School-Home Support
Helping families overcome barriers to education
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, School-Home Support
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, Pears Foundation
Partner since: 2012
Funding invested: £975,000
- Core: Unrestricted funding
- Project: Summer holiday project 2019; Bradford ‘bridge’ project
Every child should have the opportunity to benefit from education, but for some families the barriers to attending school begin well beyond the classroom. Poverty and financial hardship can combine with difficulties around housing, mental health or family relationships, creating interconnected challenges that make regular attendance difficult. Addressing absence effectively therefore requires support that looks at the family’s circumstances as a whole. Pears Foundation is drawn to organisations that understand this complexity and work alongside families to help them navigate it.
School-Home Support does exactly this. Its expert practitioners build trusted relationships with families, taking time to understand the challenges they face and working with them, schools and other services to find practical solutions. The aim is not simply to improve attendance in the short term, but to address the underlying barriers that prevent children from getting to school, engaging with their education and being ready to learn.
Pears Foundation has provided School-Home Support with long-term unrestricted funding since 2012. This gives the organisation the flexibility to invest in its people and core functions, respond to changing needs and focus its resources where they can be most useful to the children and families it supports.
At times, our long-term relationship has also enabled us to respond when particular needs arise. This included providing bridge funding for School-Home Support’s practitioner service in Bradford, ensuring that support for families could continue during a period of funding uncertainty.
Improving school attendance requires more than focusing on attendance itself. By addressing the complex circumstances that can prevent children from getting to school and being ready to learn, School-Home Support helps families overcome barriers to education and gives children a better chance to benefit from it.