kids going to school hungry and tired

[dearyme]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13081777

is this poor parenting or real poverty - or a mixture of both?

More than three-quarters of 627 primary, secondary and college teachers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who responded to the survey believed they taught pupils living in poverty.

Of those, 80% said students came to school tired, 73% said they arrived hungry and 67% said they wore worn-out clothes or lacked the proper uniform.

That's really bad....terrible.

You aren't allowed to report this woman. This surely is neglect...

It's hard facing the same low level neglect issues day after day, year after year.
Not enough for SS to get involved, too many of them for the professionals to cope with, you end up parenting children that are not yours because you can't bear standing on one side and watching the adults that are supposed to love them being indifferent.
Feeding them breakfast, giving them clothing and books and equipment, taking home the things they make in school because they want to give them to someone who cares and won't bin it straight away.
Telling them that they have a future that is better than the present.

sausages - people do report these situations to SS. How SS react IME varies considerably from area to area dependent on the level of disadvanatge of the area (likely to have a higher case load) and the amount of staff per case load in SS.

In some areas SS don't really respond to any reports of neglect unless the children are literally starving They are too busy cdealing with physical and sexual abuse. In other areas SS will take reports of neglect very seriously.

agree goblinchild. I'm the safeguarding officer at the school too, and there are much worse things we have to deal with on a daily basis than someone not getting enough / proper food.

As someone else said above, you could give this woman £100K a year and she wouldn't spend it on her kids. All the SS help in the world won't change things, she doesn't neglect her children out of ignorance of a proper healthy diet, it's because she wants to spend her money on booze and the lotto!

And agree long term hunger looks very different to child not eating their breakfast, or even a child not having eaten last nights dinner and then breakfast.

That is SO sad....

I really feel for these kids. Would gladly sponsor one myself..but the problem is so much bigger.

Some children have a really hard life. I used to work in one of the poorest areas in the country. It used to break my heart. I woul regularly want to take children home with me - though of course I didn't. But I have also bought children food to eat.

I can see the enormity of the problem and that giving the mother is NO solution...

It's heartbreaking that the children aren't "neglected enough" to warrant Ss intervention. I wonder if these negligent parents only befriend people with the same lack of standards so they don't have to question their own (bad) behaviour.

I agree it's not about money...

How much does it cost to make a child a bowl of porridge of a morning...and to send them to school with a proper school lunch.

Agree that it's love and care...children should not have to fend for themselves. I wonder if there will be any actions from the findings.

This is not new but heartbreaking all the same. I see it a lot in our school too.

It's crap parenting. I grew up in the north east of England in the 80's. Mass unemployment and strikes meant my parents rarely had much money.

They still managed to make sure 4 kids had full bellies and clean clothes. A bowl of porridge costs almost nothing but the time to make it.

I feel so sorry for the poor children out there who's parents just don't give a shit. With tax credits and child benefit there is no excuse at all for this neglect.

There's also a lot of people unwilling to interfere because it's not their business, it's someone else's children and someone else's problem.
As I said, it's low level, continuous, relentless neglect throughout their childhoods and into their teens. Like the acid rain of my youth, corroding and destroying.

And sadly most of these kids will grow up with the same low standards and low expectations (of the world and themselves) and the cycle will continue.

Not where I work now I hasten to add, there's a burnout factor to teaching on the front line and I reached it.
So I got out, to an area where worrying about Jocasta's reading level in reception, or whether I should invite all of Piers' little friends to his birthday party is the limit of their concerns.
It's lovely here, so undemanding of the emotions.

I do feel v sad for children living in situations of severe poverty and/or neglect.

I should add though that despite being neither poor nor neglected both my DSs go to school in worn out/wrong sized uniform at present - DS2 (nearly 10) had 4 new school jumpers in September. He has lost all of them and is now wearing one from last year which is slightly too small. I have recovered at least 2 from lost property before Xmas, only for him to lose them again. So now he either has to look for the lost ones, or make do.

DS1 has a great big rip in his blazer because he insists in playing football in it I've repaired it a couple of times but as soon as I do he rips in again. He will get a new one in Sept, but not before. The hems of all his trousers are shredded at the back because he insists on wearing them round his hips as opposed to his waist and the hems drag on the floor.

They also both have a habit of getting dressed in the morning in the day befores clothes rather than getting new ones off their shelves. I do sometimes get their clothes out for them in the mornings but at nearly 10 and 13 I feel I shouldnt have to do this.

