Budgeting for Laura, a single mother of four, often means deciding between buying enough food or paying her electricity bill on time.
“Some weeks we’re good, some weeks we’re down and I have to go into the community and ask for vouchers,” she says. The down weeks have been happening more since the pandemic.
“The cost of living has gone up dramatically,” she says. “It’s crazy, and it’s getting crazier … it’s continuous every year. Everything is going up and up and up.”
Research from The Smith Family released on Thursday found nine in 10 families are worried about affording back-to-school essentials as inflation continues to bite.
The annual survey interviewed more than 1,100 lower-income parents and carers whose children are supported by The Smith Family.
It was the third consecutive year more than 80% of families surveyed said they couldn’t afford school items, echoing Curtin University’s child poverty report, released late last year, which found an additional 102,000 children fell into poverty during and after the Covid period between 2020 and 2023.
Based on population change and the impact of rising rental costs, it projected the national child poverty rate had increased from 15% in 2023 to 15.6% in 2025.
“Should this trend continue, we risk seeing over one million children living in poverty in Australia in the next year or so,” the report found.
The Smith Family’s CEO, Doug Taylor, says the one in six children in Australia now growing up in poverty risk a detrimental flow-on effect for their education.
“Research tells us that by Year 9 a student who experiences disadvantage can be four to five years behind their peers in literacy and numeracy,” he says.
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Taylor adds that it’s “incredibly significant” that The Smith Family’s survey results haven’t improved year-on-year and the trend has shown no sign of abating.
“For low income families, they feel those cost of living impacts most adversely,” he says.
“Once again, at the start of the school year, families are facing those real pressures financially, but it’s also about the distress and the psychological impacts of facing those pressures.
“The burden for a parent or carer to start the school year feeling the pressure of having to cut corners in so many areas is a pressure that no family should really face.”
More than half (56%) of those surveyed thought their children would miss out on necessary digital devices because they couldn’t afford them.
Four in 10 parents or carers thought their children would miss out on educational activities outside of school and feared they wouldn’t be able to afford uniforms or school shoes.
The Smith Family has distributed 14,000 laptops to families in the past seven years, but 44%, or 400,000 students, still aren’t digitally included – meaning they have no internet access at home.
Taylor says closing the digital divide is crucial, but so too is expanding access to out-of-school activities like tutoring and catch-up classes, which have become increasingly commonplace among middle and high income families.
“We know that there’s a big gap in terms of the numbers of students that fall behind in literacy and numeracy that come from disadvantaged backgrounds,” he says.
“There’s everything that you can get in the classroom, but then so much happens now outside of the classroom in terms of that extracurricular.
“All those things matter. They’re not just about keeping a child busy with activities. They’re about engagement.”
For Laura, uniforms and shoes are now the biggest challenge with her children “continuously growing and growing”, as well as funds for extracurricular activities like sports, music and school camps.
Her kids are lucky to receive laptops and internet access from The Smith Family.
“Otherwise they’d just be using the internet off my phone, which would be impossible” she says.
“That just makes it so much harder for them, because all the homework and correspondence with the school is online now. They would just miss out because I can’t afford them.”
