Secondary English teacher Tara Diamond discovered she was going to be made homeless a week before Christmas. Without warning, her landlord decided to sell the three-bed house in Bath she’d been renting for £1,000 a month for the past three years. Diamond, a single mother of a teenage daughter and son, quickly found that on her salary of £28,000, she could not afford to rent another home locally.

“My pay has been frozen while rents have rocketed in Bath. I was already spending all my spare time working as a tutor and marking exams just to pay for groceries and avoid getting into debt. Another three-bed place would have cost me £1,300 a month – 80% of my take home pay – leaving my children and me with just £320 a month to live on. Even landlords of two-bed properties were turning me down because I didn’t earn enough.” She needed £4,000 to move home, including the deposit. “I just didn’t have the money.”

However, she was desperate to stay in Bath. “All my support network is here, which is so important when you’re a single mum, and my daughter is doing her GCSEs. Plus, the children I teach at the local comp mean a lot to me.”

She went to the council and explained her situation. “Despite being on the waiting list for housing for 10 years, they said they couldn’t help me. That’s when I realised I was going to be made homeless. I experienced this feeling which I can only describe as pure terror. I’ve never been so scared in all my life.”

In school, she pretended she was fine. “My mantra was: it would not affect my teaching, but I was so worried I struggled to concentrate at work. My head of English knew something was wrong, but I wouldn’t talk about it face to face. I was so ashamed. My self-esteem was at rock bottom. I’ve been proud to be a teacher, but if I can’t afford to keep a roof over my children’s heads, what does that say about my value to society?”

Eventually, she poured her heart out to a fellow teacher, who told her about the Education Support Partnership (ESP), a small charity that supports teachers in financial trouble. “That made a huge difference.” The charity awarded her £2,000 to put towards her removal costs and her deposit and then, at the last minute, the council offered her a three-bed home in poor condition on a rundown estate, for £489 a month. “It had no heating, no flooring and the toilet didn’t flush but I am hugely grateful. I feel like I’ve escaped a bullet.”

Another teacher, Louisa Powell (not her real name), remembers the moment she told her deputy headteacher she was homeless. “She was shocked. She asked how she could help. But I didn’t want anyone else at the school to know. I wanted to pretend, when I was teaching, that everything was OK.”

Powell, a primary teacher in Waltham Forest, north-east London, was made homeless in August last year and has been living in emergency accommodation with her two young children ever since. The three-bedroom house she used to rent, with its large garden, seems a distant memory. Today, the family lives and sleeps in two cramped rooms in bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless people. “Until it happened to me, I would never have expected a teacher could ever end up homeless or in a place like this. But now I know: it could happen to anyone.”

Latest research from the charity Shelter suggests as many as 41% of homeless households are, like Diamond and Powell, in work. In London, the figure is even higher, at 47%, and the charity believes this could be a conservative estimate.

It is not clear how many teachers are among the working homeless as Shelter does not collect this data. However, the Teachers’ Housing Association says it recently completed a project in Croydon where 75% of the teachers housed were either homeless or struggling to pay their rents, and it has noticed a surge in applications from teachers living in unsuitable accommodation. Meanwhile, the ESP has offered several emergency grants to teachers in recent months to prevent them ending up on the streets.

Powell is typical of the cases these organisations have come across. Her London landlord increased her rent by almost 10% overnight, to £1,350 a month, which meant Powell, who earns £25,000 a year, would have to spend 90% of her take-home pay on rent. A single mother who gets no support from her ex, she was already struggling to make ends meet after paying for childcare. “I looked at moving farther out, to somewhere cheaper, but I’m the main carer for my disabled mother so I couldn’t move far. Otherwise, I’d have run out of London rather than allow this to happen to me.”

No matter where Powell looked to rent within commuting distance of her mother and her school, all the landlords required a deposit of several thousand pounds upfront, which she didn’t have. She reluctantly sought help from Waltham Forest council but it refused to offer her a home until she had been physically evicted.

