About half the families Variety worked with were earning less than $60,000 per year, Glasgow said. Photo: UnSplash/ Taylor Flowe
As the first term of the year rolls around, many parents face the stresses of the high costs of returning a child to school.
For some those costs are simply impossible to meet, which leaves children without things like stationary or uniforms.
Checkpoint host Lisa Owen spoke to Susan Glasgow, chief executive of Variety, a charity that helps children to access these essentials.
"We've got families struggling with (the) cost of living crisis, you know, high inflation, unemployment, high rents, and so to be able to send your child back to school on day one with a new uniform, perhaps, all the stationary they need, the digital device that they're expected to have.
"All the tools for modern day learning that the children in our communities need are really, really expensive, and it's really hard for most parents to provide all of those things," Glasgow said.
Families with multiple children had it even harder, she said.
"We are inundated with calls every day from desperate parents who are trying to send their kids back to school with the things that they need just to start prepared on day one."
"It's tough, it's really though," she said.
About half the families Variety worked with were earning less than $60,000 per year, she said.
"We survey our families every year so we have a pretty good understanding of their lived experiences."
The impact of these financial pressures were also not lost on the children in these families, she said.
"Children who are living in households where income is limited, they know not to ask their parents for the things they need because they also know that it brings stress into the household.
"That limits their opportunities and that limits what they expect of their own lives."
Some households were sometimes forced to come up with creative solutions to get around strict school uniform rules, she said.
"There might be one uniform in household across two or three siblings, and so they go to school on specific days of the week because they have to have the uniform to be able to go to school.
"Families are doing it tough but they are also resilient."
They had more than 3000 children on their waiting list, Glasgow said. Photo: Supplied / Variety
Checkpoint's Lisa Owen also spoke to Philip, who had struggled to put four children through high school due to a serious health problem.
Variety had been a "blessing" on his family, and helped make sure his kids would be able to finish school, he said.
Before participating in the programme he had been forced to send his children to school mufti (without a uniform) for almost a month.
Glasgow said that children in this situation were often identified as being different by their peers, and could fall victim to bullying.
"All they want to do is go to school and look like their friends and their contemporaries in the classroom.
"I think it really impacts the child's self esteem."
School uniforms could cost up to $1500, which was prohibitive for many parents, she said.
"If you need a blazer and you need brand new socks and shoes, and all of those things, they all add up and its really expensive."
"There's a huge amount of need in our communities that's not met. What we have is a programme whereby a sponsor pays $50 a month and that provides a child in our country, living in poverty, with the basic essentials that they need."
There were still more than 150,000 children in New Zealand living in material deprivation, she said.
While it is not necessarily the difference between a child attending school or not, "it's about the mana that they have when they're in that classroom, and the pride they have in themselves, and their capacity to learn", she said.
Glasgow implored anyone who can to visit their website and sponsor a child, saying it was a "transformative experience".
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