The new government needs to pull “the big levers of state” to tackle child poverty in the long term and should not make further asks of schools, a senior leader in the education sector has said.
It comes after the new Labour government announced that education secretary Bridget Phillipson will jointly lead a taskforce focused on how education can improve the life chances of children in poverty, with the first meeting taking place this week.
The Child Poverty Strategy is set to be published in spring of next year.
Chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) Leora Cruddas said: “Schools aren’t going to solve child poverty on their own.”
Ms Cruddas said that while schools can of course “help to mitigate” the impact of poverty on children, the strategy “must be about eradicating child poverty...and you can’t use schools to do that. You have to use big levers of state to do that.”
She added: “This is about how government pulls the big levers of state, not about a further ask of schools.”
Breakfast clubs ‘aren’t a long-term solution’
A report published earlier this year revealed that a third of primary schools are now offering a food bank, with many staff using their own money to help struggling families.
Asked by Tes about the role of schools in tackling child poverty, Ms Cruddas said that there are particular school-based policies that can help - for example, Labour’s commitment to breakfast clubs, which it has pledged to roll out to all primary schools in England.
But Ms Cruddas said that while breakfast clubs “are certainly part of an investment that would help us alleviate the immediate impact of poverty”, they “probably aren’t the long-term solution”.
“What we really want is a strategy that lifts many more families out of poverty and eventually eradicates child poverty in England,” she said.
Schools ‘gaslighted’ over child poverty
Darren Northcott, national official for education for the NASUWT teaching union, said that child poverty “continues to have a profound impact on the wellbeing, educational achievement and future life chances of children and young people”.
“Staff in schools have had 14 years of gaslighting from the previous government through which their concerns about the extent and implications of child poverty were either ignored or denied,” he added.
Mr Northcott said it was critical that any solutions proposed by the taskforce are “based on evidence and draw on the experience of those working in schools”.
Rebecca Montacute, head of research and policy at the Sutton Trust, said that the taskforce must “strongly consider measures to take poverty-related hunger out of the classroom”.
Ms Montacute called for eligibility for free school meals (FSM) to be extended to all families receiving Universal Credit.
Schools ‘doing their best’ but lack funding
Anne Longfield, chair of the Commission on Young Lives said many schools and trusts “are doing their best to divert education budgets to help tackle the impact of child poverty, but the scale of the problem is overwhelming in some areas and funding is lacking”.
“The early years are a particularly costly time for families, with a significant proportion of families with children under five living in poverty, and these children are more likely to arrive in school with developmental issues.”
Like others, Ms Longfield called for an expansion of eligibility for FSM to all children whose families claim Universal Credit.
Ms Longfield also called for Ofsted inspections to introduce “an inclusion measurement which recognises the impact poverty can have on children and schools, and a long-term plan to rebuild the infrastructure of local place-based support with a core intention of intervening early to reduce the impact of poverty”.
The NAHT school leaders’ union general secretary Paul Whiteman urged the taskforce to consider introducing automatic registration for pupils eligible for free school meals.
Strategy to consider a child’s ‘whole journey’
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, also called for a national automatic enrolment process - as well as an extension of the pupil premium to support disadvantaged students in 16-19 education, and “consideration given to what more help can be given to persistently disadvantaged pupils”.
He called, too, for the strategy to look at restoring funding to a scheme similar to the National Tutoring Programme.
“It needs to consider the whole journey from early childhood onwards and the interventions which would help to improve the life chances and outcomes of these young people”, he added.
Niamh Sweeney, deputy general secretary of the NEU teaching union, called for the government to remove the two-child benefit cap, which it said was “trapping hundreds of thousands of children in bleak poverty”.
A spokesperson for the Chartered College of Teaching said it was time for a “joined-up policy-making that is focused on the needs of children and young people”.
The spokesperson said it was crucial this is supported through education policy-making.
“We also know that managing the practicalities, emotions and blocks to learning that poverty can bring has a massive impact on both the workload and wellbeing of school staff. Reducing child poverty could be a major step towards increasing teacher retention,” they added.
Speaking after the first meeting of the taskforce, education secretary Bridget Phillipson MP said child poverty is “a scar on our country, which holds back children’s lives and life chances at home, in school and across our communities”.
“The scale of the challenge cannot be overstated. That is why this taskforce, working across government, is essential to ensure all departments are supporting this ambition and delivering on our mission of breaking down the barriers to opportunity for every child,” she added.
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