“I turned up at the council office that day with all my belongings and was made to feel like I was the lowest of the low. It was only after I called Shelter and they informed me about my rights under housing and homelessness law that I was able to stand up for myself and get emergency accommodation in a B&B near my school. But having our home ripped away from us has had a huge impact on our family life, and my work as a teacher has suffered too. I was so distracted about my housing situation, there was no way I could come up with ideas in meetings and plan my lessons properly. I almost had a breakdown from the stress.”

Laura Sullivan (not her real name), a secondary teacher from Enfield, north London, was considering sleeping rough on the streets but was lucky enough to receive a grant from the ESP. She was paying £600 a month to rent a tiny room in a two-bed London flat with her unemployed partner, her mother-in-law and her couch-surfing brother-in-law, plus her nine-year-old nephew on the weekends, while commuting 90 minutes each way to school. “I’d get up at 4.30am and get home at 9pm. Our room was so small we couldn’t stand up in it or put our clothes away, but we had nowhere else to go. We were trapped.”

To move, they needed £2,500 for a deposit and lettings agent fees but Sullivan had no savings and was weighed down with debt after paying for her father’s funeral. “I had £150 a month to live on after rent and bills.” She became depressed and was referred by her GP for counselling. “I wondered at that point whether I’d been wrong to pursue my dream of becoming a teacher.”

Enfield council couldn’t offer her social housing, saying she was earning too much. “That’s when I looked at a homeless shelter. I thought: I’d rather be on the streets than carry on living there, I’m working too hard to live that way. My partner and I almost split up over it.”

Just in time, a member of her school’s leadership team noticed she was working very late at school. “I had to, because I had nowhere to work at home. When I explained the situation, he gave me a leaflet for the ESP.” She successfully applied for a £1,000 grant, to put towards her deposit, then cut down on her pension contributions and scraped together the rest of the money. “A month later, I finally got the keys to my own place. I couldn’t stop crying.”

Carl Hanser, caseworker for the ESP, says: “We’re very concerned to be seeing an increase in homelessness among education professionals, including teachers. We would urge anyone in the sector who might be experiencing financial problems caused by their personal circumstances, unemployment, ill health, bereavement or injury, to get in touch via our website or call our free, confidential helpline on 08000 562 561.”

The Department for Education refused to comment, saying homelessness and emergency housing for teachers was a matter for the Department for Work and Pensions. It did say, however, that the annual average salary for a qualified teacher in the UK is greater than the OECD average, and higher than in many of Europe’s high-performing education systems such as Finland, Norway or Sweden.

Martin Powell-Davies, spokesman for the National Union of Teachers, says the relationship between teachers’ wages and rising rents is at the root of the problem. “Teachers’ salaries haven’t even kept up with retail price inflation, let alone the soaring costs of rents and house prices.”

Anne Baxendale, director of communications, policy and campaigns at Shelter, says the fact that professionals are part of the rising trend in working homelessness is a sign that the housing crisis is getting worse. “Sadly, the ongoing drought of affordable homes combined with welfare cuts is leaving a growing number of people homeless, or on the brink of it. The next government has the opportunity to change things for the better. We want to work closely with whoever wins in June to tackle the root cause of this crisis by building decent homes that ordinary people can realistically afford to live in.”

Meanwhile, Powell’s four-year-old son is having nightmares, waking screaming every night since the family left their happy home. His 11-year-old sister, who shares his bedroom, has nowhere to do her homework. “It’s difficult to work in such a restricted space – we are all in each other’s faces all the time – and I feel so guilty my children are living in such poor conditions,” Powell says. “We haven’t had heating in eight weeks and I’m worried my son and daughter’s asthma is getting worse due to the extreme damp in their bedroom.”

She pays £866 a month to live there. “It’s difficult to describe just how bad it is. My son and I are covered in bites from bedbugs.” She is fighting to get rehoused. “I keep telling myself it’s not permanent. I keep telling myself to have hope. Right now, hope is all I have.”