Dear Prime Minister,
I have a lot to say to you, and no it will not be about Brexit or your belittling of the Scottish Independence Referendum, although I do have a lot to say about that – believe me.
Today, I want to talk to you about how are knowingly out-casting and disregarding the futures of the youth of today and the families that they come from.
Did you know that there are currently around 3.6 million children in the UK who are living in definitively impoverished households? That is more than one in every four children within our so called great nation that live under the poverty line.
Do you realise the effect this has? Of course you do, but let me elaborate.
Children from poorer backgrounds do not have access to adequate education. They go to school in impoverished areas, learn in over-attended classrooms, and are taught by under paid, demotivated and exhausted teachers.
Child poverty has been shown to blight education. It has been proven that those growing up in impoverished households achieve lower grades than their wealthier counterparts. Thus leaving them with fewer gained qualifications which leads to lesser progression routes and translates into lower earnings throughout their adult working life.
This of course, without a doubt has a detrimental effect on society as a whole.
So tell me Theresa, What are you doing to reduce the cause and effect this has on society?
You are; introducing up to 140 new free schools, cutting budgets within state schools, cutting parents benefits and tax credits, lowering the wages paid to state school teachers and funding £170 million to technical education.
Excuse me, What?
I’m sorry, but what exactly will this do for our children?
How in any way whatsoever do you believe this will work to raise the education standards within the poorer areas of the UK and help children fight their way out of poverty?
It won’t, and let me tell you why.
Free schools will not help raise the standard of education for all children, it will raise the standard for a select few.
It will encourage elitism and superciliousness within the community, It will intensify dissociation between the classes and it will put a halt on everything we have worked towards for diversity and equality over the past few years.
So tell me Miss May, who’s place is it to say whether one child is better or more intelligent than another and therefore deserves a better education and greater future prospects? Is it fair to give one child the opportunity grow to develop a career and live a life whilst giving another the option to take a job and just survive?
No it’s not.
Every child deserves an equal opportunity, every child deserves to be guided and shaped in to the best version of themselves that they can be.
So how can we do that?
We can start off by stopping the budget cuts to our state schools. Stop all these absurd “funding” and money-making governmental schemes for things like free schools and actually invest within your communities. Disburse monies within these inadequate state schools and make them excellent. Give them the funding and training they need to excel within education.
Stop the cuts being made to parent’s benefits and tax credits and reduce the cost of living. One way out of destitution is allowing impoverished families to have enough money to raise their kids. Most children in poverty have at least one working parent bringing in a steady income but it’s just not enough to exist on the bare minimum.
Provide state school teachers with a decent income and smaller classrooms thus allowing them to allocate their time properly with their students and focus on their individual needs rather than submitting to a robotic syllabus. Take already excelling schools and place the under achieving schools and teachers within training programmes under the wing of these successful schools to help them step up their own levels and teaching skills.
Encourage parents and teachers within the communities to cooperate with each other and enhance the already bare resources we have within the arts and academics. Encourage communication and allow trial and error to find what works best for the individual.
And finally reinstate and fund more programmes within state school communities that deal with career, academic and vocation counselling. Allow us to offer these children the experiences to find what they excel in and then fine tune their talents to their full potential.
These are the basics that every community and every nation should have in place to allow our children and future generations to prevail. We need to be seen to encourage our children to thrive and become an integral part of our civilisation.
This Prime Minister is how we need fight child poverty within the UK and if you are not willing to do so, then we will have to find someone who will.
It is that simple.
You can follow Dionne Melissa Newman on twitter @DionneMNewman or at her blog page dionnemelissanewman.wordpress.com