Last week, The Northern Echo launched its election campaign, demanding the next Government tackles serious issues plaguing the North East head-on. 

We raised six key points - one of which was to reduce poverty and hardship, which remains a major barrier for young people across the region. 

Writing for The Northern Echo, here's what Beth Farhat, incoming chair of the North East Child Poverty Commission (NECPC), had to say about the important issue.

“These children and families are not numbers on a page, these are real people…and real lives.”

Those were the powerful words of a Redcar headteacher last week when asked by BBC Radio Four what her message would be to all political parties in this General Election.

Despite schools across Redcar and Cleveland experiencing a £6 million real terms cut in their spending power since 2010/11, the headteacher talked about how her school is using its funds to offer free breakfasts to all pupils, as well as making free food and sanitary products available to families who simply cannot afford to make ends meet.

She explained that they have been left to provide this type of support because “children can’t learn if they are hungry.” 

That this should need to be said – and indeed is happening at all – in one of the largest economies in the world is devastating enough.

Yet we at the North East Child Poverty Commission know that this is not only being replicated in many of our amazing schools right across our region, but by dedicated colleges, family hubs, charities, community centres, youth organisations, sports clubs and faith groups throughout the North East.

The BBC had come up to Teesside after a new report highlighted why child poverty should be a top priority for all candidates standing in this election, and crucially, for whoever forms the next Government.

Published by the 120-strong End Child Poverty coalition – of which the North East Child Poverty Commission is a member – it found that in a staggering two thirds of constituencies across the UK, at least one in four children are now growing up in poverty.

That figure rises to a shocking 89% – almost all – constituencies here in the North East: widespread disadvantage which means tens of thousands of babies, children and young people in our region having their development put at risk, opportunities restricted and their potential limited by the multiple barriers that, as all the evidence tells us, poverty and hardship bring.

Perhaps hardest to hear from that Redcar headteacher was her statement that, “this has become our norm” – not least because we know that, with political will, leadership and the right policies, there is nothing inevitable about children growing up in poverty, including here in the North East.

But this will require the next Prime Minister to commit to ending child poverty, and then urgently developing a concrete, cross-Government plan to do this which recognises that investing in children is the best, and most important, investment we can make in the future of both our region and our country.

Indeed, failing to do so doesn’t just result in immeasurable human costs to individual, real children and families – it is estimated that the wider ‘societal cost’ of child poverty in the UK stands at over £39 billion a year.

This is the case I will be actively making in my new role as Chair of the North East Child Poverty Commission; working alongside organisations from all sectors across our region to ensure that every level of government prioritises making child poverty a thing of the past, and never again does any national Government allow it to become ‘the norm’.