Pupil attendance matters according to the Education Authority NI, who say its Education Welfare Service “works in partnership with schools, parents, EA Services and other professionals to reduce pupil absence and to raise achievement, enabling young people to maximise their educational opportunities and potential”.

In our experience of working with homeless families, a major barrier to achievement and school attendance is being accommodated in non-standard accommodation such as hotels and B&B’s. In this type of accommodation, families will often share one room, there are no tables for children to sit at and do their homework, and no kitchen for parents to prepare meals or snacks. But this isn’t the biggest barrier these children face. The main obstacle is the Education Authority’s own policy, which since August 2024 mandates differential treatment for children temporarily living in hotels. 

The NIHE state that they can fulfil their statutory duty to house homeless families by offering non-standard accommodation anywhere in NI. We have seen families with children attending school in Belfast be sent to Enniskillen, Portrush, and Derry on a no-choice basis, with refusal to accept these offers leaving people at risk of having nowhere to stay at all. According to data received via Freedom of Information, at the end of 2024, there were 464 households in NIHE non-standard temporary accommodation across the north, and of these, 72 were families.

Since August 2024, Education Authority policy towards these children has been that, while in theory they keep their school place near their old home, the EA will not facilitate their placement in a new school accessible from the ‘temporary’ hotel. Parents therefore face an impossible choice: either they keep children off school for weeks or months on end or try to make long and expensive return journeys every day to the school near their old home.

The NIHE stresses that this type of accommodation provision is temporary, yet through our campaign work we have known children to miss months of school or even entire academic years whilst living in limbo.

The impact of this non-standard temporary accommodation on the welfare of the children is staggering and the experiences shared by the families we support have been heartbreaking to hear. We have received photos of children sleeping on trains to school, some of them setting off at 6am. We have consoled parents worried about the mental health of their children and the impact the situation would have on their transfer test results. Other parents have confided the stress of having been moved across counties just as their children were preparing to sit GCSEs or A levels, and the sacrifices that that situation forced them to make. 

In a recent FOI to the Education Authority, PPR asked how many families in NIHE non-standard accommodation had been supported by the EA Welfare Service in the 2023/24 school year and 24/25 school year so far. The response we received from the EA stated that they do not hold this information.

We find it shocking that the EA, an organisation with a service dedicated to enabling young people to maximise their potential and school attendance, is not monitoring the scale of this issue and doing more to advocate on their behalf.   Even more so, that a cohort of families in poverty, who most need support to ensure attendance by their children, are not receiving it.

At the same time, a similar set of families – those in asylum accommodation while waiting for their refugee claims to be decided – face parallel challenges.  Since August 2024 the Education Authority has also denied enrolment support to families living in this type of temporary hotel accommodation, on the grounds that they would likely be moved on elsewhere within a few months. Statistics from the Home Office from end December 2024 show 418 individuals in contingency accommodation. We know from our work that a significant proportion of these are families. How many are children who at this point can only dream of being able to go to school? 

In a wider context of concern about school attendance since the COVID-19 pandemic, those families who face the biggest barriers to attendance due to homelessness, do not appear to be a priority to the Education Authority. Statutory bodies are failing to keep track of the number of families impacted, making it impossible to monitor the true scale of this issue.  Through our campaign work, we will continue to do all we can to support these families but urgent accountability from the statutory bodies responsible is needed to ensure that no child gets left behind.