School Home Support is a charity working with children and families to maximise educational opportunities and improve life chances.
Partnering with schools, local authorities and communities, School-Home Support looks beyond the classroom to understand and tackle the issues affecting children’s learning, such as poverty, inadequate housing and mental ill-health.
Since 1984, they have used early intervention to break intergenerational cycles of deprivation and low aspiration, replacing them with children in school and ready to learn.
The biggest influence on a child’s life is their experiences at home. School-Home Support employs expert Practitioners to work with families on addressing a wide range of complex issues, building their engagement and resilience so that they can resolve future issues independently. Without this support, children are much less likely to achieve their best potential.
We have never known a more desperate time for vulnerable families, recovering from the pandemic and now facing the biggest cost of living crisis for decades. Many of the families School-Home Support works with feature one adult who is in work, but average pay is shrinking. These families don’t know how they will pay the bills, put food on the table, or afford their child’s bus fare to school. The increasing number of challenges they face makes times harder, and more intensive casework support vital. Families who were dealing with one major issue are now dealing with many more when their children are referred to School-Home Support.
The funding we provide to School-Home Support enables its practitioners to provide advice and support to families in Bradford and Kent, enabling them to access vital support with bills, gain employment and crucially get children in school and ready to learn.
In 2024, our funding enabled SHS’s practitioner service in Bradford and Kent to support children who are experiencing serious disadvantages at home such as poverty, food insecurity, domestic violence, inadequate housing and mental health challenges which, in turn, contributed to them to experience barriers to education. Throughout the year, SHS experienced significant increase in concerns relating to housing. In response, its practitioners worked with housing associations and other experts to help support families to be rehomed, move into fit-for-purpose accommodation, improve their housing conditions, and advocate for families to be closer to schools and other family members. Practitioners also helped families obtain housing-related items, such as washing machines to wash school uniforms, and beds and bedding for children to sleep on, assist with transport costs if families are living far away from school, and support families with addressing other knock-on effects from housing challenges, such as ill-health or safety concerns.
In 2024 we continued to work with the following schools:
- Brompton Westbrook Primary, Chatham
- Byron Primary School, Gillingham
- Knowleswood Primary School, Bradford
- One In A Million Free School, Bradford
In response, SHS has:
- Benefitted 323 children and their families who have been facing difficult times in their lives
- Supported 112 individuals through the provision of intensive casework
- Supported 141 individuals through early interventions
- Delivered group work support to 70 people
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