Pepe Di’Iasio, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, comments on the Centre for Young Lives state of the nation report on the scale of children growing up in crisis.
“Schools and colleges know only too well how factors such as poverty, poor housing, and deteriorating mental health are damaging the wellbeing of children and young people and affecting their educational outcomes. Teachers and leaders do everything they possibly can to support these young people – often where local services have fallen away because of years of cutbacks – but they cannot solve all these external factors on their own.
“As a result, we see young people in our classrooms who are struggling with so many challenges in their lives that they are not in a good condition to be able to learn, and worse still, many of them are often missing from our classrooms entirely.
“Andy Burnham has spoken about the need for a ‘circuit breaker’ moment in our society and there can be few areas where this is more badly needed than the crisis affecting so many children and young people. It is a vicious circle where poor outcomes and blighted lives are generational, embedding disadvantage and vulnerabilities into the very fabric of our society. We have to do better.”