One mum was crying in the hall this morning.

Initially, she just cried. There was no verbal communication, she was simply rocking. After a few minutes, she told me that nothing had happened, but that she had severe tummy pains. As I began to express further concern, she said that she had to get home. She said it was the youngest child’s birthday and then began to cry again because she’d been unable to buy him a gift. We discussed that when she does get more money, she’ll first need to address the lack of food in the house, as well as the gas and electricity bills.

The school gave her a food-bank voucher for Friday (it doesn’t open until then). We also gave her gifts to give her youngest child from donations. Staff contacted the Salvation Army, which then provided her with £20 and food to last until Friday.

This is just one story of many suchlike.

This month, a barely audible voice was heard on an international stage. Professor Philip Alston, a United Nations special rapporteur, was tasked with investigating the effects of austerity. His report makes for depressing reading. In it, he says: “For almost one in every two children to be poor in 21st century Britain is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.”

In 2017, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported that, in 2015-16, four million children in the UK were living in poverty. That’s 9 out of every class of 30. In some areas of greater poverty, the impoverished could constitute as many as half of a classroom of children.

Last year, the Trussell Trust gave out nearly 1.2 million emergency three-day food parcels from its 428 food banks. The highest proportion was given out to lone parents and children.

No centralised data

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to speak at the House of Lords in an event organised jointly by the National Federation of Women's Institutes, Feeding Britain and End Hunger UK.

The event was chaired by Heidi Allen MP and was intended to publicise a private members’ bill in Parliament: a proposal by MP Emma Lewell-Buck to introduce a national measure of poverty.

The fact is that a growing collection of statistics paint a very sorry picture of food insecurity across this country. However, there is no properly centralised data set by which to measure this surge or to chart the effects of policy decisions. We desperately need one.

As a headteacher, I meet these statistics head-on every day.

My staff and I have faces for every one of them. Our own records show that last year the families of 35 children in our school – about three in each class – needed food-bank vouchers to be able to eat at home.

The records show a growing number of families struggling to keep their heads above water. Every day they come through our doors with fresh stories of hardship and heartbreak. It’s hard to listen to these voices of pain. It often breaks your heart. Sometimes it’s so extreme that you feel a part of your soul shrivel at the knowledge of the hardship and misery.

It is true that poverty has always been a grim reality for many of our school communities, but it’s worse than ever now. It’s more prolific, more extreme, and our pastoral-support register provides the statistics to prove that this is so.

Stealing from bins

We all work so desperately hard to "close the gap", but it’s not a one-off gap. It’s a daily gap that drags on for too many children and families. Preventing this gap from growing any bigger takes a Herculean effort. In our school, we do make a difference every day. It’s a place that we ensure is happy, secure and stimulating for all of our children. Despite everything, there’s a lot of learning, a lot of fun and a lot of hugs.

Many children bounce enthusiastically through the school doors, and others drag themselves through, tired, listless and with dark bags under their eyes, dull hair and dull eyes.

These children can tell you about the physical experience of hunger, sore tummies and heads, and an accompanying weariness. They have a distorted relationship with food: desperate to get to the front of the dinner queue, stealing from lunchboxes. Some of them even steal fruit cores from the bin.

Too many children live with a growing sense of shame, of not being good enough; it makes them angry and anxious, and lacking in confidence.

In the modern consumerist society in which young people are often accused of a sense of entitlement and a lack of appreciation, too many children know the value of everything; they know that they can’t afford stuff: trips, cookery lessons, football clubs, swimming or music lessons. This means that they grow up with a lack of social and cultural capital to compound their material shortages.

They don’t experience sleepovers, clubs, parties and birthday presents.

They live with the associated spectres of poverty as a daily experience – of the poor mental health all around them and outbursts of domestic abuse.

They live in damp housing with inappropriate sleeping arrangements, nowhere to do homework, broken-glass-covered stairwells, dangerous electrical fittings and transience caused by frequent house moves.  

They suffer from poor dental health and too many will live 15-20 years less than the other children who may be living no more than a five-minute drive away. This is not good enough; it is time to draw a line in the sand, to say enough now.

These children are the reasons why we must find any way possible to speak truth to power. The volume must be turned up to ensure that the voices of our most vulnerable communities become impossible to ignore.

Siobhan Collingwood is headteacher of Morecambe Bay Primary School