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."
“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?”
I see the same here in the Northern parts of France and throughout the countryside, people the ex-president Francois Hollande called derisively “les sans-dents” (without tooth) are suffering in silence. It’s heart breaking.
My niece moved to London years ago as a student. Got together with some others and rented a flat. My brother tells the story of how they had to travel across town on the subways, etc. and deposit money into the electrical company account that would turn on their meter and supply. But it is a prepaid plan for the heat. (Maybe it is gas??)
Anyway - they put in a bunch of money figuring that would last them awhile - may $200 or something??? Anyway, after about 5 days - the heat turns off! They figured it would last the month or more - but nope - the meter hit $200 after five days and they are shut off!
So, she takes the several hours to go across town again, deposits even more money, and they all agree to take shorter showers, keep the heat down, etc. I think they lasted 20 days out of what they hoped would last 30!
That was perhaps 8 years ago. I’m guessing prices have only gone up, but hopefully she can pay on her smartphone now. (Is working and living over there now).
Back in my day we had to walk barefoot all day long and late into the night across the living room floor just to change the channel on the TV. There were no remotes back then and the parents would say ”change the channel” and we had to do it or else we would get whipped with a wet and sweatty towel. It didn’t matter if it was cold or hot or if there was a blizzard outside or if there was a hurricane or flooding or If there were any tornados going on.
In the article about Prince Harry and his American fiance’s wedding security costs forcasted to be somewhere around 30 million there were a lot of irate posters from the UK complaining about tax payers being forced to pay that amount when many people are hurting, hospital is even turning down cancer patients and canceling surgeries etc.
Same as it is here.. business are dodging taxes by importing workers in stem fields. They claim there aren’t enogh American kids. It’s a lie. Many of these countries lack the same standards of education. I work in a stem field. I have personally experienced the degree mill grads who have a paper degree but make life threatening mistakes a new American grad would not make. Yes, I said life threatening.
But the worst tax dodging offender is our government.
The MSM will surely let us know...
While I have not read the books below, I’ve read enough of Theodore Dalrymple’s essays at City Journal and elsewhere to know there are plenty of problems in the white lower classes. Read a few of the Amazon reviews of his books, Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses and Not With a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline to get a sense of what is at work here. The welfare state and Leftist social policy is a big enabler of cultural decline, unsurprisingly.
Here is his page at City Journal:
https://www.city-journal.org/contributor/theodore-dalrymple_44
As a follow up to my previous, here’s a good essay that outlines some of the cultural rot. It’s from 10 years ago, so these forces have been in play for quite some time.
Childhood’s End
Britain, land of bleak houses and low expectations
https://www.city-journal.org/html/childhood’s-end-13114.html
Part of the elites’ plan has been to deprive the white underclass of any sort of real education. Combined with a true rate of inflation of 10-15% (nothing like the figures cooked up by government), probably higher for staple foodstuffs as a result of the UK’s exploding immigrant population (no pun intended) and the country’s inability to produce more than 40-45% of that now needed, the result is steadily worsening poverty.
It’s interesting that most comments assume the children are hungry and poorly dressed because of insufficient welfare spending directed at them. It’s really more like the opposite: there’s so much taxpayer money flung at “poor children” that the adults in their lives have gone completely AWOL.
Exactly; I can see you read the linked article.
Arguably we are just earlier on the same path of cultural rot here in the US.
I’ve been reading Theodore Dalrymple for 15 years or more. I think the US is definitely headed to the same place ... just on a somewhat different path, because we have a different history. In particular, we were affected differently by the World Wars and didn’t go whole hog for socialism in the 1940s.
It seems that many people have the impression that only minorities are dysfunctional and on welfare in the United States, when that’s simply not accurate.
One more thing: in the UK, every child is, in a sense, “on the dole,” because of the Mothers’ Benefit.
I am a great fan of Miss Read. An author of fiction, she documents life in rural England from about 1890 to about 1976. There have always been a British underclass who was hungry and poor with wastrels for parents.
Many of the policies in place were to directly address this issue. However the Moslim invasion has taken its toll and the policies of the upper classes on immigration and their version of the EPA have gutted the country.
btw have read every one of his books and follow him.
exactly, the prediction is that we are about 10 to 15 years out from Britain’s predicament.
It has certainly been a correct prediction in the past 15 years in the mental health field.
sometimes I wish that you lived next door to me TC
Ey laddie, how can you have any pudding when you won’t eat your meat?
Come over for a drink, and we’ll solve all the world’s problems! You’d get tired of our cars parked in front of your house, though ;-).
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