Parents typically need to find at least £39 per week for a child’s secondary school education and £19 for a primary-aged child, research for Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) finds.
Families in 2022 are facing the greatest threat to their living standards in living memory. Much has been written about these pressures, but to put them into context, we need to understand what has been happening to children’s and families’ costs in recent years. The Cost of a Child reports have been produced annually for a decade, and this 2022 edition presents the latest evidence of what families need as a minimum, and how this compares to the actual incomes of low-income families.
Low-income families will have an estimated £1,000 shortfall for energy costs alone in the year to April 2023, if as expected Ofgem’s price cap rises to £3,554 in October, new analysis from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) shows. An announcement on the new cap is due tomorrow.
Over 120 charities, faith groups, trade unions and civic organisations sign open letter urging First Minister to plug “gap in cash support.” “Parents going without food to feed their children, feeling ashamed at the basics their children are going without, and dreading the coming winter bills.”
With 38 bills but no direct help with spiralling costs, this speech was a far cry from what struggling families needed to hear today. Government offered no short term comfort for parents struggling to feed their kids in the face of rocketing prices, and no long term vision for ending child poverty.
The Cost of Having Fun at School captures the experiences of pupils and parents with school fun, highlighting what we've heard from Cost of the School Day focus groups with over 8,000 pupils as well as the views of parents and carers.
This report focuses on the UK Cost of the School Day project's research so far in England. It highlights some of the positive work being carried out by schools to ensure that opportunities are affordable and inclusive, while also drawing attention to the multitude of ways that pupils from low-income families face exclusion and stigma.
In August, Child Poverty Action Group and the Church of England published a report, Poverty in the Pandemic, which offered a glimpse into the lives of low-income families trying to survive the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This report provides an update on how families with children are managing financially, based on an additional 393 online survey responses received in the period since the last report was published, up to the end of November 2020.