That time of year has rolled around again — the six-week school summer holiday. While the rich jet off abroad, the poor and working poor will suffer like never before on a variety of fronts.

When I was growing up in the ’70s it was simple. Dad worked full time and Mum worked two evenings a week part-time. 

While we were never well-off, Mum handled the summer childcare for myself and my sisters on her own, with Dad’s help on the two evenings she worked. 

Days were filled with bike rides, picnics to the local park, trips to fetes or building dens in the garden. 

This then culminated in the one-week caravan holiday to either Cornwall, Wales or Great Yarmouth, which was looked forward to every year with great excitement. 

My working-class school summer holidays would end in the last days of August, when Mum marched us off to town for the school uniform buying. 

I never heard her complain once about the cost of kitting us out, even though a couple of items had to be bought at the school shop.

Fast forward to recent years when I have had all four of my sons straddling secondary school to primary. 

Blazers and jumpers emblazoned with the school logo are extremely expensive.

Successive governments have applied pressure to schools encouraging them to have a generic uniform with no school logos. I know of none where this is the case.

Those navy jumpers all over supermarket adverts are useless when your school charges double or triple the price because the school badge has to be emblazoned on it. 

There were many years when I simply did not have the money to buy “quality” school uniform items from the high street and had to buy cheaper uniforms. 

This, frankly, was so poor quality it barely got to October half-term without having to be replaced and thus defeated the object of being “cheap.” 

Since the Tory cuts you can add on the cost of certain GCSE textbooks as schools do not have enough to round. 

To kit four boys out in the whole uniform plus blazers, coats, shoes, football/gym shoes, PE kit and stationery would always come in at around the £800 mark — a huge sum to find in the school holidays, and one I dreaded every year.

Currently I have two sons at secondary school and have become wiser, buying men’s trousers, shoes and so on in the sales.

I am thankful I have not had to find six weeks’ school holiday childcare. That is only because I am a carer for my youngest son who is autistic, so I am at home.

For those who have no option, the juggling required and sheer cost is immense. 

I have a friend who is in this position. She and her partner have three children. One is 14 at secondary school and the other two are five and eight in primary school. There are no grandparents living nearby. 

She takes the first week off school to stay home, her partner takes the second week off. 

Then she relies on her 14-year-old to fill in the gap for the third week, which she feels guilty over, but has no choice. 

She then pays for two weeks’ childcare for the five and eight-year-old full-time and then the whole family has a final week together in a caravan holiday in Britain. 

She would love a holiday abroad but schools have made it clear this is not allowed in term time and she can’t afford to go abroad in August as the cost doubles. 

Her school uniform costs are around £500. She is in favour of a shorter three-week school summer holiday with the option to remove children for a holiday for up to 10 days a year excluding exam times. She feels this is fairer and far more manageable for working families.

For those families totally unable to afford a holiday, days out are no longer a cheap option. 

Once the “free” days of a trip to the park, bike-riding or a trip into town, with a visit to a cafe perhaps, are done children will often complain about wanting a proper day out like their peers at school. 

For a family of four, once you take into account petrol or train fares, entrance fees to a theme park or other attraction and a lunch, there is no change out of a few hundred pounds. 

Feeding your children for six weeks ought not to be a problem in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but in 2014 foodbanks are bracing themselves for unprecedented summer holiday demand. 

When poor children are in school, they at least get one meal a day. In the summer holidays this is not the case. 

In my household I plan carefully the main meals for the summer holidays week by week, but find I am buying a lot more bread, ham and salad for sandwiches, cereal and milk, bottles of squash and so on as the “fridge raiding” is far more frequent than in term time. 

Families who get free school meals during term time are frequently unable to cope during the summer. Working poor families who are not entitled to free school meals are already sending their children to school with no lunch on occasion, as they simply have run out of money until pay day. 

In 2013 a local foodbank reported a 40 per cent surge in referrals during the school summer holidays. 

I witnessed two small children dancing around their kitchen delighted that the foodbank had provided them with breakfast cereal for the week — not treats, but cereal, a staple for the majority of families.

Con-Dem policies have put huge pressure on the backs of the working class. It is us and our children who are bearing the burden. 

Nick Clegg’s answer was to provide free school meals to all five and six-year-olds. He forgot that many schools have no kitchens but was hell-bent on ploughing on with his hare-brained scheme. 

He never thought for one moment that while five-year-olds were enjoying a free school meal, impoverished seven-year-olds might well be going without a lunch as mums whispered: “Tell the teacher you’re not hungry, just for today” as they wracked their brains trying to figure out how they would pay for lunches for the rest of the week. That’s real life, Clegg — that is what is happening in your 2014 Britain.

Yet still the politicians wring their hands and do nothing. 

Michael Gove has gone, but he has been replaced by privately educated Nicky Morgan, whose philosophy has so far constituted that “university education is not a right.” No change there then. 

It’s time the government supported parents. More and more are having to work but childcare is unaffordable. 

Poor parents and parents of disabled children are struggling to feed their kids over the six-week summer holiday. Days out are luxuries. These are the lives of the working class in 2014 — lives far removed from Westminster where a couple of holidays, treats and days out are the norm for children of MPs. 

They should walk a mile in our shoes and try to change things to make our lives just a little easier. After all haven’t things progressed just a little bit since my 1970s childhood? To the poor it appears not.

Bernadette Horton blogs at mumvausterity.blogspot.co.uk/