ‘our’ financial inclusion support officer, not ‘a’ financial inclusion support officer - that means they are more trusting of it.”

When a family makes contact, the financial inclusion support officer looks at their circumstances in the round. This is why, although Graham works only with secondary schools, the new Scottish child payment - which is a £10 weekly payment, introduced in February, for children under 6 (the SNP promised in its manifesto for the May Scottish Parliament election to double it to £20) - features among the many benefits that she has helped families to claim.

The figures also show that families have been helped to manage thousands of pounds of debt.

“It’s not just about financial gains,” says Howe. “Sometimes we find that families - particularly during this difficult time - have run up debt and that starts to become unmanageable. The financial inclusion support officers can step in and also help them manage debt and payment.”

As the programme has gained momentum and evolved, the financial inclusion support officers have also started to refer those parents who are seeking work - or who are worried about redundancy or unemployment - on to services where they can help them train or find a job.

Howe is full of praise for the schools she works with. When she goes along to meetings about setting up the service, more often than not, the schools want it to start immediately.

School staff, however, are buckling under the pressure of an ever-increasing workload - be it related to how pupils are going to be assessed this year, the range of new responsibilities thrust on them as a result of the pandemic, providing pupils with lateral flow tests or identifying contacts when there is a positive case.

Some might argue, therefore, that helping families sort out their finances is a bridge too far.

But that’s not how Macdonald sees it. Supporting families to sort out their finances brings stability and, with that, comes calm - and schools clearly benefit from that, he says.

Graham echoes this: “Improving the financial situation helps the whole household. If you have a family that’s really worried about where the next £1 is coming from, that has an impact on the wellbeing of the family and of the student. But if they are no longer worried - if that is settled - that has an impact on the family as a whole and on education.”

On a more practical level, the financial inclusion support officers are also trained to check if there is a device in the house and a reliable internet connection. If there is not, they help secure one.

“So it’s not just about money, it’s about securing resources that support education,” says Graham.

Macdonald has long been interested in making sure cost is not a barrier to accessing the full range of experiences schools offer, from various courses to school trips.

He has vivid memories of asking his own parents for £70 for a school trip to Germany and being told they could not afford it.

“I had never noticed we were poor; schools should not be places where children realise they are poor,” he says.

Macdonald, then, has long been alive to the barriers some pupils face - yet the pandemic opened his eyes further to the poverty some pupils are living in.

School staff do not traditionally visit pupils’ homes but Covid saw them deliver food parcels as well as devices and - in Macdonald’s case - 100 desks so that students had a place to work. He was shocked and depressed by what he saw.

This scheme works, he believes, because it uses “the power of the school brand” - but that does mean schools use their own communication channels to text, send letters and tweet to promote the support.

Some of that burden can be eased by the creation of ready-to-go messages, which then just have to be sent out by schools. But one of the most effective ways of reaching parents was found to be a letter sent to the family home, and Howe acknowledges that it was the school office staff who were stuffing the envelopes.

At Bellahouston, however, they have also been careful to make sure that Graham has become the face of the initiative. Her pictures have been included in tweets and on the school website and, of course, her contact details appear in messages.

Clear and meaningful action

As the service becomes embedded, word of mouth has also become a powerful way of encouraging families to seek out Graham’s help - especially when they hear what she has done for friends.

All too often, schools and teachers identify a need - be it related to mental health, special educational needs or poverty - but lack the time or the expertise to help, as well as knowledge of the external services to signpost families and pupils towards.

One of the huge frustrations when it comes to pupils’ mental health, for example, is that even if issues are identified early by teachers, waiting lists for child and adolescent mental health services are such that it can be years before a young person is seen.

Now, however, in these Glasgow schools, if a teacher knows a family is struggling financially, there is clear and meaningful action that they can take to support them. And that is more crucial than ever just now: as a result the Covid pandemic, demand for this kind of support is only going to grow.

Macdonald believes the time he has invested has, beyond question, been worth it.

“It really annoys me that a lot of families have gone through hellish times and yet they don’t know the money is just sitting there waiting for them to claim it. It doesn’t take much time to put out a tweet or a message to families but you know it’s having a huge impact. Some people just need a helping hand.”

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 25 June 2021 issue under the headline “Money talks”