The horrifying truth about being a teacher in the UK today
Buying food, clothes, bedding and basics for pupils has become commonplace in schools where some children have never seen sand despite living 20 miles from the beach. Zoë Beaty returns to her home town of Boston, Lincolnshire, and hears accounts from inspiring teachers across the UK who have had to become first responders in their communities, and who are finding innovative ways to change children's lives
In a modest building tucked just behind a residential road in Boston, Lincolnshire, teachers and pupils at St Nicholas Church of England Primary School are well into their day. Around lunchtime there are cheers in the corridors; behind classroom doors children sit cross-legged and captivated, enjoying their daily storytime. The headteacher, Fiona Booth, has had a storytime of sorts herself this morning, too, as she does every day. Sometimes it comes from a pupil who witnessed violence in their home the night before, or who was overjoyed to have eaten a tin of peas for their Christmas dinner. The stories are heartbreaking, almost unbelievable, or at least unbearable to fathom.
Recently, for instance, one child came into school a lot more excited than usual. He’d slept in a tent overnight, he told Booth and her staff; he was elated. Previously he, his parents and his two siblings had been sleeping on the streets. He was the designated “blanket”, Booth explains, “because out of him and his two other siblings, he was always the warmest. So they would huddle together and he would lie on top.” His sister had the responsibility of foraging for food out of bins (she had the longest arms). The school sprang into action.
St Nick’s, as it’s known locally, is well practised when it comes to extracurricular care – it was the focus of a recent BBC report looking at the pressures facing schools, because of its drive to go above and beyond for its pupils. But it’s just one example. Like thousands across the country, teachers here are seeing hardship and deprivation in class every day. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that primary school staff estimate that more than one-third (35 per cent) of pupils in their care came to school hungry last year, a number that rises to 44 per cent in deprived areas, like Boston, where the issues can be witnessed well beyond the school gates.
There’s deprivation here of every kind – poverty, food deprivation, problems with housing. “I’m very conscious that there are some children in our school who are dearly loved at home,” Booth clarifies. “But the large majority just kind of… exist.”
Having grown up two minutes down the road from St Nick’s, I am familiar with what she describes. I have watched my teenage twin sisters navigate the school system – a few years ago they told me that breaktime meant sitting in small groups and “pooling” lunchboxes to share food with those who didn’t have it, which is “not uncommon at all”, according to Booth.
“If a lunchbox is brought at all, it might just contain a cold, uncooked Rustlers burger [a processed, microwaveable, vacuum-packed burger]. We’ve seen that. Or a huge bag of broken biscuits and nothing else; coffee, or Monster energy drinks in children’s flasks, things like that.” It’s not a teaching problem, but a parenting problem, says Booth. In a town like this, for schools like hers, that is precisely the point.
In the surrounding area – a working-class town built on agricultural labour, with high immigration, low integration, lack of adequate infrastructure and the resulting bitter sense of abandonment by local and central government – there’s a battle being fought.
Outsiders looking in at schools like St Nick’s – where there are 21 languages spoken among 190 pupils – are often quick to blame high numbers of non-English nationals overwhelming the system. Booth is blunt about it: “They’re bigots,” she says. In fact, the town’s problems are much wider and generationally embedded than the make-up of its population.
In 2021, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that the town had the second-highest proportion of people reporting no qualifications in the country; government-published data on education, skills and learning for post-16s in Boston and Skegness pegs it as being in the top 5 per cent of the worst places to live. That’s due to high crime, high teenage pregnancy rates, and low mobility. “People born here stay here,” Booth says.
“That lack of opportunity, lack of aspiration, lack of experience means that as a school we’re always trying to narrow that capital cultural gap.” Motifs from the school’s motto – “Let your light shine” – are dotted all around, and reflect that aspirational cause which is clearly so important to Booth. “Places like this are lighthouses saying, ‘Look out there: you could be so much more.’ A lighthouse guides you away from danger.”
You get a better sense of the rigorous support system that Booth and her staff have created when she speaks about this – a system that not only caters for the children, but is having to help the adults in their lives, too. Booth makes sure she stands at the school gates every morning and at the end of the school day, so that parents can find her easily if they are in distress.
“It’s really easy to stand back from a distance and be principled about it,” says Booth. “Or say that it’s a ‘parent’s job’ to feed or clothe a child, or brush their teeth. But you try doing that when a child is hungry or a parent is broken, and they’re coming down the path towards you saying, ‘He’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me.’” The school has found that domestic violence is rising exponentially. “Your job, then, is to get that person inside.”
In the North West it’s a similar story. Steve Campbell, CEO of the LET Education Trust, which manages four schools around Accrington, Lancashire, tells me he sometimes receives as many as 10 notifications per day from Operation Encompass, a police service that communicates with schools when a child has witnessed violence in their home the previous night. “The number of referrals that come in is horrendous,” says Campbell. The prevalence of issues like this has made teaching unrecognisable from when he started out 40 years ago, he says.
Much of the hardship that Campbell and his team witness among pupils is unseen, or “not obvious”, deprivation, he adds. Around 40 per cent of the students attending two primary and two secondary schools within the trust qualify for “pupil premium”, which means that their parents earn below a certain threshold. Outside of London, that’s £22,700 if they have one child, or £26,300 for two or more.
“There’s an awful lot of families that are barely above that breadline, and it’s equally challenging for them,” says Campbell, who was headteacher at the Hollins School, which is part of the trust, for 10 years before taking on his current role.
Around 30 to 35 per cent of pupils in the trust’s secondary schools are of Asian heritage – many are descended from those who migrated to Lancashire in the 1950s to work in the cotton mills – and have large extended families to help look after them. There are other children who are not so fortunate, Campbell explains. “Both our primary schools are on the outskirts of the town, so they tend to be mostly white British,” he says. “But it’s white British and not working – lots of families with mental health issues, parents who don’t send their children to school and don’t work themselves. It’s a very challenging cohort.”
