Lauren doesn’t look at the register on the whiteboard. She doesn’t want to see the symbol denoting her free school meal (FSM) status. Instead, she sits self-consciously, as all around her produce an assortment of colourful stationery. Lauren has no stationery.

For the umpteenth time, she is reprimanded by a teacher who hands her a solitary pen.

At lunchtime, she orders a sandwich as normal. She would like a hot meal and a pudding, but doesn’t know what everything costs and is too embarrassed to ask.

In the afternoon, her teacher talks about a school art competition. He mentions prizes and certificates. He lists some websites for inspiration. Lauren loves art but knows she won’t be entering. She has nothing at home to make the picture with and no internet access.

Lauren isn’t real, but her experiences unfortunately are. Many children across the country are struggling daily with the effects of poverty, even - and sometimes especially - at school.

“We think of school as a great equaliser but actually this is very often not the case,” says Luke Bramhall, school research and delivery lead at Children North East. The charity is on a mission to make things better for school-aged children living in poverty by “poverty proofing” the school day.

The idea of poverty proofing was born eight years ago when the organisation handed disposable cameras to 1,000 children and young people in the North East, and asked them to photograph what poverty looked like. “We got 11,000 photos back and it was really eye-opening,” recalls Bramhall. “The response was clear that the one place it can be miserable to be poor is school.”

So the charity set about seeing what it could do.

Poverty proofing a school starts with looking at things from the child’s perspective. Children North East makes a point of talking to every child in a school it is working with. “We ask, ‘Do you know who’s poor in the school?’” says Bramhall.

The answer is always, “Well, yes, and this is how we know.”

They find that many of the structures in place to help poorer children are in fact stigmatising them. Children say they hate their FSM status being identified - their packed lunch is given to them in a paper bag while everyone else has lunchboxes. And they resent being publicly sent to borrow spare PE kits that are often in poor condition.

‘Walk of shame’

In one school, the ingredients provided for pupil-premium children in food-technology lessons were always left at the front of the class for collection. “The children described going to get it as ‘the walk of shame’,” says Bramhall. He also talks about a school in which a member of staff would come into lessons and dole out free revision guides. “They would read names off a list,” he recalls. “This was just identifying those students. Children are savvy. They work things out.”

It’s not just the actions of those in authority that can cause problems. “Children were telling us they wouldn’t go to the free after-school club because you could wear what you liked and everyone was wearing the latest football kit, which [the disadvantaged pupils] couldn’t afford,” says Bramhall. “Children weren’t going on their end-of-term trip to the theme park, not because they couldn’t afford the £10 or £15 [cost], but because their friends would also be taking extra spending money. They didn’t want to be the ones stood outside the fast-food shop while all their friends were inside.”

Even in lessons, poorer children were missing out. Bramhall says some pupils would not take part in junk modelling because they didn’t want to be the ones with the value-range cereal box or the cheap cola bottle. Meanwhile, one secondary child was spending her evenings sat on buses with her mum’s smartphone to access the free wi-fi to do online homework.

Bramhall makes it clear that this situation is not just about a few extreme cases per school. Latest figures from the Department for Work and Pensions show that more than 4 million children (nine out of every class of 30) in the UK are currently living in poverty. What’s more, the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that the number will rise to more than 5 million by 2022.

Research commissioned by the British Youth Council, Child Poverty Action Group, Kids Company and the National Union of Teachers in 2013 also found that:

• 14 per cent of low-income students chose not to study arts or music due to the associated costs.
• 55 per cent of low-income students said that they were going hungry at school because they could not afford to eat.
• 57 per cent of low-income students said they had missed at least one school trip because of the price, and that this had an effect on them. Examples of the impact of missing school trips included hampering the ability to socialise and make friends or learn new skills.

So what does the charity do to poverty proof the school? According to Bramhall, there is no single right answer; context is king.

“The solutions for the same problem can vary wildly,” he says. “We’ve been working with two schools in Middlesbrough, both with very high levels of disadvantage. In one school, the uniform policy was quite lax and that really worked in that school, but at the other school (just a couple of miles away), it was all about what you wore: you had to have the latest stuff so the school had to employ a much stricter uniform policy. The two communities worked differently.”

The proof is in the pudding

Responding to student feedback is key. In the Lauren examples above, it might be about ensuring that there is clear pricing on all food, removing all visible markings indicating FSM students on documents, providing standardised stationery and being mindful of the potential limitations of any homework set.

Other examples might be: making sure there is an abundance of clean, spare PE kit; rethinking dressing-up and own-clothes days; and even avoiding asking children to talk publicly about holidays or Christmas presents. (“Children were telling us they’d started lying about going on holiday or what they’d had for Christmas,” Bramhall says.)

But does it work? Newcastle University has been evaluating the work, using a variety of indicators. The research is ongoing but initial indications are that poverty proofing has had an impact on FSM students’ attendance and take-up of extracurricular activities.

What poverty proofing has shown, says Bramhall, is that a few tweaks to the system can make a big difference. And while a poverty-proofed school day won’t solve all of a child’s problems in life, schools that have taken part in the project have shown it can have a significant effect.

“What we can do is to ensure that when children walk in those school gates, they get that same equity of experience and opportunity and learning and fun,” Bramhall states. “We want to be reflecting a society we wish to have rather than the society we actually have.”

Lucy Edkins is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 25 October 2019 issue under the headline “Averting pupils’social stigma by ‘poverty proofing’”