Overloaded and Overlooked: Investigating How Poverty Drives School Students into Paid Work

Despite years of schools ringing the alarm, authorities are not monitoring the issue of poverty-driven student employment, nor do they seem to have acted to substantially increase their understanding of the issue. This neglect – by those who have the power to eliminate this effect of child poverty – is concerning, especially as long hours of paid work while at school can greatly diminish young people’s wellbeing, social and psychological development and educational attainment.

But while the size and spread of the issue is unclear due to this neglect, the number of high school students affected appears to have grown since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. We know poverty drives some school students to leave education entirely for fulltime employment; and it is likely that even more students are juggling school and poverty-driven employment, many of them likely struggling with fatigue.

Employment whilst studying can, of course, be beneficial. Benefits may include boosting a young person’s future employability, current sense of purpose and confidence. However, poverty-drivenstudent employment can mean overly long hours of work while studying, and even if the hours are manageable, the student can feel trapped, stressed and as if they had no choice, rather than empowered by their own decision to work. In addition, areas of deprivation offer fewer paid-work opportunities. This means poverty-driven student employment is probably more likely than other student employment to come with poor conditions and/or be a long commute from home. (On the flipside, fewer employment opportunities mean fewer students in deprived areas are in paid work than students from other areas on average – meaning fewer students in under-served communities are able to access the benefits of employment.)

Whether they have left school early – which may carry a higher risk of later unemployment, poverty and prison (McDermott et al., 2018; Samuel & Burger, 2020)– or working long hours while still in school, deprivation-driven employment robs students of educational achievement and their future potential, further locking them into poverty and lowering medium-term productivity for the country as a whole (Rua et al, 2019). They know it too: students in deprived communities are far more likely than students in privileged communities to think attending school is important (ERO, 2022, p. 95).

Ultimately, this problem is politically created by successive governments, and it is in the government’s power to prevent it, by addressing the underlying causes: hardship and the cost-of-living crisis, including housing costs. Adolescence is a crucial and sensitive period of psychological and biological development yet many free services – from public transport to GP visits (and prescriptions past and future) – stop after age 12 or 13.

Education is the way out of poverty – but currently systemic poverty and long-term State neglect of the education-employment issue stand in the way of education. Core elements of the right to education (as specified in international treaties) include “measures developed by the State to ensure full participation in education” (Te Kāhui Tika Tangata, no date). This must include adequate resources to attend education, rested and alert.