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.

No experience of these situations then?
Just feeling a bit witty?
Let them eat cake and all that?

Tragically, it's a cycle that will continue, as most of these children will parent their children in the same way.
I think parenting skills should be taught as part of the national curriculum.

When I worked for SS I saw some cases that would break your heart. Sadly, there is not the money or the number of foster carers needed to take them all into care. Most of those told to attend parenting classes did not bother, as they couldn't see or understand what the problem was, due to the way they themselves had been raised.

On the other hand, I'm sorry.
I now live in a lovely area with people who have nice homes and nice children and nice lifestyles and no clue as to how huge sections of the country live.
I ran out of energy and fight and the will to keep struggling against the odds, so I opted out and left them.
So the problem is mine, not yours. You are unaware and oblivious, I quit.

in newham all primary kids et free school meals, pity the overnment cut the trials in other areas of the country.

Goblinchild don't beat yourself up!

It must have been hard work to teach in an area like that. I'm only admin at the school I'm at and that's hard enough.

GoblinChild, I am really feeling for Eeyore here & don't know if you realise how pushy you sound. At our school there's only one lady (parttime TA) who runs the 2nd hand uniform sales, she is impossible to reliably leave messages for, often impossible to find (she also does Lost Property). I can literally spend 20 min. hunting around the school trying to find her (for Lost Property) to find she went home already or is in a meeting.
The staff rarely know when the next 2nd hand uniform sale is, and they don't want the job of having to decide what's big enough or good enough condition for somebody else's standards. As for asking a friend to pick up something at the 2nd hand sale, Eeyore may well be working such long hours that there's nobody she feels she knows well enough to ask, or share her skint status with.

Eeeyore I don't think the story is about people like you. Anyway, DS can get his (cleany washed) jumper filthy by 8am, some kids are truly awful that way.

Our school doesn't even sell uniform any more -- you order it all thru a website, delivered to one's door. But amazingly more expensive than 2nd hand, which is still relatively easy for me to get because I'm a SAHM who keeps her eyes peeled for the erratic sell offs of Lost Property.

I think teachers have a "nose" for neglect tbh...at least good ones do!

My ds1 has a clean and pressed uniform every day (I am slightly anal about it having not had same when I was growing up)but yesterday when I picked him up at 3.15pm I could have wept!....his hair was standing up on end, his finger nails were black, his sweater was stuffed in his backpack and his white polo shirt was smeared with grey/black stuff....he had had a fun day!!!

If someone had seen him they would perhaps have made judgements about me....but he was clean as a button at 8.45am!!!!

Also, he takes packed lunches but will only eat brown bread and butter, an oaty biscuit and a packet of crisps and water....I am sure I would be judged for that too, but he gets a good breakfast and a good tea so I dont stress about it.

Real neglect is matted, unwashed hair. Dirty faces and bodies, smelly bodies, dirty unwashed clothes, soiled pants, clothes that are ripped/torn /far too small/shoes with holes in etc etc

......and I see it every day at my sons school.

Truly heartbreaking

Thanks lljkk.

Sorry if I was being pushy, I thought I was problem-solving.
I've never been able to make it to my children's school as I'm at my school 8-5.30, so it was just what I'd have done in those circumstances.

It's a good idea, but we don't have a cheque book.

Poverty can lead to poor parenting which can lead to poverty which can lead to poor parenting which can lead to poverty etc. etc. etc.

I've taught children who sleep in the same bed as their 5 or 6 siblings every night. Mum sleeps on the sofa. If there is one. There is lots of love in the home but little in the way of the skill required to budget, to prioritise or to launder effectively. There is electricity. Sometimes. Food, occasionally. Loan sharks? Daily. Police raids? Regularly. These children rarely sleep well either because their siblings keep them up or spend the night tossing and turning or because no-one's had any sleep thanks to the Police raiding next door or loud, violent problems elsewhere in the block. It's hard to wash school clothes over night if you have no washing machine and your child doesn't have enough spare clothing to wear whilst the, donated by school, clothing is being washed. It's even harder to dry clothing overnight if there is no heating and the accommodation is damp. No electricity means no fridge which makes a hard life even harder.

Sadly the above isn't the case for just one of the children I've taught over the past ten years but for a significant proportion of every single class I've taught. I stockpile school clothing and PE kits by buying them, salvaging them from lost property or making use of the cast-offs of friends and family, negotiate 'free' breakfast club attendance (or else scrounge spare fruit and milk from the KS1 classes) and ensure my classroom has beanbags, cushions and blankets to let tired children sleep if they need it.

So yes, I'd say the reports reflect my experience. It's heartbreaking but, as teachers at least we can provide a safe, secure place for those children for part of each day and do a very little something towards breaking the cycle of poverty and poor parenting. Sadly neglect, whether willful or circumstantial has to be far worse than what I've described for social services to prioritise... which says a lot about the situations other children find themselves in :(

SE13Mummy-You sound like the best teacher these poor kids could have.Please keep up what you're doing- you will make a huge difference to your pupils.

