Britain's ghost children

New Statesman​

21-05-2025

Photo by Sandy Johanson/Millennium Images
In the headteacher's office of a school in a deprived area of Barrow, Cumbria, Mrs Walker recounted the morning she'd climbed through the window of a vulnerable pupil's house. Inside, she found their parent, who had addiction issues, passed out. The head got them both up, out of the house and through the school gates, the kid headed to their classroom, the parent to her office to sober up. That day, they got to record that pupil as attending school.
It was summer 2022 when I sat and listened, agog at Mrs Walker's relentless commitment and chutzpah. We were two years on from the UK's first Covid-19 lockdown, and just one since Robert Halfon MP sounded the alarm on the country's other invisible epidemic: our 'ghost children'. The 93,000 pupils 'severely absent' from classrooms – missing at least half of school – after they re-opened.
Mrs Walker's school was a detail of that data made real: our poorest kids were, and are, significantly more likely to be absent. Its high free-school-meal eligibility (at 60 per cent, three times the then national average of 20 per cent) was matched only by its history of high absence. And yet, the head had taken the school's attendance rate from 91 per cent to 97 per cent. Her story spoke to what teachers could achieve – but also to the extreme, above-and-beyond measures some were forced to take.
Today, four years on from the alarm that few heard (or cared to hear), 173,00 students are missing at least 50 per cent of their schooling, with a further 1.6 million out at least 10 per cent of the time. Those receiving free school meals are nearly four times more likely to be absent – a statistic widely accepted as an underestimate given 900,000 kids living in poverty aren't poor enough to receive free school meals.
While few stories I've heard while speaking to teachers and visiting schools – both for the podcast series Terri White: Finding Britain's Ghost Children and my outreach work in deprived areas since – have been quite as wild as Mrs Walker's, they all offer the same reality check. There's the school that sends a minibus through the community to pick up every vulnerable child; the free breakfasts not just for pupils but for their parents; the sleeping bags for kids who've never had a duvet; hours spent helping parents struggling with job applications or the benefits system.
In total 1.8 million kids – one in four of all UK children, one in two at GCSE level – are caught up in our absence crisis. A large proportion of them live in deprived areas. (Or, to look at it another way, there are more than three times as many students absent in state schools as there are total kids in private education.) Food banks in schools now outnumber those in the community.
A recent survey of teachers revealed that 87 per cent have seen poverty-driven exhaustion in their pupils. Record numbers of our poorest kids are missing school, and when they do go in they're starving, drained in mind and body.
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And it's clear what comes next, when education is lost. Not only are pupils from low-income families almost six times more likely to be permanently excluded, but 90 per cent of those who are excluded don't pass GCSE English or maths. Three quarters of young people in prison have been suspended at least once.
But I know that it doesn't have to be that way. I grew up in poverty, and I looked to school to keep me fed – one school holiday, reports were made to social services after I was seen eating out of a bin behind the fish and chip shop – and to offer me opportunity. Not, as I viewed it at the time, the opportunity to escape my community, but the opportunity to escape a specific material reality that brutalised and dehumanised me.
And school delivered. I passed my GCSEs then, the first person in my family to study post-16, took A-levels and went to university. I moved to London, and later New York, where I worked as a journalist. Education didn't gift me a whole new life, it gave me the right to decide what my life would be. To break the cycle so that my own son wouldn't be ankle-deep in fish bits.
Where is that same right for the 4.5 million children living in poverty today? When school is increasingly looked to for the very basics of living, for survival; when they're not just feeding kids during school hours but, as teachers have reported, providing cookers, microwaves and beds.
This is a crisis that can only accelerate, with child poverty expected to reach 4.8 million by the end of Labour's first term. A crisis I fear will lead to opportunity being eradicated entirely for those in our most deprived areas. Because child poverty isn't just about kids in classrooms with bellies empty of food but full of pain. It's about the loss of learning, of qualifications, of a career, of earning potential. It's the loss of a life that every child should be entitled to have a crack at grafting for. It's a life stolen from our kids every single day while child poverty spreads unchecked, wrapping itself around every shoot of ambition, of self-belief, of hope, of desire.
There's only one teacher whose words have stuck with me longer than those of Mrs Walker: my own primary school teacher, Mrs Webley. 'You seemed to know that the only way out of poverty for a woman was education,' she once told me. And I did. But today, the doors and windows have been locked. The message to our poorest kids is that there's no possibility of escape. That they're worth less, if anything at all. And that is a scandal that should shame us all.
Terri White is a journalist and author. Her book 'Coming Undone' is published by Canongate
[See also: Can you ever forgive Nick Clegg?]
Related
This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain's Child Poverty Epidemic