Staff at Tees Valley Education (TVE), which runs four primaries and a special school in some of the region’s most deprived areas, are used to looking for signs that families are under serious strain. One mother’s hands were “raw and red”, recalls Katrina Morley, its chief executive.
“She and her husband had five jobs between them,” Morley explains. “She was hand-washing the children’s uniforms regularly and they were turning up to school immaculate, but the detergent was eating away at her hands.”
