One year in a struggling British state school

Shortly before Easter, Glyn Potts began to suspect that the children had not been eating. Potts, a statuesque headmaster in his mid-forties, watched uneasily from the mezzanine over the central lobby of Newman Roman Catholic College in Oldham. Every lunchtime, hundreds of schoolchildren materialised from all directions, jostling out of their classrooms and descending noisily down staircases to the benches below. Many rushed off to collect hot food or to the ever-popular panini counter. 

But from his vantage point above, Potts could see that some of them were just waiting, hanging back until right before the bell rang to signal the end of the lunch break. More and more kids had begun sidling up to the dinner ladies at the end of lunch break, asking if any chips were going spare. 

These were the “jam” kids, Pott’s term for children whose families were “just about managing” and so didn’t meet the British government’s threshold for free school meals. The jam kids were now routinely coming into school without the £2 they needed for a hot dish, a pudding and a drink. They were queueing for scraps.

In the five years since he became headmaster at the school for 11- to 16-year-olds in the former mill town next to Manchester, Potts had seen other things that disturbed him. He’d watched as Covid laid bare Oldham’s overcrowded, clapped-out housing, high levels of multi-ethnic poverty and dependency on service jobs, all of which contributed to some of the country’s highest infection rates.

Ministers imposed local lockdowns on Oldham on and off through 2020, in an attempt to quell the spread of disease. As a result, more face-to-face school hours were lost in the area than elsewhere in the country. Potts discovered that some children had begun riding around on the Greater Manchester tram network, using its free WiFi to do their homework. When that service was switched off, they moved to McDonald’s. 

Then, as the pandemic abated, the cost of living crisis and rising inflation bore down on the same families. School attendance levels were poor. Some kids started turning up late, telling teachers they couldn’t afford to ride the bus. The school had to step in in the case of one exam-age pupil who had been working so many hours a week it broke the law.

But the jam kids presented a particular challenge. At first, the staff at Newman rang the parents of the students who had been turning up without lunch money, to investigate. Eventually, Potts decided the school would begin absorbing the cost of feeding the extra pupils, seating them in a separate classroom to avoid the indignity of the queue.

There is something reminiscent of military precision to Potts’s controlled demeanour. As he moves through Newman’s corridors, he orders children to tuck in their shirts or tie their shoelaces. His manner with the kids is not brusque but brisk, as if he is reminding them of a standard they’ve mutually agreed to uphold. In his office, I’d noticed a copy of Soul Fuel for Young Explorers, a best-selling, adventure-themed devotional written by the explorer Bear Grylls. Before he was a teacher, Potts was indeed briefly in the army and still serves as a volunteer cadet. He is a born problem-solver.

But in his time as a headmaster, Potts has become an expert in some unexpected fields. He never thought teaching would involve understanding the finer points of housing policy, for example. Once the number of his pupils living in homeless accommodation began to rise, he had to learn. Over the past academic year, I have shadowed Potts and visited his school. In that time, his responsibility for solving problems originating far beyond the school’s grounds has only increased. Each time we spoke, it was amid a new chapter of political upheaval or economic hardship for the UK, as prime ministers and their allies came and went, and inflation crept ever higher. Like many teachers facing the country’s escalating socio-economic crises, Potts and his staff have had to do much more than educate.

Autumn

Newman College was created more than a decade ago from the merger of two Catholic schools, one predominantly white and one with 70 per cent Muslim pupils. The premise was better integration following Oldham’s 2001 race riots, when ethnic tensions erupted into a series of violent clashes between white and Asian youths.

Today, the school’s 1,500 students come from across the borough, from the more-moneyed moorland communities at its fringes to areas of acute poverty at its urban core. “We’ve got children who come in from Saddleworth in Ferraris,” Potts explained, the first time we spoke, of the pretty Pennine villages seven or eight miles away, “and children who’ve got nothing”. The school’s parliamentary constituency of Oldham West and Royton is ranked fourth-worst in the UK for child poverty, according to the charity Action for Children. More than half of the kids there are living below the breadline.

