Harris Academy Peckham Park looks like any other primary school. On an unremarkable south London residential street, it has a hall with wooden benches, classrooms with tiny chairs, papier-mâché Mona Lisas and crayon Monets on the walls, and small children whizzing around the playground.
But it isn’t normal at all. Because the majority of the pupils here are homeless.
One of the girls in the playground, seven, goes back to a single room in a hostel where she lives with her two siblings and her mother, the floor piled high with school books.
Another girl, eight, gets so cold in the temporary council flat — where she sticks posters and maps over black mould on the walls — that she takes weeks off ill. A boy aged ten travels nearly two hours to get to school from his crisis housing, falling asleep on his mother as they take two buses and a train.
“The school is their stability,” says Marie Corbett, Harris Peckham Park’s executive principal. “For the children, but also for the parents. We ask and we listen — especially to those who don’t have anybody else to talk to. We try to be a place of learning, peace and respite for children who live in poverty, sometimes not knowing where they are going to sleep from one night to the next.”
This autumn, staff sent a survey to its 81 families. Of those, 81 per cent said they were homeless. This includes families who said they were sofa surfing (19 per cent) and living in temporary accommodation (54 per cent), meaning they had told the local authority they were homeless and had been housed until somewhere permanent became available.
Today, the warm staff room is filled with mothers who want to explain their situation to The Sunday Times. They weep at one another’s stories, which are also their own stories: they are stuck and scared. They do not know how long their families will be in the temporary homes — or what will be next.
“These non-secure tenancies are really difficult for our children,” says Corbett. “They know that it’s not a home and they might be moved. At our school, this is the norm.”
Families stuck in temporary housing
Temporary accommodation was designed to be an emergency measure but the figures for its use are rising, with many families languishing for years. It can be anything from a hostel (a block of flats with shared kitchens and bathroom); a B&B (alongside paying guests) or an apartment rented by the council from a private landlord.
On March 31 this year there were 104,510 households in England in this accommodation, including 131,370 children, a 10 per cent increase from the same period the year before and a doubling over a decade.
The situation in Southwark, the school’s borough, is extreme. Last year, 2.45 per cent of households were in temporary accommodation, classified as homeless, compared with 1.65 per cent in London and 0.22 per cent in the rest of England. There were 2,784 children in temporary accommodation in the borough, an increase of 109 per cent from 2015-16.
Peckham has changed markedly in the past two decades, from a working-class neighbourhood with high immigration rates to something more hipster and trendy, where artisanal coffee shops pop up next to food banks.
In 2000 the average property price in Southwark was £248,175. A decade later, it was £472,507. And a decade after that it was £783,142.` The rate of increase was twice that of the UK as a whole.
Recent mortgage rate increases meant landlords raised their rents further or sold up, decreasing the stock. Landlords can be picky with tenants, more likely to go for three young professionals than a single-parent family of four. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2022-23 rent in the borough was at a record high at £1,800 per calendar month.
“The area is becoming less liveable for families,” said Corbett. Even teachers are struggling to afford to live nearby. She knew many pupils were from homes that were poor. More than 50 per cent of the pupils are on free school meals compared with 24 per cent of the school population eligible in England.
It was Covid that changed everything.
“The boundaries between school and home moved,” says Corbett. Staff were, for the first time, going through children’s front doors, dropping off school supplies with certain pupils — laptops, workpacks or iPads — and checking on the more vulnerable ones.
Whole families lived in single rooms in hostels, sharing bathrooms and kitchens with strangers. Others were hours away from the school, isolated and unable to move. There was black mould on the walls, fridges empty, phones out of credit.
“The families’ living conditions became more highlighted,” says Chantelle Feka, the school’s special educational needs co-ordinator, who grew up in Peckham and still lives nearby. “That’s when I started helping people with housing applications, writing letters to MPs in emergencies.” Sometimes Feka can write four in a week.
Children respond to homelessness differently, she says. “Some withdraw, others become nervous and others become enraged, angry all the time. Some, particularly the children of asylum seekers, will try to advocate for their parents, translating their problems to the teachers.”
The school has started acting like a food bank, handing out packaged meals donated by supermarket chains. It collects second-hand winter coats and money for uniforms and PE kits from other schools in the academy trust — down the road in leafy Dulwich, for example, the parents give generously. The teachers also apply for grants for school trips.
