Children in Scotland started back to school this week, and children in England and Wales are into their last few weeks of holidays. There’s a sense of sadness in the air – at the ending of summer, at the thought of missing the kids however tiring it is to spend hours and hours each day in their company. But the relief for parents on low income is almost palpable, as many look forward to an end to the challenges of juggling work with the challenge of non-existent or expensive childcare, and conjuring up extra food for children who would normally get 5 meals a week at school. But there’s dread too. According to a YouGov survey, 51% of parents in households with incomes below £30,000 said they could not afford everything their child needed for the start of the new school year. And these aren’t even parents on low incomes. The median household income is less than £20,000, and a household on the breadline has an income of only around £14,000 per year. The head of Save the Children exposed the real difficulties of low income families when she explained that families in poverty may only have £20 a week to spend on food, never mind the costs of back to school kit. According to the poll, 43% of struggling families said they were likely to have problems buying school uniforms, 26% said they would not be able to buy the full PE kit, and 19% said they struggled to pay for books and equipment.

And while fathers in low income families do experience difficulty, more often than not, it’s mothers who carry the responsibility for these extra costs. Research by the Women’s Budget Group has shown how women are the main managers of family money – and family poverty. They often act as shock absorbers, shielding their children from the main effects of poverty. What this means in reality is that mothers will go without proper meals, and cut back on personal expenses, in order to ensure that their children go to school wearing the right clothes and carrying the stationery, sports kit and other things that they need. This matters both because managing poverty can damage mothers’ physical and mental health, but also because children’s wellbeing is closely linked to mothers’ wellbeing. After all, you don’t get rich children in households with poor parents.

It’s not just going back to school that’s in the news this week – so is leaving school. Young people all over the country are waiting for their A level results, too. And once again the focus is on whether A Level results are actually worth the paper they’re written on, or whether the exams have been ‘dumbed down’ and are now too easy to be meaningful. But the real issue in education is once again overlooked – it’s all about inequality. Children from low income families are less likely to go to university, are less likely to get high grades at GCSE and A Level – indeed are less likely to do A Levels – and are more likely to go to schools facing numerous challenges to providing a solid education. These are the symptoms of a longer-term challenge that results from entrenched economic inequality.

At least there are a few things that all of us can do about the cost of going back to school. The CAB’s Adding Up campaign has some useful tips and action suggestions encouraging parents of any income to tackle their children’s school and their local authorities to deal with this.

Of course, this campaign doesn’t really deal with the deeper, longer-term results of economic inequality, but it might help give parents on low incomes a bit of relief.

MPs’ salaries may seem fairly high to some of us, but lawyers (£70,000 average) and CEOs (£100,000) are earning even more. Now compare it to the average wage in Britain: about £25,000 per year. If you earn the National Minimum Wage you’ll be on about £11,000 per year. (If you’re on JSA, you’ll pull in around £3,350, although you will also be entitled to other benefits.) These days CEOs and company directors are earning over 75 times more than the lowest paid – 20 years ago that figure was only 17 times.

And it’s not just the money that’s different – the rules are different, and differently enforced, too. A friend of a friend of mine was recently hauled through the courts after he failed to pay back a housing benefit overpayment of £200. He didn’t pay it back because he couldn’t. Another friend of mine is in debt to the tune of a few hundred pounds because of her housing benefit being mistakenly stopped when she declared payment for leading two community arts sessions (well within the benefits earnings disregard). She has no idea how long it’s going to take to pay it back. This is making it hard for her to consider paid work as she’ll suddenly be expected to pay the debt off more quickly and won’t have enough left over from her pay packet. Even if the MPs have to pay some of their expenses claims back, they hopefully (after years of decent earnings) have savings and other assets to fall back on, and won’t be left struggling to pay for essentials like a new boiler, cooker or a school trip for their children.

Surely what’s fair for one group of people is fair for everyone. We need tougher rules and better enforcement for public servants claiming expenses and more understanding and better support for those living close to the bone trying to keep their families and homes together on low incomes.

And, of course, more equality. Time and again, as other UK poverty blogs have discussed, societies with greater wealth equality are happier. Maybe as well as considering a http://www.oxfamblogs.org/ukpovertypost/2009/03/recession-unemployment-no-benefits-system-its-just-not-fair/ Wealth inequality in the UK – the gap between the richest and the poorest – is larger than it has ever been before (PDF). It’s now 40% higher than it was in 1974. Now I admit that I wasn’t so engaged in social issues at the time (my little sister and my little brother arrived in the years before and after and I was quite busy learning to hug them) – but nonetheless, it’s easily within my lifetime and it’s a pretty shocking increase. What it means, in reality, is that the richest people in Britain are 7.2 times richer than the poorest. It means the UK is the third most unequal society out of the 22 richest countries in the world – only the USA and Portugal beat us.

Well, so what? you might say. After all, even the governing party are ‘intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich’. But according to a whole pile of evidence collected by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in a new book, The Spirit Level, inequality is the cause of most, if not all, of the social ills that the UK suffers from. Teenage pregnancy, obesity, bigger prison populations, more depression, unequal mortality rates for different social classes – all of these are indicators of unequal societies. All are better in more equal societies.

As the Equality Trust website, spurred by the book, explains, there are pretty much two ways to remedy inequality: redistribute through taxation and other economic structures, or ensure less inequality between incomes at source. Which to choose? What a dilemma.

But actually in the UK at the moment, the problem is more basic than that: it is how to get sufficient public support to take action on inequality. For so long this and previous governments have promoted the view that you can end poverty without talking about indecent, disproportionate wealth. While at the same time, consumer culture has driven and been driven by an ever more entrenched belief that we all have a basic right to consume and even overconsume – which of course means that we have a concomitant right and, by implication, duty to chase wealth.

The result is a society where those who have less will always be poor – in health, in expectation, and in aspiration. And where the rich will always look down on them. In a society like that, attitudes towards the poor will never change. And as we’ve argued before if attitudes don’t change, there is less and less chance of supportive anti-poverty policies that really do help people on low incomes get out of poverty.

The proposed Welfare Reform Bill (which gets its second reading on Tuesday late afternoon) is a case in point. Years of rhetoric about ’scroungers’ versus ‘hard working families’ has resulted in proposed benefits changes that will increase compulsion on lone parents, reduce Carers’ Allowance, introduce workfare-style requirements for jobseekers, and a number of other radical changes. And all this at a time when the economy is contracting, jobs are disappearing, and the number of unemployed people is increasing.

I’m reminded of the old saying ‘be careful what you ask for, you will surely get it’ – perhaps this is the payback for being intensely relaxed about excessive wealth. Perhaps now, we’ll really understand what a high price society has to pay for the selfishness that results from inequality.

A Charity Commission report out last week found that almost a third of British adults would be too ashamed to seek help from a charity even if they needed it. Independence and self-sufficiency is a highly prized value – ask anyone who has ever experienced disability and hated every minute of asking others for support. Most people who are on benefits or low incomes want to support themselves, whether they’re starting out on their careers, or just trying to get on with their lives.

As Carol’s story shows, far from simply taking from society, people on low incomes in the UK make valuable contributions. There are currently 109 time banks in the UK with 7714 active volunteers. Studies of timebanks have shown that 58% of their volunteers earn less than £10,000 per year; 72% were not in formal employment. Meanwhile, some of the highest earners in the UK are avoiding paying their economic dues in taxes to the tune of £13 billion.

That seems to disprove the putative link between poverty and scrounging. At a time when economic recession is bringing unemployment ever closer to everyone, I’d suggest that it’s time to think again and start to value the real contributions made by those who struggle every day.