Unlike neighbouring Manchester, Oldham has not recovered from a long economic decline that began when its cotton mills started closing. Those mills once made the town rich, drawing workers from all over the British empire. Now many are empty. Aerospace manufacturing buoyed the local economy for a time. BAE Systems’ vast plant here constructed the iconic Lancaster bomber during the second world war, not only providing skilled employment but an anchor in the community for families who lived in the surrounding terraces and 1930s semi-detached houses. The factory closed its doors in March 2012, six months before Newman opened its own around the corner.

Potts and I first spoke in August 2022, on a patchy line as he drove his son to watch a women’s Hundred cricket match at Old Trafford. In the last days of that long, politically rancorous summer, the Conservative party leadership campaign was in full swing, following the resignation of Boris Johnson. There was only one other national news story: soaring energy prices. 

Seven miles down the A62 in central Manchester, the leftwing campaign Enough is Enough had just been launched to protest against the rising cost of living. Trade unionist Eddie Dempsey’s invective bounced off the pavements: “We’re not going to let these people take the piss out of us any longer,” he bellowed, of a government in search of its next leader.

I was struggling to imagine what the cold months ahead would bring, I told the headmaster. Potts had no such difficulty. He’d just left a school finance meeting and the numbers were fresh in his mind. Usually, he explained, Newman’s hardship fund provides about £3,500 a year for items — blazers, jumpers, purple-and-blue striped ties, school bags or stationery – for children who can’t afford them. But, with a week to go until the beginning of term, it had already shelled out twice the normal amount.

Potts deemed the school uniform “brilliant, beautiful”, and he meant that sincerely. It was not only a means of instilling discipline, he explained, it also muted the differences between “haves” and “have-nots”. At Newman, 43 per cent of pupils are eligible for free school meals, compared with a national average of 24 per cent. In a low-wage economy, however, free meals are only a superficial proxy for poverty. Children generally only get them if their household is already receiving welfare benefits. So, even before the start of the school year, Potts was worrying about the families who didn’t qualify but were nonetheless poor, those who were so low-paid “it’s almost not worth them having a job”. 

Potts was concerned about his own budget too. That week, Newman’s governing body had reiterated that mental health support must not be cut for the children, many of whom were still adjusting to school life post-lockdown. He agreed with them but, he said, “these are the things that cost”.

A fortnight later, the autumn term had begun. Queen Elizabeth had just died. Liz Truss was prime minister and, while the British state was focused on the royal funeral arrangements, food prices were rising quickly. At Newman, financial pressures on households were already apparent. Spending in the school canteen had gone up dramatically. Parents, Potts surmised, were calculating that £2 for a school dinner was cheaper than anything they could put together in a packed lunch.

There were also subtler signs of a squeeze. The Year 11s (15- and 16-year-olds due to take their GCSEs and leave school the following summer) were worried about whether everyone would be able to afford to go to their prom. “It seems to me that it’s in the psyche of the young people at the moment,” said Potts. “Money isn’t to be wasted and they’re starting to understand the school does more than perhaps it should.”

Winter

In late November, under overcast skies, I headed back to visit Potts in person. Since we’d last spoken, Truss had already departed Downing Street, and been replaced by Rishi Sunak. Thanks to the turmoil at the top of government, the country was on its fifth education secretary in five months. The latest food inflation figures, published by the British Retail Consortium that morning, were running at 12.4 per cent, way above the 1.1 per cent from the year before. The school’s entry lobby seemed colder than the temperature outside.

As Potts ushered me, businesslike, upstairs to his office, he explained that ever since its opening, Newman has had faulty heating and a leaking roof. Ten to 12 classrooms a day get flooded when it rains, he said, “and in Oldham it rains quite a lot. It’s the drizzle that kills us.”

Newman was built under the last Labour government’s private finance initiative, a scheme designed to replace public buildings, keeping the costs off the government’s books and leasing them back to the state over decades.

