These are unprecedented times. I have been a teacher for 31 years, a headteacher for 21 and never before have I experienced such a highly pressured working environment.

Curriculum expectations have never been greater, the stakes have never been higher and the budgets have never been more tightly squeezed. The communities that we serve are facing great challenges, too. Immigrant communities are living in fear of their status, the number of children in poverty is growing and working families are sliding into financial crisis.

All around us record numbers of people are facing food insecurity and are having to rely on food banks – a provision that I would never have expected to be a reality in anything other than history lessons. I have never seen so many media stories of hungry children and parents who cannot make ends meet: stories that force society to wring its hands in horror at the idea of such unmet need in modern Britain.

We’ve even had a UN rapporteur visit our country to investigate the dreadful impact of austerity and poverty on our most vulnerable communities. As a head, I was called upon to facilitate a meeting for visiting members of a cross-party parliamentary committee to investigate the effects of poverty across our nation.

Pupils living in poverty

Our teachers, too, are feeling the strain. My senior leadership team and I meet with staff regularly to help them deal with the emotional impact of working to support families buckling under the pressure of austerity. My staff have to watch children suffering from the daily grind of poverty and yet feel forced to push them on to reach academic targets that feel irrelevant and alien to their world.

It’s no wonder that it’s becoming harder and harder to recruit and retain teachers, with more leaving the classroom long before they are due to retire. And we have less and less support staff to help cover these absences around school – it is becoming harder to afford supply cover. Teachers can’t purchase equipment and supplies that would help to enrich their teaching, and they no longer have access to the support services we previously had in place to address their own wellbeing.

Preventative services to help support pupils are disappearing rapidly and the caseload for our beleaguered public services is growing in number and complexity. Thresholds for support are higher, families are left in crisis, and children are left struggling to cope with mental health issues alone.

Teachers are shouting about it. We are trying to make our voices heard. In all my years of teaching, I’ve never witnessed anything like the number of school communities who are speaking out so strongly to MPs, parents and members of the community for support.

Headteachers are usually keen to avoid conflict and reluctant to put their head above the parapet. And the crisis is so pressing that many are deviating from this stance and sending letters to parents informing them of their desperate financial status. It’s unheard of for headteachers to travel to London to march in such large numbers to make their anger and frustration heard.

I have never before seen TV shows in which school managers and governors lay bare the painful decisions to cut provision – and the consequences –  before the nation.

It’s sometimes hard to believe the number of pressure groups that have sprung up to make their voices heard on the damage that is being done to our schools and the educational experience of a whole generation of children. These groups are speaking out alongside our unions to make sure social media, TV presenters and newspapers are all screaming out the message. A social media petition raised over 100,000 signatures and was discussed in Parliament with MPs from all sides of the political divide presenting heartbreaking stories from schools in their constituencies.

The school funding crisis

But all of this noise is falling on deaf ears. There’s such a feeling of dissonance with the responses from policymakers, who change face and name but say exactly the same as their predecessors. All that we hear in reply is the same tired message of "record levels of funding".

I feel like I’m in a pressure cooker. A pressure cooker which is about to blow.

Clearly, this can’t go on.

If education secretary Damian Hinds really wants to improve morale and staff retention, the answer is simple. Fund schools and support services adequately. He does not need a working party to find solutions: he just needs to listen to the volume of voices that are screaming this simple message to the Department for Education: "You cannot ask us to do more with less and then wonder why we’re not happy with our lot."

We need to turn the volume up on this message, so that it simply can’t be ignored. All headteachers need to add their voices to those of colleagues who have already stepped forward. Governors need to share the dreadful decisions they are forced to make, parents must demand that this stop.

Our children only get one chance at going to school. We cannot allow their experience to be blighted by cuts that are shredding their educational entitlement in a way that none of us has ever seen before.

In these unprecedented times, it is incumbent upon us to unite, to protect our schools, to protect the education of our children and to turn the volume up so that even those who choose not to hear have to listen.

Siobhan Collingwood is headteacher of Morecambe Bay Community Primary School, Lancashire