You make them wash though, do hair and teeth? You feed them and their clothes are clean if a bit tatty?

And them wearing the days before clothes isn't a big deal. I assume they don't smell for example?

its so sad to see kids hungry and dirty. I know a woman who earns 35k plus and her little boy's clothes would be rejected by Oxfam!

My DD is starting to get wilful with clothes (on non uniform days) and sometimes does not look as well pressed as I would like and she is also a very poor eater if you are not badgering her throughout the meal so sometimes I daresay she goes to school hungry - but this is her own doing - there is always cereal, fresh fruit and toast available to her in the morning. I am a breakfast eater myself so its always a "done" thing in our house.

yes they bathe every night and hairwash a couple of times a week, DS1 gets a bit smelly after playing sports but a bath sorts it out. They do look scruffy a lot of the time in their school clothes (some of their school stuff would prob get rejected by oxfam as well), especially getting towards this time of the year. They look much better at weekends in their 'best' clothes....

food - they don't always have breakfast as need to leave fairly early to get to school, sometimes they take toast to have on the way, however DS1 is overweight and DS2 has 3 meals a day other than breakfast (lunch at school, dinner at CM then will always ask for supper - beans on toast etc when he gets home) so I dont think anyone would worry they are being starved. Hope not anyway!

Kids wearing uniform a bit too small, refusing to have breakfast or wearing slightly scruffy clothes are not be themselves a sign of neglect. Children who are neglected will often be smelly day in day out, have dirty clothes, be hungry much of the time, often be missing standard items of clothing such as underwear. Honestly, teachers and others are not judging you becauseyour kids refuse to eat breakfast. Real neglect is usually obvious if you have regular contact with the child in question.

i think teachers can tell the difference between a scruffy kid (arent they all) and a neglected one. I know I probably could when I waited at the school gates :(

If you think about someone like Shannon Matthews mum, I cant imagine she was up at the crack of dawn pressing their uniforms and preparing their lunches and seeing them off with a kiss somehow

I used to teach in a secondary school on a "bad" estate in London (very first teaching job ever, and years and years ago now). What shocked me was the number of children who actually did have money, but who's food for the day was McDonalds breakfast bought themselves and eaten on the walk to school, choc and pepsi from the vending machines at lunch (or maybe some chips from the canteen) and then Kentucky Fried chicken on the way home - every single day, and right from year 7 day one... Parents didn't care enough to make sure proper breakfast/ lunch/ dinner was available and handed the kids a fiver instead - neglect not poverty, though possibly also ignorance (maybe they thought that was fine, and at least they were providing in some way not keeping the money for themselves...) No wonder there were behavioural problems and tired and grumpy children though! A lot of the same kids had TV/ DVD etc. in their rooms and apparently nobody checking / nobody bothered if they were up til the early hours of the morning watching late night horror movies...

Of course there were also cases of children unwashed/ dirty clothing/ outgrown shoes/ no coat in winter and so on, but these were "in the system" to a degree - followed up on by form tutors, on through head of year (which I believe was a role being phased out - I'm no longer in the UK nor teaching in regular schools) and educational welfare, but there was nothing anyone could do about the ones who were always tired and malnourished despite having cash in their pockets etc.

Its terrible isn't it. TBH it does put people's parenting worries here into perspective e.g. is my child watching too much tv? Not saying parents are wrong to have these worries, but children who are really neglected have a terrible time of it.

I question the assertion that "benefits are plentiful" and I suspect that anyone attempting to live on benefits would find this a risible statement. I would also be careful about assuming poverty is always an element in neglectful parenting because I was privately educated and was quite horrified at the squalid conditions a couple of school friends lived in. Their parents were enormously wealthy but chose to live an "existential" lifestyle.

I do recall some very sad cases of hopeless parenting when the dcs were at primary school and often this would come from parents who'd been appallingly parented themselves. One of ds2's classmates was so appallingly dirty that the school discreetly bought her a swimming costume and towel so that in the summer she'd at least get some exposure to water.

I do suspect (and apologise for old gimmer moment here) that tiredness is rather too often associated with too many weekday evenings spent in front of computers though. That and too many activities crammed into the week - often by middle class parents who seem to think their child needs the sort of organised schedule that would exhaust an adult. I was a liberal parent in very many ways but right through their schooldays I was ferocious about bedtimes because growing young people need a sensible amount of rest - even if they may not need 8 hours of actual sleep.

I agree with dearyme in that teachers can tell the difference between "scruffy" and "neglected" though.