Labour MP Warns Homeless Families Are Using Schools As "Support Hubs"
Troubled small child in school uniform running away and unhappy with school
3 min read
A new Labour MP who was a deputy head teacher before being elected says families are turning up to schools with their belongings having been evicted from their homes.
Labour MP Sureena Brackenridge, who sits on the Commons Education Select Committee, told PoliticsHome that the wider impact of people being unable to afford somewhere to live “cannot be underestimated”.
“Schools are seen as crisis support hubs”, she says, “but we are limited with what we can do”.
The MP for Wolverhampton North East said that during her time as a teacher, she witnessed families “turn up to the school with bags because they have been evicted and they do not know what to do”.
She added: “Within the challenges we are seeing in wider society there are a lot of problems hitting communities.”
Last year, the charity Child Poverty Action Group said that while schools have in many circumstances supported families and pupils who are struggling, “this cannot continue”.
“Schools cannot solve child poverty. The efforts staff are making to deal with the effects of child poverty are pushing schools to their limits."
Brackenridge told PoliticsHome: “When we talk about barriers in education it's not all about barriers inside education, it's about the barriers across the community and in real life.”
Last year, housing and homelessness charity Shelter published research showing half of teachers at state schools in England (49 per cent) were working at a school with children who are homeless or who had become homeless in the last year.
At the time, Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, said that an "alarming number of teachers are bearing witness to the horrors of homelessness and bad housing that families tell our services about every day".
The Labour Government has launched a child poverty taskforce which is expected to publish recommendations in the spring.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said there is no "silver bullet" to addressing child poverty.
Starmer has resisted calls from charities and some Labour MPs to lift the two-child benefit cap. The Child Poverty Action Group estimates that taking this step would lift 250,000 children out of poverty, but the PM has repeatedly stressed that the Government will not make commitments that it cannot afford.
In July, Starmer removed the Labour whip from seven MPs after they defied the Government to back an opposition amendment calling for the cap to be lifted.
The cap, which in most households restricts the receipt of benefits to a family’s first two children, was introduced in 2017 by then-Tory chancellor George Osborne.
A Government spokesperson said: “We recognise the severe impact that housing instability can have on children’s education, which is why we continue to work across government, including with the Child Poverty Taskforce, to tackle the root causes of housing instability and provide practical support to families in need."
PoliticsHome Newsletters
PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe
