John Lyon's charity Annual Report 2024 - Report - Page 8
WHAT IS HOME-SCHOOL
-COMMUNITY?
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted harsh
inequalities across society. The consequences
of the lockdowns was not felt equally amongst
communities: the impact of the virus on BAME
communities was significant and the closure of
schools for so many months disproportionately
affected children from already disadvantaged
backgrounds e.g. families with limited financial
resources, those with caring responsibilities
or children with Special Educational Needs and
Disabilities. Covid-19 shone a spotlight on this
disparity and highlighted these differences.
Home-School-Community (HSC) is the strategy developed
by John Lyon’s Charity to respond specifically to these
inequalities by offering increased levels of support to
organisations working with children and young people in
the Beneficial Area over six years from 2021- 2027, as it
recovers and rebuilds from the Covid-19 pandemic. The
Charity quickly identified in 2020 that whilst immediate
emergency funding was required, a longer-term focus
was also needed.
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JOHN LYON’S CHARITY ANNUAL REPORT 2024
The HSC Strategy was developed during the Autumn of
2020 and early 2021 when there was already evidence of
the poorest fifth of households seeing a fall in their median
household earnings of around 15%, approximately £160
per month (Institute of Fiscal Studies). This was before
the Cost-of-Living crisis that saw inflation rise to a 41
year high of 11.1% in October 2022.
The ambitious HSC Strategy was made possible by
withdrawing £22 million of funding over six years from the
Charity’s endowment, to be spent at the same time as the
Charity’s usual grant spend of c.£12 million in 2020/21.
The strategy encompassed the need for urgency to ensure
that organisations could survive, and children and young
people had immediate needs met, balanced with the need to
take a longer-term view. To give structure to this additional
giving, the additional £22 million was to be spent over five
distinct but interrelated areas, to ensure not just a local
voluntary sector that survived the immediate aftermath of
the pandemic but could strive to respond to the longer term,
increasingly complex needs of children, young people and
their families.
Click here to read our Home-School-Community
Strategy Report 2021
