Posted on 04/02/2018 11:30:59 PM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
The plight of schoolkids living in poverty in 21st century Britain was highlighted Monday as schoolteachers told of their experiences on the frontline in schools in poorer areas.
A survey of 900 teachers revealed 60 percent of them saying child poverty in schools had worsened since 2015, with one in three saying the problem had got significantly worse, the annual conference of the National Education Union (NEU) was told in Brighton.
The Guardian newspaper reported how headteachers from schools in deprived areas say they are having to provide basic services such as washing school uniforms for pupils from poor households, and are even paying for budget advice and counselling services for parents.
A number of school leaders said at the conference they had noticed a visible difference in health and stature between children from their schools in deprived areas and those from better-off areas.
One headteacher from a school in Cumbria in northern England said she was shocked to witness the differences between former pupils from her school and those from other primary schools.
"My children, who have gone from me up to the local secondary school, have grey skin, poor teeth, poor hair, poor nails. They are smaller, they are thinner," she said.
"At sporting events, you see your children in the year group compared to other children in an affluent area and you think: our kids are really small. When you see them with children of the same age who are from an affluent area, they just look tiny."
Louise Regan, head of a primary school in Nottinghamshire, said: "We have a food bank, so we give out food parcels, particularly on Fridays, we buy clothing, we do a lot of buying, particularly coats in winter and shoes. We've had children who haven't come to school because they didn't have shoes."
Jane Jenkins, headteacher of an inner-city primary school in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, said: "Poverty on paper seems to be getting better but the reality is completely the reverse, poverty is just becoming more and more extreme."
Mondays were often the worst days at some schools, conference delegates said, with children arriving in school hungry and tired after a weekend with little food.
The experiences of teachers back up a new survey carried out by the NEU in association with the Child Poverty Action Group.
NEU official Celia Dignam, responsible for child poverty issues, said the union's survey revealed 4.1 million children are living in poverty.
Dignam said: "Schools are now a safety net, particularly for children in poverty," added that the Institute for Fiscal Studies had estimated that by 2021 5 million children in Britain would be living in poverty.
In a statement the Department for Education said: "We continue to support the most disadvantaged children through free school meals, the 2.5 billion pound (3.5 billion U.S. dollars) funding given to schools through the pupil premium to support their education, and the recently announced 26 million pounds (37 million U.S. dollars) investment to kickstart or improve breakfast clubs in at least 1,700 schools."
pffff- we used to have to hollow out loaves of bread to wear on our feet to walk to school through 2 feet of snow- uphill both ways- Then we had to split a chord of wood to keep the woodstove going- then classes all day, then shovel my way back home again- many is the day i shoveled my way to school and when i got there my bread shoes were all soggy
Snow days? Ha! No such thing back then
Kids these days!
Yes, things are getting really weird in the U.K., too.
SHOCK ABUSE SCANDAL: Nun raped me and had my baby - Torment of a schoolboy victim
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/940504/child-abuse-nun-raped-me-and-had-my-baby-schoolboy-victim
however we always hear about inner city poverty, and those kids are huge, huge and fat as well....
Looked up the census figures for Cumbrian counties. It appears they are in the %90+ white, so what’s going on? Too much pandering to the non white population?
Are these Muslim children?
Are you kidding? Big deal! We had to do all that plus wash all the windows at the teachers house during a blizzard on the way home....
It may take another century and millions more murdered, but eventually humanity will connect the dots and eradicate socialism like polio.
what Xinhua and the original in The Guardian don’t mention is the well-documented increase in fuel poverty in Britain, due to insane “manmade gobal warming” policies and increasing costs of electricity/heating:
National Education Union: EduFacts - Child Poverty
Research by the End Child Poverty coalition also demonstrates that the poorest families in the UK pay higher prices than better-off families for basic necessities. A family living in poverty is likely to have to pay nearly £1,700 more than a higher income family for essential household items like a cooker, ***energy and home insurance...
https://www.teachers.org.uk/edufacts/child-poverty
MSM pushed the mad “green” policies and the global warming nonsense, and now they pretend they are concerned about the poverty they caused. hypocrites.
Don't forget that Shoeless Joe Jackson did pretty good for himself!
In fact, it wasn't until he started to regularly wear shoes to work that his downfall came about.
(Of course, some claim it wasn't the shoes that mattered, but rather that he chose the wrong color of Sox).
Keep spending that money on ungrateful and violent 3rd world savages from Northern Africa and the Middle East, instead of taking care of your own. Only so much money to go around. As in America, the citizens get shafted while 3rd world ugly gets a, welcome mat, with all the goodies.
And wouldn’t you know it, these same savages can go around, for years, raping and abusing young girls with absolutely no fear.
Amazing how Western Civilization has become so ‘pussified’ to put up with this.
Thanks Berlin_Freeper. That's the same kind of thing that helped create and drive The Great Migration, and in the intervening four centuries there have been multiple regime changes in Britain. Same problems? Same policies. Dump the EU, dump the Parliament, dump the Crown.
+1
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