How you can help children in the UK battling poverty and the pandemic

Vikki with her daughters, Amelia and Maisie. She lost her job as a nursery school teacher due to coronavirus but vital support from Save the Children helped her family stay strong during the crisis (Simon Edmunds/Save the Children )

The first years of a child’s life are the foundations on which their future is built. Confidence, resilience, a hunger to learn and an understanding of their place in the world are all vital emotional building blocks, carefully nurtured during the early stages of a young person’s life to form a strong, solid basis for their development and wellbeing.

But for some children living in the UK, poverty is holding them back and preventing them from reaching their full potential, with this childhood poverty gap evident in children as young as five. Unfortunately the Covid-19 pandemic has only compounded this issue, triggering widespread economic insecurity, job losses and unemployment, and leaving many families who were already struggling without the income or opportunities to give their children the start in life they want.

The happier news is that the power is in our hands to make a profound difference by addressing the root causes of poverty and narrowing the gap between disadvantaged children and their better off peers.

Supporting early learning is a simple, effective way to tackle inequalities and help children thrive – boosting their language and communication skills as well as their social and emotional development.

One parent who knows just how crucial education is to children’s health and happiness is Vikki, who lives with her two daughters, Amelia, eight, and Maisie, six, in Hanworth, London. When the pandemic struck in 2020, Vikki lost her job as a part-time nursery school teacher and struggled to make ends meet.

To ensure the family were supported during this challenging time, Save the Children provided food vouchers, as well as early learning packs focused around stimulating and strengthening communication and language skills to make home-schooling easier for Vikki and ensure Amelia and Maisie didn’t miss out on learning opportunities.

Despite the pressure she was under with health and money worries, Vikki made the most of every moment she spent with her daughters during lockdown, and they even managed to turn what was going on into a learning journey, documenting their experience together by recording diaries, taking pictures and making models. And though difficult, the experience was ultimately affirming for Vikki, as she kept things together financially, and Amelia and Maisie’s education stayed on track. “As a family we got through it,” she says. “Just realising that as a single mum I can do it. I did it and we got through it.”

Now, Vikki, Amelia and Maisie are looking forward to a future that is much more positive, while making the most of every moment. “I want the children to thrive. I want them to be in school, to appreciate everyday and what everyday can bring,” she says. “To appreciate that being at school is also a luxury, and use every day to their full advantage.”

Along with her family, Amelia, eight, recorded diaries, pictures and made models to document how they got through the pandemic (Simon Edmunds/Save the Children)

As Vikki’s story demonstrates, the triggers for poverty can be sudden and outside our control, and can quickly impact on families, as parents scramble to make ends meet, and life becomes a matter of simple survival. But with an approach that combines both financial and holistic support, these crisis moments can be averted – helping parents to feel safe, accepted and connected, empowering them to keep things together as a family, and have the resources required to help facilitate their children’s development.

Supporting Save the Children’s Fairness Fund is a simple, effective way that you can help families and children in need, and effect lasting change by troubleshooting and tackling immediate pressures as well as the bigger picture problem of child poverty as a whole.

Rather than simply providing emergency relief, the Fairness Fund enacts both short and long-term interventions and deploys a strategic approach, creating evergreen resources and developing innovative programmes aimed at empowering parents and children and building the skills and resilience to protect them in the future.

By working closely with other charities and liaising with the government the charity works on both a macro and a micro level, ensuring more, lasting support is given to the UK’s most underprivileged children, to make a real difference.

Monthly investments in the Fairness Fund could provide children living in poverty with a positive home learning environment where they can play and learn, alleviate families’ financial pressures so that children are properly nourished and given the equipment they need, and support community partnerships between schools, nurseries and health workers to help children in every aspect of their lives.

As well as providing children with vital short-term resources, like meals, as a Fairness Fund investor, you are able to play a part in tackling the systemic problems that make poverty so difficult to escape.

In return, you will receive regular updates about the work your money is funding and the progress being made for children both here and abroad.

Thanks to the vital support from Save the Children, families like Vikki’s were able to get through the toughest times intact. But there are still difficult times ahead and closing the childhood poverty gap will require a sustained effort to enact real and lasting change. But change is possible and measurable, and it’s something we can all commit to helping facilitate.

Invest in the Fairness Fund today to make the world a place where every child can thrive.