In the ongoing discourse surrounding education, it is understandable that our focus and attention can be consumed with the immediate demands we face at the school gates tomorrow morning: attendance figures, budgets, staffing, behaviour and the next set of outcomes.

While these day-to-day realities are critical, delivering genuine, transformative progress often requires brave and bold decisions that reshape the fundamental conditions upon which schools operate for the long term.

The launch of the government’s strategy Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty sits squarely in that second category. There is an interdependence between what happens in a child’s life outside the school gates and what happens in our schools every single day.

The child poverty strategy

The current reality is that 31 per cent of children in the UK, which equates to 4.5 million children, live in poverty, with 2 million in deep material poverty.

The statistics for children who face poverty are heartbreaking; a higher likelihood of mental and physical health issues, lower academic achievement in school, higher probability of becoming Neet (not in education, employment or training), lower earning potential than their peers and a greater chance of homelessness.

The launch of the new child poverty strategy, which sets out a number of provisions, including the reversal of the two-child benefit cap, needs to be understood within the context of decades of previous government attempts to tackle child poverty and its impact on education.

Insufficient past efforts

Historically, policy has swung between two main approaches: income redistribution (putting money directly into families’ pockets) and area/school-based initiatives (striving to “poverty-proof” the education system itself).

While these area/school-based initiatives - including, for example, Education Investment Areas - provided vital support and extra resources, they were fundamentally trying to plug a gap created by insufficient family income.

While these interventions were necessary, they were insufficient.

We cannot expect and ask schools to be a substitute for stable income, warm housing and regular meals; it is an impossible burden that diverts enormous energy and resources from schools’ core mission of teaching and educating children.

The experience of the past decade, where targeted benefit caps and freezes (including the two-child limit) saw child poverty rise significantly, starkly illustrated a critical lesson: structural progress requires structural solutions.

A new focus

The new strategy, which aims to lift 550,000 children out of poverty by 2030 and signals a return to policies that acknowledge the most powerful improvements to educational outcomes for children living in poverty, begins outside the school gates.

Poverty is an unavoidable barrier to educational attainment. No amount of curriculum refinement or behaviour policy can fully compensate for children arriving at school cold, hungry or carrying the stress of family instability.

The key pillars of this new approach provide the structural context that schools desperately need. The reversal of the two-child benefit cap is the single most powerful act.

Coupled with expanded universal credit support for childcare costs for all children, this directly addresses the working poor, who now make up the majority of families in poverty.

The deep purpose

We know that children living in temporary accommodation face profound disruption, missed schooling and damage to their physical and mental health.

The new plan directly confronts this, investing £950 million for better temporary housing by 2030 and ending the unlawful placement of families in bed and breakfasts beyond the six-week limit.

Crucially, a new legal duty will notify schools, health visitors and GPs when a child is placed in temporary accommodation, ensuring that no child is lost to the system.

This is not about absolving policymakers from tackling the urgent pressures schools face today. It is about recognising that genuine progress demands both short-term responsiveness and long-term structural change.

When basic needs like food, stability and secure housing are more reliably met through supportive policy, our staff can better focus their expertise on their primary mission: teaching, nurturing and inspiring children to learn and thrive.

Breaking the cycle

Reducing family poverty is a deliberate decision to help break the cycle where disadvantage is inherited.

The new strategy signals a shift towards a school system that is supported by social policy rather than strained by its absence. It is the kind of profound, lasting change that allows our educators to finally focus on their mission: unlocking every child’s potential.

For our nation’s children to truly thrive, in the short and long term, inside and beyond school, we need a connected education system.

A system where government, schools and wider sectors work together, each playing our unique roles to tackle some of the most pressing and entrenched problems that children, education and society face. There can be no more critical and compelling imperative than that to address child poverty.

The child poverty strategy is something that the schools sector should be welcoming, rejoicing in and getting behind.

Dawn Haywood is chief executive of Windsor Academy Trust

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