UK: Child poverty photo story

Last year we collaborated with award-winning photographers Simon Roberts, Liz Hingley, Laura Pannack, Abbie Trayler-Smith and Carol Allen-Storey, who spent a year working with families around the UK to create an intimate portrayal of child poverty today.

This week the New Statesman published a selection of these poignant images in a five-page photo story.

Entitled Five to a Room, the piece highlights our campaign to combat UK child poverty and exposes our concerns at the rise in the number of UK children living below the breadline.

Life on a budget

“The photographs published here, from Save the Children’s campaign on poverty in the UK, illustrate the pinched and provisional nature of life on such a budget, ” says New Statesman reporter Edward Platt.

“Four children huddle in a single cot in a flat in Birmingham; three teenage girls read and do their homework on the bed because there is no table in their parents’ house; a boy plays with a football in the shadow of a Glasgow stadium that offers the tantalising prospect of riches and success.”

“The effects are felt well beyond the domestic sphere – Save the Children’s campaign asserts, self-evidently, that children living in poverty are more likely to live in unsafe neighbourhoods – and they resonate through the generations,” continues Platt.

“Education is supposed to provide an escape route, and yet children in poverty are half as likely to get five good GCSEs as their better-off peers.”

Check out the full article and images here