“You never know where a person has come from until you walk a mile in their shoes. You don't know what that person's story is.”

June Cigar, former homeless person and social justice campaigner, Skid Row, Los Angeles

“Poverty takes something from your soul on a daily, dayto- day basis.”

Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth, talking to Project Twist-It

The great escape

My dad had been showing me how to knot my new school tie all week. By the time it came to putting it and the rest of my uniform on – brown pleated skirt, jumper with two yellow stripes on the cuffs, white shirt, beige socks and brown blazer – for the first day of secondary school, he’d had enough of my efforts and given up, but I eventually had it down.

Somehow, the family had mustered enough money to make sure I had a ‘proper’ wool blazer and not the thin polyester kind that the government grant for poorer families covered. “This is a good one. It will make sure you’re warm in the winter,” the woman in the shop had told me as she took the government voucher and cash from me.

That I was putting on a brown uniform, and not a maroon one, was significant. This single fact weighed on me more than the guilt of where the money had come from to fund the better blazer. You see, a few months earlier I’d unexpectedly failed my 11+, the exam that determined which kids in Northern Ireland would go to the ‘grammar’ school (where the focus was on academic achievement) or the alternative (usually a school where poorer youngsters ended up and which saw most pupils leave at 16 with no chance of further education, never mind university).

The day the 11+ results came in my legs felt hollow, my stomach tumbled. In a single announcement all of my dreams seemed to die.

I. Had. Failed.

My aspiration of one day going to university had been stolen by an arbitrary exam that assumed you could decide the entire future of an 11-year-old on the basis of a couple of test papers, no matter what circumstances that child lived in when she had to sit those papers.