SCHOOL students challenged MPs last week to see poverty through their eyes and understand its effect on life at college, home, and locally. Every young person must have an equal opportunity to do well and never simply to survive, they told them. “It’s about having the fitting conditions to thrive, free from the extra burdens of poverty.”
The Year 11 students, aged 15 to 16, from Oasis Academy Lord’s Hill, in Southampton, went to Westminster on Tuesday of last week for the launch of a latest report, A Chance at Childhood. Published jointly by the Children’s Society and Oasis UK in expectation of the Government’s Child Poverty Strategy, it highlights their first-hand reflections.
They told MPs, “We stand before you today not only as students, but as witnesses to the silent struggles of young people in our community trapped in poverty. Poverty is an economic issue. It is a cycle that suffocates ambition, crushes potential, and makes even the only points of home life unbearable.”
When you’re young, they said, you shouldn’t must worry about “adult” things like money, bills, and getting food on the table. School shouldn’t be “yet one more place” where inequality and the impact of poverty is deeply felt: “Not with the ability to afford school trips causes you to miss out and feel like an outsider. . . Living in poverty may mean you’ve gotten unequal access to opportunities resembling extracurricular activities.”
They reflected on the detrimental effects of living in overcrowded housing: lack of privacy; not with the ability to study; the pressure to tackle additional caring responsibilities or employment. “Although our parents attempt to shield us away from seeing them struggle financially,” they said, “we notice their struggles, their pains, and we wish to assist them, share their burdens.”
Struggles with mental health and well-being, emotional neglect, increased tensions at home, and lack of safety in areas with higher crime rates are all touched on within the report. Young people all the time had something to say and something to show that got here from their on a regular basis experiences, the CEO of the Children’s Society, Mark Russell, says within the foreword.
“We know from our research and our direct work with young those who there’s a transparent link between poverty and well-being. We see this in our Good Childhood Report 12 months after 12 months. We all have to hear these insights and commit ourselves to fight for the change we want.”