Newman has had faulty heating and a leaking roof. Ten to 12 classrooms a day get flooded when it rains

For Newman, the result has been a weird trade-off. Under its PFI agreement, the school receives a chunk of money back each year from the owner, via the local authority, in recognition of the building’s persistent leaks and fluctuating temperatures. Ironically, this “failure payment” has provided a cushion for the school’s budget through a period of sustained public sector austerity, brought in and maintained by successive Conservative-led governments since 2010 in the form of budget cuts and freezes. The extra cash is not enough to protect it indefinitely, however, particularly as inflation bites.

“Anyone want to bet £10,000 the roof didn’t leak over the weekend?” Potts asked at a staff meeting later in the year. “Good,” he replied to the bemused silence. “You would have lost your money.”

Despite the dilapidation in the hallways, Potts’s office was cheerful. Self-portraits of smiling pupils lined its bright red walls. The glossy cover of a flip-chart featured the faces of a class of departing Year 11s – a gift at the end of his first year as headteacher in 2018 – formed into a composite portrait of John Henry Newman, the 19th-century cardinal and theologian after whom the school is named. Paperwork was laid out methodically in A4 piles on the floor, evidence of some sprawling administrative task my visit was interrupting. 

We sat at the boardroom table which dominated one half of the office, from where Potts and his senior leadership team attempted to solve the, at times, insoluble puzzles of class scheduling, recruitment and finance. 

In London, the government had just unveiled its second budget in less than two months. The first, Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous “mini-Budget”, had been swiftly discarded after causing a mini-market meltdown. The outlook for schools in general seemed better than Potts had expected, but there was still scant detail for him to go on. Since he had to set a budget for the following April without knowing what money would be coming in, he was already planning to cut back on textbooks and axe extracurricular trips to ensure the books balanced. While brutal, macro decisions were being made in the Treasury, the micro ones were being determined in this room. 

I asked what cancelling the school trips might mean for his kids: “You’re going to think I’m over-egging the pudding here, but I can categorically tell you this,” he replied. “We took some children away to Castlerigg, which is a sort of retreat house over in Cumbria, in Keswick, and it was the first time one of the students had seen a live cow. And they were laughing, because they do just look like the cartoon.” That might be an extreme example, he conceded, by now in full flow, but the point of such trips is to make “citizens of the world”.

“From a completely moral standpoint: my children, I want them to be competing with Eton, with Oxbridge, that kind of thing,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to do that if I can’t even give them a glimpse of what is a standard trip for some of these other institutions.”

Another puzzle has been how to make the most, or anything at all, of the government support offered for catch-up tutoring, intended for children who had fallen behind during the pandemic. Potts had been finding it hard to attract tutors out to Oldham when he had to compete with schools elsewhere, including in Manchester, which is growing rapidly. Most of the kids at Newman were reliant on a school bus service that could not accommodate evening catch-up sessions.

But the government had also asked schools to find 60 per cent of the necessary funding if they want to continue the support into next year – a requirement Potts would find impossible. In the end, he decided, there would be no option but to hand back the money. Rather than helping students who were being left behind, he said, the scheme was “absolutely” widening the gap with more affluent areas still further.

“I understand that we have to be accountable for money,” Potts said, of the ministerial impulse to control spending at the centre. But, “we won’t be spending it on headteachers’ golden toilet seats”.

As we sat musing over finances, Christmas was just a few weeks away. With the budget looking uncertain, financial pressures on households were becoming apparent too. Children had begun asking if the hardship fund would pay for the school bus, or whether any food was going in the bin at the end of the day. Staff had started putting sandwiches out at the front of school at 3.10pm; some were dipping into their own pockets to provide food. More kids were turning up looking “tired, hungry and dishevelled”, with “no breakfast to perk them up”. More families seemed to be getting evicted; the first glimmers of a new trend.

I asked Potts how worried he was about the next few months. Usually composed and quick to reply, Potts was silent and, for a moment, I thought he might cry. When I listened back to my recording later, I counted an eight-second pause. “There’s a selfish bit of this,” he said, eventually. “There’s a selfish bit of this, because if someone is harmed, or dies, I haven’t got the tools.”

Spring

In January this year, Potts was getting to grips with housing policy. The trend in evictions had escalated since we last spoke, as landlords sold up or increased rents. More families were simply failing to pay.