All children are offered breakfast, lunch and dinner. The parents have coffee mornings to keep warm. Many pupils — due to long and changing school runs, or overcrowding — do not get enough sleep so teachers have moved more challenging lessons to the beginning of the day. They top up parents’ Oyster cards and sit on hold in phone calls to local authorities’ housing departments, trying to push housing applications through.
Shunted from place to place
Temporary accommodation dwellers have no right to choose their location and families are often placed further out of London where the prices are lower and more places are available. They can be moved often and without warning.
“Our community is mobile,” says Corbett. “So we can have a family that might arrive and be here for a matter of weeks, because they’ve been moved, again, in terms of their accommodation, or they might keep their children in the school but travel for hours, because the school is the only form of stability for the children.”
Jade is an older pupil at the school. Her family has been moved between temporary accommodation so many times in the last couple of years they cannot remember how many exactly — either seven or eight. For each, they had to get a taxi as they had no idea where they were going, the street names unrecognisable.
“The council speaks to me like I am nobody, I feel like nobody,” says her mother, Doria, a part-time cleaner in her forties, sitting in the staff room. She and her two children fled an abusive relationship, returning to the area where they used to live and where her friends and family live. After sofa surfing with friends for a while, Doria eventually had to report to Southwark council as homeless.
In one B&B the three had to share a bed. “And my children had to be there — they are so young but they had to help me,” she says, unable to keep speaking through her tears. “I thought I was protecting my children by leaving my partner, but then we had nowhere to go.”
Recently she was moved to Plumstead, further southeast, into a private rental home found and funded by the council, while she waits for social housing. “It brings me down to depression,” she says. “The teachers here help me a lot, they fill up my phone [with credit], help with emails to housing [officers]. The teachers know everything.”
For years, Abimbola Akintolu, a 51-year-old catering assistant and single mother, travelled for two hours on buses with her children to school, first dropping her daughter, 10, at Harris, then taking her 15-year-old son, who has autism, on to his special needs school.
They live in temporary accommodation in Croydon, a borough further south, where they were placed by Lambeth council after her partner left and she was evicted, unable to afford rent. Lambeth said her current home was a private rental property secured by the council and is on the waiting list for social housing.
Her daughter was often exhausted by the time she got to Harris and fell asleep in lessons. Her son was much more agitated. By the time she returned home from dropping them off, it was time to come back, so some days she would just sit in the Peckham McDonald’s until school pick-up — or walk around the local area.
This year, Feka helped the family apply for a car from the council, due to disability, filling out forms and pushing the application forward until, finally, it was successful. “If it wasn’t for this school I would be in my grave,” says Akintolu. “The teachers are the only ones listening to us.”
“Lambeth council is doing everything it can to find the most suitable accommodation available for homeless families,” said a spokesman.
Children who have never had a home
The temporary shelters many of the children go home to each night are not only far away, but poor quality. Fatima, eight, has been homeless for nearly all her life, living with her two older brothers and mother in temporary accommodation on the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth, a sprawling, rundown block of flats, the largest public housing estate in Europe.
“We have so many mice, they eat everything in the house,” says her mother, Aminata Diallo, 45, a cleaner. There is damp on the walls, mould on the floor, leaks staining the ceiling and peeling wallpaper, covered by children’s maps. “The radiator is not strong enough so when winter comes it’s very cold in the house,” says her eldest son, Salia, 22, who is at college. “When you go outside and then come in, it’s even worse. It’s colder inside. It makes us sick most of the time.”
Fatima often has to take days off school when she gets ill, unable to get better. They are waiting to be placed in permanent accommodation by Southwark council. “The council tells us to wait,” says Diallo. “But we don’t know how long we will be there for. We are always calling them but it’s always the same response: wait.”
Another mother at the school, Comfort, 34, has lived in a single room in a hostel in Bermondsey for four years, waiting for a home. Suitcases are stacked high against the walls next to a fridge, the floor a chaotic pile of school ties, tiny shoes and a child’s retelling of Shakespeare. “Sometimes I shut the door to the kitchen and I cry,” she says.
No one can tell her, or the other mothers in the classrooms, what will happen to their families because no one knows.
Corbett’s school is the constant. “If you walked into this school, on any day, you would not realise what they’re going through or the issues that they’re facing,” she says. “Because actually when they come here, it’s exciting. It’s their happy place.”
