Housing crisis impacts young people's 'sense of belonging', violence reduction chief warns London’s homelessness crisis is helping to fuel violence among young people, the director of Sir Sadiq Khan’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) has warned.
Ms Peck said that in pursuit of the VRU’s goal to create more “inclusive” schools across the capital, some 100,000 children in London now attend schools with access to UNICEF’s ‘Rights Respecting School Award’ programme, which aims to put “children’s rights at the heart of school policy and practice”.
The scheme has resulted in 15,200 children and young people taking part in arts and drama-based sessions, Ms Peck said, and has led to 90 per cent of pupils having a better understanding of healthy relationships and 80 per cent now able to spot ‘red flags’ in a friendship or relationship.
Ms Peck said: “We’ve reached 5,000 young people, and amazingly what we’ve seen there is reports back from teachers saying, to solve conflicts now, they [the children] are reaching for words rather than for violence, and the attainment gap between them and their peers has narrowed by 98 per cent, which is pretty staggering, I think.”.
Lib Peck, the former Lambeth Council leader who has headed up the mayor’s VRU since 2019, said the lack of “belonging and identity” that comes with being homeless is causing young Londoners to disengage from school and “drop out of the system”.
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