School-Home Support
Improving the life chances of children, getting them back into school and ready to learn
We are incredibly grateful for Pears Foundation's long-standing support to School-Home Support. Their crucial core grants have funded our essential functions, enabling us to deliver our work to more children and families across the country. As a partner, they understand what organisations need and respond quickly to tackle barriers. This included providing vital bridge funding for our Bradford practitioner service, ensuring vulnerable children continued to receive the support they needed to stay in school and succeed.Nick Marsh, CEO
Investment in core functions is essential for any organisation to be resilient, responsive and to grow. We have supported School-Home Support with unrestricted core funding since 2012,so that they can continue to provide the best possible interventions to help children learn and thrive.Kari Holtung, Programme Director
Partner since: 2012
Funding invested: £975,000
- Core: Unrestricted funding
- Project: Summer holiday project 2019; Bradford ‘bridge’ project
Pears Foundation supports children who face extra barriers to learning.
Children with serious challenges at home don’t go into the classroom on a level playing field with their peers. That is if they attend at all – across England, the percentage of pupils who are missing more than 10% of their schooling has dramatically increased since before the pandemic, from one in nine to nearly one in five. These children and young people are missing weeks, months and even years of their education, severely affecting their future life chances. And it’s not just their future that is at risk: children not in school are more vulnerable to becoming involved in dangerous behaviours like gang activity, drugs or alcohol.
School-Home Support (SHS) provides personalised support to bring children back to school, ready to learn. This means tackling deep seated challenges for the whole family that create barriers to learning. Partnering with families, schools, local authorities and communities, SHS’s expert practitioners help address complex problems from issues with housing to concerns about money, or support with family relationships.
The aim is not only to help families out of the immediate crisis, but to build more resilient and self-reliant families who feel ready to reconnect with the school community, ensuring their children’s education is prioritised.
As part of our work to reduce barriers to participation, Pears Foundation has provided core funding for School-Home Support since 2012, giving the charity much needed additional capacity during a period when austerity measures have presented challenges for schools and for children’s wellbeing. These were further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic during which SHS’s practitioners supported some of the country’s most vulnerable families.
We also support Literacy Pirates, which runs after-school reading clubs, StreetGames’ Fit and Fed programme, which addresses holiday hunger and physical inactivity, and Child Poverty Action Group.