Poverty in the classroom teaches us a painful lesson about inequality.

Classrooms across the UK are fast becoming the front line in the struggle to get by after almost a decade of austerity.

A report compiled by the Child Poverty Action Group and the National Education Union, based on a survey of 908 union members working across the education sector from nurseries to secondary schools reveals the extent of the problem.

It also highlights the increasing role played by teachers and support workers in picking up the slack as benefits are frozen and services cut to the bone.

Amongst the members surveyed 53% said they had dipped into their own pocket to subsidize books and stationary, one teacher quoted in the report said staff ‘regularly purchase clothing, food and supplies for students and their families’.

This includes sanitary towels and other hygiene products.

In addition, 13% said their school ran a low- cost food club and 16% said their school either ran a food bank or provided subsidized meals for students.

Access to a warm meal during the school day was an area of concern for many respondents, with children with disabilities or special educational needs and those from refugee families most at risk of missing out.

As one teacher put it ‘the bar has been raised, so some families who would have had free school meals no longer do'.

Over half the respondents (56%) said children entitled to free school meals are missing out because their parents are either intimidated by the bureaucratic process involved or fear they will be stigmatized as a result.

One respondent parents fearing their child would be ‘seen as a statistic:’ and so were missing out on nutrition vital to their development.

In general, 87% of the teachers surveyed said they believed that poverty was having a negative impact on their student’s education, with 60% saying the problem has got worse in the past three years.

The struggle to get by faced by families in poverty of living on low incomes has created a situation where many young people miss out on basic things like bring able to travel to visit friends or family, as one respondent said this is ‘heart breaking’.

Poverty experienced in childhood can have an impact on physical health and mental wellbeing that lasts a lifetime. This had been attested to by academic research going back for decades, to which this report only adds.

The only place where this truth does not seem to be self- evident is in the corridors of power. New Labour made limited attempts to address the problem but were hamstrung by a fear of appearing socialist; the coalition and the Tories have ignored it entirely.

Faced up to or ignored the problem of poverty and its social consequences still exits, there is a real risk that future generations will be seriously harmed along with the future stability of our economy and society.