Housing: Call to forestall displaced youngsters going ‘lacking’ from faculties

“I spent all of half-term looking for somewhere to live,” says mother-of-three Shanice Aird.

The 29-year-old from west London rejected her council’s most up-to-date brief lodging be offering “an hour away” from her youngsters’s faculty.

The Shared Health Foundation is urging the federal government to position in measures to forestall youngsters in brief lodging going “missing” from faculties and GPs after fashionable displacement of households around the nation.

The charity’s new record requires a notification machine so that each one government are conscious when a kid strikes into brief lodging.

The govt says it’s making an investment £1bn in homelessness services and products this 12 months to assist households trapped in brief lodging.

Ms Aird was once residing in a safe tenancy flat in Ealing together with her 3 youngsters, elderly 3, 5 and 7, however was once moved to brief lodging in Hounslow in 2021 after witnessing a stabbing.

She is now being evicted from the two-bedroom assets by means of the owner, however says Ealing Council has simplest introduced her flawed selection lodging, together with one flat an hour clear of her youngsters’s faculty.

Ms Aird says she is going to quickly be homeless and must “sofa surf with friends” after the council discharged her from their housing responsibility.

“We haven’t been able to do anything this half-term because I’m constantly on the phone to councils, emailing, trying to get as much help as I can,” she says.

She admits her youngsters’s attendance in class is “awful” as they don’t have an enduring house.

“It’s really horrible because as a mum you want to try and provide as much safety and happiness as you can.”

Ms Aird says she must be on the subject of friends and family to assist together with her psychological well being.

“I have bipolar type 2 and tend to go into depressive episodes, if it’s a really bad episode it leads to me not being aware of what I’m doing,” she says.

“I’m happy to move to another borough, as long as I’ve got some kind of family support network.”

Ealing Council stated Ms Aird was once just lately made gives of “suitable properties both in and out of the borough within easy reach of her support networks”, which she refused.

“Because of her refusal of these property offers, the council have discharged her main housing duty, and we have made a referral to children services at Hounslow Council who may be able to support her under the Children’s Act,” it added.

More than 164,000 homeless youngsters are lately residing in brief lodging throughout England, the absolute best quantity on report, figures display.

Analysis of presidency knowledge by means of homeless charity Shelter suggests there are virtually 94,000 youngsters in London residing in brief lodging.

As a end result, households are being displaced with some Londoners being moved miles away because of a loss of everlasting inexpensive housing within the capital, in line with Alicia Walker, Shelter’s assistant director for activism and advocacy.

“We’re sending children and families from London to Manchester, but Manchester has the very same problem, then the children and families in Manchester might be moved to Durham…it means we’ve got a country of displaced people,” she says.

Dr Laura Neilson, founding father of the Shared Health Foundation which co-chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on brief lodging, says they need to see youngsters “still have access to education and healthcare” in order that they “get to live a much more normal childhood than these children are experiencing”.

“We are asking the government to be more curious about how many children are missing from education because of temporary accommodation,” she provides.

Felicity Afriyie has lived in brief lodging for 21 years together with her 3 youngsters elderly 16, 19, and 20.

In that point they have got lived in additional than 10 properties.

Currently, they’re residing in a one-bedroom hostel in Lambeth, south London.

In earlier brief lodging, she says her youngsters’s trips to college took two hours.

The 53-year-old says it took goodbye to do the varsity run she “spent the whole day” looking ahead to her youngsters to complete faculty.

“Sometimes you see schoolchildren on the bus sleeping because they come from very far,” she says.

Her daughter Grace, 20, says: “One of our school journeys was two hours.

“Doing that distance to college each day was once terrible. It’s had a large have an effect on on our schooling.

“You can’t expect a 16 year old… that’s moved houses more times than they can count to sit a set of exams that will change their life and expect them to perform as well as their more stable affluent counterparts.

“It’s no longer truthful and it is not a degree taking part in box.”

Grace says she has dropped out of university due to the stress of temporary accommodation.

“Some folks are in fact seeking to get out of the machine,” she says.

“We’ve grown up like this and we don’t need the technology after us to be in the similar place. We’re by no means going to get out of the machine when it is stacked in opposition to us.”

Lambeth Council says it had made a direct offer of suitable permanent accommodation to Ms Afriyie but she turned it down and requested a review. The review found that the permanent property proposed was suitable.