This was new territory for Newman College. Manchester has had a family homelessness crisis for at least a decade as the city’s growth outstripped the ability of poorer families to pay rising rents. Oldham has traditionally been viewed as the cheaper alternative – so much so that it has long accommodated disproportionate numbers of asylum seekers, placed there by Home Office contractors on tight margins, as well as homeless families from stretched services elsewhere.

Government figures for January to March this year showed an 80 per cent rise in Oldhamers deemed homeless and eligible for statutory rehousing, with a similar rise in the number of children living in temporary accommodation. The town’s homeless figures are now nearly twice the English rate.

There’s a mission creep within schools. We’ve become an emergency service before it’s an emergency

One Newman pupil trying to revise in the living room of temporary accommodation told the school they were struggling to read. “I can’t do it, the lights aren’t bright enough,” the teenager explained. The first reaction might be “get a grip”, said Potts, recounting the tale. “But if you’re not at a desk, if you’ve not got a light . . . all of a sudden everything becomes harder, doesn’t it?”

The school was working with the Catholic charity Caritas in the hope of providing lamps or desks for those without. Having reported on Manchester and Oldham for more than a decade, I was surprised to hear about this sharp rise in homelessness numbers. I checked with Oldham College, a couple of miles away from Newman. It was seeing the same thing. The number of students flagged as homeless had risen 60 per cent year on year. 

The broader harm done to kids during the multiple Covid lockdowns – mental health problems, neglect, persistent truancy, harmful social media use – had also proved stickier than Newman had anticipated, compounded by the new economic climate. Referrals to Newman’s safeguarding system, where staff log concerns about student welfare, from bullying, to mental health problems, to neglect, were “going through the roof” according to one of the college’s social workers, Rebecca Ashworth.

“There were a lot of kids [who] were just not seen,” she said, of the lockdown periods when agencies were not checking in with children face-to-face. “And we’re seeing it now, with serious case reviews from that period: a lot of child abuse and deaths happened in that time.” At school, many children were struggling to acclimatise to “the new normal”. Some just never came back. Persistent truancy has roughly doubled at Newman since before the pandemic, a statistic that holds true across the country.

Teacher recruitment was becoming nearly impossible. Before Christmas, the school had advertised for seven jobs, some of them on starting salaries of £25,000-£28,000. Three had had no applicants at all by the time I spoke to Potts in April, days after the latest teacher training statistics revealed that the government had missed its recruitment target by 40 per cent over the previous year.

Potts was considering paying for a new graduate to go through training in order to obtain a geography teacher. It wouldn’t cost much more than advertising for months for applicants who never applied. Newman also needed a physics teacher. But as Potts told his senior leadership team: “You may as well just ask for a supermodel, it’s not going to happen.” One of the humanities teachers had left to become a driving instructor.

Sometimes, Potts thinks about quitting. Lots of his peers have. With less than five years under his belt, he is the fourth longest-serving of 14 headteachers in Oldham. “That’s not ideal,” he said. “I should [still be] the new boy.”

Newman had another problem. In the words of assistant headteacher Kate Diveney, the school was becoming a “victim of our own success”. Newman currently has both the highest number of kids in care in the borough and the largest quota of children with special educational needs. In a perverse incentive, each time a new child is registered with special needs, the school must pay the first £6,000 towards their support out of its own budget. As Newman’s reputation as a good school for kids with special needs spread by word of mouth from parent to parent, the school was being hit harder financially.

Mental health has become an “absolutely massive” issue too, Diveney said, with referrals for suicidal thoughts and self-harm having risen “exponentially” since Covid. “We cannot cope with the demand.” Support staff have noticed an uptick in family breakdowns. One child known to police and social services to be living in a home in which domestic abuse was taking place had to stay there because there was no other available accommodation. “There’s nowhere for them to go,” Diveney said.

All those issues, and more, are being constantly sifted and addressed by staff. Feedback, said Potts in November, showed worrying signs of emotional strain; staff members told him that they “want to cry sometimes”.

