THE last time a Labour government took power I was in primary school.

Although I don’t remember much from that election, one issue stuck with me — Labour’s pledge to eliminate the scourge of child poverty.

With another election fast approaching I have returned to schools, this time with dried food in my hands rather than a bag on my back.

In the last few years Britain has seen a surge in foodbank use to over half a million people. Half of these are parents. More surprisingly, over half of them are in work.

The vast majority of teachers are reporting hungry children in their classrooms and many have resorted to buying food out of their own pay cheques to feed their pupils.

The causes of this are clear. Since 2010 underemployment has risen by over 432,000, and stands at over three million. Zero-hours contracts also now count for at least 700,000 jobs in Britain, and with over two-thirds of children in poverty part of a family with a working parent it is clear that the jobs that are supposedly leading the recovery simply don’t work.

It is not just the immediate impact of poverty which hurts children.

Unsurprisingly, poor diet has been proven to have a significant impact on children’s ability to learn, affecting concentration, behaviour and overall cognitive ability, adding yet another hurdle to our increasingly unequal education system.

A two-year pilot study in Newham and Durham looking at the effects of universal free school meals showed pupils in Year 1-6 making two months’ more progress than children elsewhere.

However even with universal free school meals at all stages of education we still would need to deal with hunger at home and the added strain of providing lunch during holidays and the rising cost of childcare.

If we want to effectively deal with child poverty, we need to deal with the causes of poverty in the first place — an end to the inhumane benefit sanctions that push struggling families over the edge and an end to zero-hours contracts which can’t sustain a young family.

Instead we need to create decent well-paid jobs with a welfare safety net that is designed to protect and lift people out of problems rather then ensnare them in poverty.

However, any progressive policies the next government might implement will likely take years to make a difference, leaving those currently suffering without help.

This is where unions come in. Where the government and political parties of all persuasions are failing to tackle the reality of child poverty and local councils still reeling from cuts are unable or unwilling to help, we fall back on the grassroots organisations of the working class.

And that is why I find myself going back to school. Over the next few months I will be working alongside a coalition of local unions in Oxfordshire, including teaching unions, to organise practical class solidarity with unemployed and underemployed working families through organising workplace food collections. But the project aims to do much more than that.

Using the organisational networks and capacity of trade unions, we are gathering information on the extent and impact of child poverty in the area.

We want to use this information to raise awareness and challenge commonly held misconceptions about food poverty locally but also to focus the attention of policy-makers and politicians.

By using our strengthened networks, we can work to shift the political debate away from the abstracted and false assertions propagated by David Cameron that Britain’s economy is growing, on to the real damaging human cost of the Con-Dems’ austerity policies.

The project is still in its early stages, but already there are indications both of how desperate the situation has become but also what a difference trade union action could make.

At a group meeting last week, a young teacher who lives in Cameron’s own constituency reported regularly seeing pupils taking their free school meals home with them to help feed their families. This cannot be right in 21st-century Britain.

Teachers are front-line witnesses of the growing hardship of families but they are also ideally positioned to make a real difference to their pupils’ lives, not just in the classrooms but on dinner plates as well.

Brendan Lee is a grassroots education activist.