Extreme child poverty is worsening across the UK, with schools increasingly forced to fill in the gaps being left by councils and social services budget cuts, school leaders have said.

Headteachers from schools in deprived areas of England, Wales and Northern Ireland say they are having to provide basic services such as washing school uniforms for pupils from poor households, and are even paying for budget advice and counselling services for parents.

Teachers and school leaders also said they were regularly providing sanitary products such as tampons for pupils, buying shoes and coats in winter, and in some cases giving emergency loans in cash to families.

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The experiences of the school leaders are borne out by the findings of a survey published on Monday by the Child Poverty Action Group and the National Education Union (NEU), which is holding its annual conference in Brighton over Easter.

In the survey of 900 teachers, 60% said child poverty in schools had worsened since 2015, and one in three said it had got significantly worse.

“Poverty on paper seems to be getting better, our number of free school meals seems to be going down, but the reality is completely the reverse – poverty is just becoming more and more extreme. Benefit entitlement rules are shutting more and more families out of the system,” said Jane Jenkins, the headteacher of an inner-city primary school in Cardiff.

“It is really tough. When people are asking you about standards and why a school is not higher in the league tables, often that is very much a secondary consideration for us these days. More and more, for third-sector ‎services and children’s services, the pressures that those services are under are absolutely massive. So school is now the only agency where children and parents are getting that sort of support.”

Howard Payne, the headteacher of a primary school in Portsmouth, said: “Over the last 18 months the number of child protection issues I have seen has increased fourfold – and I’m in a small school. Every single one of those issues has been related to poverty, debt, not eating enough, and that has increased dramatically.”

During the snowstorms this winter, Payne said, he kept his school open when other schools in the area were closed. “I kept ours open because I was really worried about the number of children who wouldn’t get a hot meal that day,” Payne said.

Several school leaders said they had noticed a visible difference in health and stature between children from their schools in deprived areas and those from better-off areas.

One headteacher from a school in Cumbria, who did not want to be named, said she was shocked to witness the differences between former pupils from her school and those from other primaries.

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“My children, who have gone from me up to the local secondary school, have grey skin, poor teeth, poor hair, poor nails. They are smaller, they are thinner,” she said.

“At sporting events, you see your children in the year group compared to other children in an affluent area and you think: our kids are really small. You don’t notice it because you’re with them all the time, but when you see them with children of the same age who are from an affluent area, they just look tiny.”

Other school leaders reported having to clean pupils’ school uniforms, especially after weekends when some children from poor households had no way of washing their clothes.

“We are expected to be social workers, to be carers, doctors, we are expected to deal with every issue at the same time as doing all the other things that government wants us to do,” said Louise Regan, the head of a primary school in Nottinghamshire.

“We have a food bank, so we give out food parcels, particularly on Fridays, we buy clothing, we do a lot of buying, particularly coats in winter and shoes,” Regan said. “We’ve had children who haven’t come to school because they didn’t have shoes. We’ve gone and bought shoes, taken them to their house and brought the child into school.”

The headteachers, all delegates attending the NEU’s conference, said Mondays were often the worst days, with children arriving in school hungry and tired after a weekend with little food.

Celia Dignam, an NEU official responsible for child poverty, said the union’s survey revealed the reality of 4.1 million children living in poverty.

“Schools, as well as educating children, are now a safety net, particularly for children in poverty,” Dignam said, noting that the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that 5 million children would be living in poverty by 2021.

“This is not a situation that is getting better, it’s actually getting significantly worse,” she said.

The survey found that 55% of teachers felt free school meal provision did not come close to meeting the needs of pupils from poor backgrounds.

“From 2022 there’s going to be an income threshold for universal credit, so there are children currently entitled to free school meals who will not be getting them,” said Dignam. “We’re heading for an absolute crisis. You think we’ve got a crisis now but it’s going to get even worse unless we see some policy change from government.”

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The NEU argues that all children whose families are receiving universal credit should become eligible for free school meals.

Although child poverty sits outside of the Department for Education’s remit, the DfE has allowed pupil premium funding to be used for poverty alleviation.

“We continue to support the most disadvantaged children [in England] through free school meals, the £2.5bn funding given to schools through the pupil premium to support their education and the recently announced £26m investment to kickstart or improve breakfast clubs in at least 1,700 schools,” a DfE spokesperson said.

Last week the education minister Nadhim Zahawi announced funding for research into ways of supporting disadvantaged families during the school holidays, to overcome “holiday hunger”.