In the new year, some of the school’s lower-paid workers had begun asking if they could take home the spare sandwiches at the end of the day. “We’ve had to say no,” said Potts, who was fretting about losing those staff – some of whom work with the school’s most vulnerable children. “They know they can work in Asda and get better pay.”

Summer

In mid-June, I paid my last visit to Newman. Summer, or north-west England’s version of it at least, was back. Strikes had been scheduled for a fortnight’s time, as the teaching unions faced down the government over pay. Potts was trying to work out how the school would provide staffing on those days.

On the playground, a boisterous group of teenagers was eager to answer questions. As the boys messed about and the girls rolled their eyes, the kids were unhesitatingly positive when I asked them about their futures. They had all noticed inflation, measuring its jumps in the price of cans of Vimto, Freddos and meal deals. Did it affect them? They all nodded. “It’s annoying,” said one girl, quietly. “The cost of living crisis has gone up, but [my parents are] being paid the same, so it’s not making a difference. It’s not balanced.”

Potts had cut the Lake District trips, but he had recently purchased some inexpensive matinee tickets for students to see the musical Hamilton in Manchester, because “we know our kids haven’t been to the theatre, and they are going to be testing against kids in their GCSEs who go to the theatre all the time”. If they get that opportunity, he said, as we stood looking at a silent hall of grey exam desks, “that might be the spark. They might be the new Willy Russell.”

Potts had been right to worry about the jam kids: while a lot of the hardship fund once went towards children who couldn’t afford school trips, this year it was spent on bus fares or “a pen and a pencil”, on warm coats or on children who have “got no shoes”. Dialogue with some families has been tricky, he said. Previously, “they’ve never had to say, ‘Actually, I can’t afford it’.” More than £3,000 was owed in unpaid lunch bills by the end of the school year.

The subject of toxic masculinity had come up repeatedly in our conversations over the year. Potts worried, in particular, about the growing popularity of the online influencer Andrew Tate, the former kickboxer whose brand of misogyny had been gaining growing traction online. “I’ve got Muslim boys who say, ‘He’s misunderstood, sir’; white boys saying, ‘He really values women. That’s why he sleeps with them.’” He frowned.

Ideally, in this climate, there would be a “life skills” lesson on the curriculum, he added, teaching “mental resilience, finding jobs, dealing with homophobia and racism”. (Tate was charged with rape and human trafficking the day after our conversation.) An anti-gay slur is cropping up more and more, having disappeared for a while. Potts has been called a “soft man” in the past, he said. “Don’t we need a few more soft men in the world right now?”

When we spoke for the final time in mid-August, Potts was back at his desk. Nine months after the chancellor’s Budget, he still did not know exactly how much money he would be allocated in the coming year. The day before, new figures had revealed that 28 per cent of secondary school pupils nationally had been persistently absent – missing at least 10 per cent of school time – over the year. The children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, warned “that if further action is not taken, we risk normalising disengagement from education and irrevocably breaking the social contract between schools and families”. “I took some relief in the fact this is now a national issue,” Potts said. 

His attempts to solve the staffing problem had also trundled on since we last spoke. Newman was now training three graduates to fill the gaps in geography, religious studies and IT. The hardship fund had effectively become “unlimited”, he said. The money will just need to be trimmed from elsewhere.

I asked Potts a question that had kept coming back to me throughout the year: Are we asking schools to solve problems that should, ultimately, be up to others to solve? “It’s an interesting way of thinking about it,” he replied, apparently unruffled, “because we are held responsible for these measures. We know full well that the child is not going to learn if the child is not going to stay awake. But I accept there’s a mission creep within schools. We’ve become an emergency service before it’s an emergency.”

I was reminded of a conversation we had had weeks earlier, looking down from the mezzanine at the kids rushing to get their lasagnes and paninis. The bigger question, he said then, was not about how much money Newman would put into the hardship fund this year, or next. “We have to know what we want from education,” Potts had concluded, gazing down at his young charges. “There’s going to come a point where we’ve got to question what we want the future of our country to be.”

Jennifer Williams is the FT’s northern England correspondent

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