The school has successfully implemented a non-profit element to its education model – the Let’s Be Foundation, an extended services provision that encourages “cohesion through creativity”. Pupils are encouraged to give back to the community and express themselves through funded projects – like spending time caring for the elderly – in order to develop “character education” in a system that is highly focused on academic performance.
“One part of it is what we call the ‘inspire and motivate’ programme. That might be going to the cinema, or going to a restaurant for a meal, which many of our pupils have never experienced,” says Campbell. As well as encouraging them to attend school more regularly, it encompasses a simple but crucial element of education: that you can’t be what you can’t see.
This is a familiar theme in all the schools whose leaders I speak to. Back in Boston, they promise that every child will see the beach, just 20 miles away in Skegness, at least once. One pupil, Booth says, was freaked out by the sand; another fell over “terrified, because the sea kept moving”. In Keighley, West Yorkshire, Ceinwen Lodge, the headteacher of Worth Valley Primary School, encourages aspiration and vocational development in children by organising agricultural trips, or “anything that can help take away that fear of travelling, or being out of your comfort zone”.
“If even one of these children ends up travelling the world and having an amazing career because we showed them it’s safe and fun to travel, that’s the point,” Lodge says. “When we’re talking about breaking cycles, that’s it.”
Lodge became a headteacher just over six years ago, when Worth Valley had a bad reputation and a “requires improvement” Ofsted report. Many children were persistently absent, parents were difficult to engage with, and the school itself was in desperate need of renovation. Over time, Lodge and her team – “I never say ‘I’,” she underlines. “It’s the whole team” – have developed effective interventions that have brought vast improvements.
They take children with severely neglected teeth to a local dentist who works with them, and they often conduct home visits. When they find that children are living in overcrowded two-bedroom homes, or in dwellings that are overrun with animals, lacking in basic food and hygiene, or simply unsafe to be in, they’re able to take action – not just by calling in the already squeezed social services, but by making sure that the child in their care feels extra safe and looked after at school.
They run a free breakfast club (subsidised by Greggs) as well as a “sunset club” that goes on until 6pm; there are numerous free after-school clubs and, as part of its “household support fund”, the school offers essential items like bedding, blankets, duvets, toiletries and winter clothing to families free of charge.
Lodge refuses to “group” children together, or label them in terms of their needs. “You have to make an effort to get to know each child individually – their family circumstances, their siblings, their interests. Only then are you effectively able to see when something isn’t right,” she explains. “That could be in terms of poverty, witnessing domestic violence, their parents’ mental health, or crime in the local area.”
To give a little context, the ITV drama series Happy Valley, which documents the tragedies of a drink and drug-addled area, was based nearby. Indeed, opposite Worth Valley school, I’m told that it’s an open secret that a local resident places a cereal box in his window when he’s stocked up to sell. In 2023, Lodge was forced to take emergency action when a member of staff spotted a man dressed in black, wielding a shotgun around the perimeter of the school. She and the other teachers were given a round of applause by terrified parents for the way they handled it.
“All of these things and more are what children are coming to school with and shouldering,” Lodge says. “And we have to make sure that we’ve got the resources in school to remove that fear and those barriers, and to provide support, before you even get to educate.”
All of the schools I speak to are vastly improving educational outcomes – many children at St Nick’s, against the odds, are out-performing targets. Their difficulty is then sending these children off to poor secondary schools – like nearby Haven High, for example, where 90 per cent of St Nick’s pupils go, and where my sisters shared their lunch out – which received a damning indictment from Ofsted last year. Booth says that it’s a “narrow, standardised version of what education is” that holds so many pupils back, eventually perpetuating issues like crime, drug addiction, poor aspirations and poverty in the town.
To an extent, it has always been this way; I remember girls in my year losing their mums to addiction, parents who were more in than out of prison. Others who essentially brought themselves and their siblings up alone, or who were unwashed or rakishly thin. Perhaps it was a coincidence that I now see so many of them thriving, having broken that cycle. But Booth is under no illusions: she is aware that things have significantly worsened in the last 20 years of social and political change. A radical overhaul is necessary, she says.
“But so many people have come and meddled and fiddled… They say, ‘Let’s all learn Latin. Let’s all play the violin... Well, my aspiration for children is as high as anybody’s, but actually, until basic needs are met, it doesn’t matter. If they are not safe and warm, they cannot learn anything.”
Every morning, St Nick’s has an assembly where they sing and dance, so pupils can “shake off anything they’ve seen at home”, then it’s off to begin classes for the day. In the early years section, there are big rooms full of pure imagination fuel – dressing up, role play, art areas – and outside, a vast playground with plenty of stuff to play with.
It’s here that the kids also look after “bug hotels”, and farm the orchard for a “reverse harvest”, where they give fresh produce to families in need. Next, they hope to implement a language hub so that new starters, often refugees from places like Ukraine, having only just set foot in the UK, can feel comfortable and learn English more confidently. “How can you tell someone you’re hungry if you don’t speak the language?” asks the deputy head, Tom Bell, while showing me round.
On my tour, I chat with scores of happy, smiling children. The school has a high turnover: around one-third of the children will leave over the course of the year, many of them because their families are fleeing debt – most commonly, they will simply disappear overnight.
When they arrive in school, they’re greeted with the sight of the school’s swansong emblazoned across the length of its windows. “Let your light shine,” it repeats; inside, a sign exhorts them to “always believe something magical is about to happen”. Amid the grim realities of these children’s lives, a little hope.
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