Good grief - how bloody awful. I really admire the teachers on here who have tried to help these poor kids.

I work with families with young children, but I'm not a teacher. I think that one of the main problems is that a lot of families don't know how to cook from scratch (which costs less than ready-meals and take-aways) or budget. A mum I know spends most of her money on food for the family, but it's tins of mince and macaroni cheese, bags of frozen chips etc. These things cost a fraction of the price to make.

A lot of the asylum-seeking families (who are often the poorest of the poor) can make delicious meals from basics - flour, lentils etc.

I think that we need to teach children how to cook basic, nutritious meals, perhaps by way of obligatory home ec lessons for a couple of years in secondary school.

I hate these threads

The Welsh Assemby is far from perfect, but the free breakfast scheme for all primary school children is a good one.

I often worry about being judged by teachers and SS.

DS2 goes to a primary school where, thankfully, they can wear trainers and tracksuit bottoms. His trousers always have holes in the knees after about 2 weeks from playing football/it/rubgy (or the occasional scrap!) at playtime. It used to be GAP now is very much Primark! His jumpers also seem to just fall to pieces too. His school polo shirts are all faded and he grows at such a rate that they are often getting a bit small (and holey!) He often lies about cleaning his teeth (I feel the dry toothbrush after he has set off!)

And he is just filthy at the end of every day. And stinky.

He doesn't want a big packed lunch because it eats into playtime at lunch but has breakfast, dinner and a small supper. He has a doorkey (he's 11 but has had one since he was 9) which the teacher often looks after for him during PE. We live 1 minutes walk from school and I aim to get back from work just as he is walking in the house but I think he needs a key in case I get stuck in traffic.

Also, I was hugely embarrassed once when a teaching assistant called round impromptu and there was (clean) washing just draped everywhere in the living room. It honestly looked like a launderette. And I was smoking a fag in the garden.

"Poverty can lead to poor parenting which can lead to poverty which can lead to poor parenting which can lead to poverty etc. etc. etc."

That's dangerous and shallow stereotyping.

Usualsuspect: I wonder if you hate these threads because it shows that there is another side to the story: real and serious neglect as well as relative poverty. Benefits are not always spent well. If children are going hungry while the parents smoke and drink they are not hungry because they are poor, they are hungry because they are neglected.

SE13 - Not having a washing machine and cold/damp accommodation makes washing and drying clothes harder, but it is still perfectly possible for parents to send children in clean clothes. As long as each child has 1 change of clothes, you can send children to school reasonably clean.

You know it was only 30-40 years ago when lots and lots of families in places like Glasgow lived with only a fire when they could afford it, shared outside toilet and often no running hot water.

I have always found that some teachers who come from middle class/better off backgrounds can IMO be too understanding of how difficult it must be to keep children clean and well fed when they live in poor accommodation/live on benefits. Yes I'msure the standards for what is clean may have been lower, but plenty of families managed to send their children to school not smelling dirty and looking reasonably clean.

I think there is a difference with hungry/tired and scruffy!

My children will often go to school with unpolished shoes and stains on the jumper and I agree that can sometimes be a sign of abuse.
Not all scruffy children have their most important needs unmet however.

I am a stickler for early bedtimes, clean teeth and good food, but as a family we are just not into preening ourselves.

A teacher will see a child from September right through to July. So they will know which ones had smart uniforms on the first day of the year; which ones smell all the time and which ones become progressively smellier through the day/week; which ones come in hungry then tuck into a packed lunch and which ones come in ravenous day in day out and spend break time trying to sneak into wherever the packed lunches are kept so they can steal food.

They will also be able to sense the air of abject misery surrounding a truly neglected child.

A very sad thread. Not one mention of the break down of the family or the need for a return to family values; for the price of alcohol to be raised; for a clamp down on drug use, abuse and dealing of all kinds; teenage pregnancy; the social ill effects of ghetto estates and tower block living; of personal responsibility; of family planning; or of three generations of flexible boundaries imposed by teachers, nurses, social workers and the liberal left that have done nothing to improve the standard of living for hundreds of thousands of children.

Tired, hungry, dirty - possibly cold and abused too - how far we have come since Victorian squalor - the physical squalor replaced by modern neglect. What progress?

SE13Mummy, you sound like a wonderful teacher, with a real grasp of the issues involved. I am so glad that there are teachers like you out there!
There are solutions to some of these problems, and most teachers do their bit. Schools can help by sorting out the second-hand uniform issue, providing breakfast clubs etc; government can work on reducing social inequality (I wish!) and social services can do their bit; friends and family can be involved. But sadly some children just have a crap childhood.

What strikes me is that some of these posts are describing children who could have lived in Victorian workhouses. A hundred years of enlightened (and some not so enlightened) social reforms and we still haven't dealt with the problem of child poverty. Why not? My guess is that many people simply don't know or believe how the most deprived people in our society live. I don't think it helps to judge them - better to try to understand what's happening in society.

Cross-posted, Onceamai!

Imo it's not the liberal left who are to blame (or any one government or party). How could it be, over 100 years (much more really) and throughout Thatcher's time too.