Earlier this month, we at the Social Mobility Commission published our annual monitoring report.

We’re a neutral organisation, publically appointed, and so a monitoring report from us is business as usual. It may even - God forbid - sound quite dry. But the message inside was clear.

We, collectively, as a country, are failing our children.

The statistics are stark. There are at least 4.2 million children living in poverty right now in the UK - 600,000 more than in 2011. 

Even before the pandemic, this was expected to rise to 5.2 million by 2022. This is verifiable fact, and should make all of us ashamed.

The reality of poverty

But it is also just a number, and we can’t let it be the whole story. We need to properly visualise what it means.

Let’s introduce another number - the threshold beneath which a child is classed as being in poverty: Household income of £16,000 a year.

I’m a teacher, and we use terminology such as “pupil premium”, and “free school meals” all the time, but whenever I do, I remind myself what we’re really talking about. £16,000 to feed, house and clothe a household of four, or five, or even six or seven (because we now cap benefits after the first two children).

This is hard. It’s hard in practical terms and, as teachers, we have become used to helping children who are without resources, without space to work, without digital access, without appropriate clothes for school, without breakfast, and, in one heartbreaking case that has haunted me for years, without food at all.

But, in a way, difficult as this is, it is the easier side of child poverty to tackle. It has an answer - we pay for breakfasts, provide spaces, buy laptops - even if it is hard to put into action.

The invisible dangers

There is another side, though.

For every child at risk of physical harm from poverty, there are countless more who suffer deep and long-lasting wounds to their happiness and life chances that are more difficult to see.

The essentials might be there, but our research has found again and again that experience of scarcity and insecurity can severely impact emotional, social, educational, and financial prospects in later life.

Baldly put, a childhood spent in poverty dramatically increases the likelihood of poverty in adulthood. Distressingly, we can show that this is more true now than it used to be, with those who grew up in poverty in the 1980s twice as likely to be in poverty now as those born just a decade earlier.

The most obvious explanation for this - one I’ve seen first-hand as a teacher - is that poor children do worse at school. 

The educational attainment gap between children in poverty and those who are more economically fortunate is terrifyingly consistent.

One of the most revealing statistics is that almost three in five children on free school meals fail to get good passes at GCSE English and maths.

Long-term negative effects

Still, even such clear correlations risk lapsing into jargon and diminishing the emotional depth of children’s personal experiences. 

The “attainment gap” doesn’t tell us about why it feels so bad to see your name on a list of disadvantaged pupils prepared for Ofsted. 

Or the humiliation of being told off repeatedly for not doing homework that has been assigned via an app, which you cannot access because no one in your family has any mobile data left. 

Or why, with the greatest possible respect, you cannot focus on Shakespeare when, back at home, you know there are money worries consuming your parents’ every moment of the day.

This gets to the heart of so much about the issue we face. Poverty is not just about food, access to the internet or lack of clean clothes. Poverty is about stress.

Take away the security of a solid wage, and a household begins to creak at the seams.

And all my experience as a teacher tells me that a child in a household under extreme financial stress can suffer damage that will stay with them for years.

Failing to deliver

The irony is that 2020 was the year by which the government had been meant to solve Child Poverty, only to step away from the challenge in 2015 when it got difficult. And now our economy has imploded. 

It would be easy to slip into a triage mentality putting in place quick fixes to the system, some food vouchers here, some laptops there, a bit of extra tutoring to plug the gaps.  That is something - it is a vital first step - but it is not good enough. 

In our monitoring report, we make the point that over the past seven years, despite every prime minister reiterating a commitment to increasing social mobility, eradicating burning injustices, or simply levelling up, there has been a total lack of coordination and planning across government.

We talk about changing things, but no one seems willing to commit to making social justice and social mobility an actual part of planning policy.

Until we do, though, nothing will change.

We must face reality

We must emerge from this crisis with an unshakeable commitment to changing a benefits system that has allowed more families with children to enter into poverty.

We need, as a matter of urgency, to pay the national living wage, extend eligibility for free childcare, and invest in children’s centres. 

But beyond that, we must also reckon with the fact that coronavirus has exposed a malignant, pervasive apathy about the future of our country’s children. 

We no longer have the luxury of looking away.

Sammy Wright is Social Mobility Commission lead for schools and HE and vice principal of Southmoor Academy

He also recently won the Northern Book Prize for his novel, Fit, which centres on issues of social mobility, and will be exploring some of the fault lines in educational policy on Radio 4, Four Thought this week.