September is the season of footwear. From the moment the ever-more-elaborate back-to-school adverts begin their annual creep into our collective consciousness - alongside an almost imperceptible change in the flavour of the air, from fizzing July and August to the mellow warmth of autumn - shoes will be stamping their presence on our psyche.

Across the country, parents will smile thinly at tills, handing over their cards and cash with silent inward sighs, after a weary battle of with reluctant infants or recalcitrant teens, all over a seemingly endless array of regulation school shoes. 

Stockinged feet of all sizes will be wedged by ribbon straps on to measuring boards, whose resulting figures will either elicit sighs of relief at a lack of growth or raised eyebrows and a small gasp at just how quickly current shoes have been outgrown. Summer-sandalled beach feet and playtime-trainered toes will be velcroed and laced into the leather and patent of the forthcoming term, and then allied with their other hardy term-time foot soldiers of plimsolls, football boots and trainers. 

Stacks of boxes and tissue paper litter the floor: remnants of negotiations and battles between parent and child, as they seek to find common ground in the no-man’s land of sensible and fashionable. 

At the school gates

And on that first day of term, when the statutory first-day photos have been duly sent to friends and relatives, or posted on social media, those shoes will find their way to the school gates.

Some will be waved off hurriedly over the fence by car keys clutched by those who are late and yet to get back into step with the rhythm of school and work. Some will step in time with their wary parents, ready for a first-day drop off; both sets hesitant and emotional as they go toe to toe for a final good-luck hug. Some will be racing in, scuffed already from bikes and scooters or from the first football strike of the year. 

But some will not be shiny and new. Some will not have been in those shoe shops. As we watch the parade of polish enter our assembly halls and sit smartly on chairs or gleaming September floors, it would be all too easy not to notice that some children will not be the scrubbed, the newly shod and the smiling faces on doorstep photos. 

Rain seeping in

Some will be in shoes that are too small or shoes that fear wet playtime not because the rain will seep in. Some will be in uniforms in which they have slept and which, even as very young children, they have had to remember to get ready themselves. 

I still remember a child I taught more than two decades ago, who wore the same pair of wellington boots as his school shoes for three consecutive years, despite his toes being crushed and his feet being sockless. 

Others will not have had the safety of a loving and consistent adult in their lives, or the reassurance of a home that is not chaotic or dangerous. It is these children for whom the back-to-school adverts potentially mean a return to a warm and safe building, or a regular hot meal, or a smile and a chance to be a child. It is for these children that we as a profession should be putting forward our very best collective feet. 

The end of the holidays are the chance for many to start afresh and to walk an exciting new path. Others need us to notice and to walk alongside them, to support them and understand them, and to advocate for them. Because, just as the preparation for the new term is so much more than new shoes, our work as a profession, as teachers, is so much more than just identifying next steps. Teaching, and the communities we build in our schools, are all about soles, and all about souls. 

Emma Turner is the research and CPD lead for Discovery Schools Academy Trust in Leicestershire. She tweets as @Emma_Turner75