Reflections On: Surrey’s End Poverty Pledge
Good Company, a local charity that runs five local food banks and other anti-poverty projects, is calling on local schools to sign up to its End Poverty Pledge. The charity has been working closely with local secondary schools over the past few years, after seeing first hand the financial pressures that school life places on low income families.
By talking to students in receipt of free school meals, and helping them to share their experiences with senior school leaders, they identified a number of ways in which schools can create a fairer and more inclusive community for all students, regardless of their financial circumstances.
“The reason I joined this project is that I didn’t want other children to experience the same stigma that we did. I hope it makes a positive change, not just for our school, but for other schools as well.” [Maisie, Year 13 Student]
Issues that came up repeatedly in discussions with students include the poor quality of school meals, the prohibitive cost of school uniform, and barriers to accessing support towards the cost of school trips and equipment, as well as a widespread lack of awareness about poverty among students and staff.
In each case, the students came up with practical recommendations to help address these issues, which are already being implemented by these schools:
- Providing training to make staff more aware and sensitive to how their actions can inadvertently embarrass or stigmatise students from low-income families.
- Improving the quality and quantity of free school meal provision, by increasing the uptake of hot meals, incentivising healthy options, making free drinking water available in the canteen, and promoting an affordable meal deal option.
- Reducing the cost of school uniform, by minimising the number of compulsory and/or logo-ed items, making teachers more aware of the reasons why some students may not be wearing the correct uniform, and establishing school uniform recycling schemes.
- Being more proactive in offering support to parents and older students, rather than waiting for people to ask or relying on teachers to identify those students who need extra support.
We hope that other local schools will follow these schools’ example, by taking the End Poverty Pledge and exploring what more they could do to reduce the financial pressure on families. An interactive video-based training resource for schools is available from Good Company.
For further information, please email: poverty@goodcompany.org.uk
