How one teacher tackles child poverty in the most unusual way

Petting 50 dogs certainly beats climbing Ben Nevis, spending the rest of your life with a Fortnite tattoo or eating a red onion raw.

Getting money from Harry Judd of McFly might be slightly better, though.

These are just some of the ways George Pointon, a primary school teacher in Portsmouth, spent the last month of his summer holidays.

For 29 days, George woke up and looked at his whiteboard – he’s a teacher, after all – to see what challenge he was doing for charity that day.

All the challenges weren’t his call, though. Instead, he let anyone who chipped in a few pounds to his fundraiser, called Challenge 29, decide what he should do.

‘It feels like a lifetime ago,’ George, 29, tells Metro.co.uk of his first challenge, eating a red onion. ‘I thought it was gonna take 10 minutes. I was in there for a good few hours just trying to get through it. I stank as well.’

His charity drive, which took place throughout August, has already raised nearly £6,400 for Action for Children, Chances for Children UK, the Child Poverty Group and The Robert Centre.

George’s name might seem a bit familiar. About four years ago during the coronavirus pandemic, George posted some jokes he asked his class of six-year-olds to come up with.

It didn’t take long for the post to go viral. ‘It was the day after that radio stations wanted to interview me, just come bloke that thought this was funny,’ George says. ‘I couldn’t tell my kids. They were too young, and I think the concept of explaining that to them would be a bit mad.’

‘I asked one for a joke. “What does the chicken not want to be? A chicken nugget.” Obviously, the kids went crazy. Then we went, actually, when we strip that back, you’re right. We’re actually talking about the poultry industry and mass consumption.’

In Mr Pointon’s classroom, anything can be a teachable moment.

From what questions they’d ask on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to what movie they’d pitch, you’d be hard done by thinking of something George hasn’t asked his class.

‘Sometimes what they said was really funny. Other times profound. I’d have people go: “Can you ask them this?” Seeking profound wisdom from a six-year-old,’ he says.

‘I thought we were spending so much of our time listening to these adults in high power – government and parliament – that were acting like children. We got the opposite side of it. We suddenly got these children that were acting like adults, and it was really nice contrast to what was going on in the world.’

But George hasn’t always been a teacher who wrote a book (Teacher Man: Diarities of Life Inside a Primary School) or someone who comes up as an ‘internet personality’ when you Google his name.

He was once just a 20-something trying to get an iMDb profile: ‘I was the classic thing of a full-time writer, part-time actor but a full-time teaching assistant instead. I fell in love with teaching and during lockdown I chose education.’

He and his partner, also an actor, packed their bags and moved from London to the coast just as the pandemic hit. Becoming a teacher full-time, it didn’t take him long to realise what every teacher around him did.

‘It is impossible to work in education in any capacity and not see how child poverty affects young people and it affects them through external circumstances,’ he explains. ‘None of this is their fault. This is just a situation that they’re in.

‘Quite often when adults are in poverty, there’s this stigma attached to it. We often say they made bad decisions or didn’t work hard enough, yada yada.

‘But you cannot do that for children and child poverty, because that’s the situation that they’re born in.’

Poverty is all about money. Too few zeroes in the bank to afford basic household needs – think food, clothing, shelter or medicine.

Around 4.3 million children are growing up in poverty in the UK, according to official figures. In a typical classroom of 30, this amounts to about nine pupils. With so many going to class hungry, some teachers are even dipping into their own pockets to buy their students meals or jackets.

More and more families are falling below the poverty line, says Joseph Howes, the chief executive of Buttle UK, the charity behind Chances for Children UK.

‘There has been an extreme, drawn-out decline in living standards to the extent that children growing up in financial hardship cannot live healthy, fulfilling lives,’ Howes explains.

‘They are physically weakened by their profound, yet simple needs not being met.’

As George stresses, poverty isn’t just about what’s in a kid’s lunchbox. While George doesn’t expect most schoolchildren spent their summer eating raw red onions like he did, some had families take them to museums and theatres.

Others spent it mostly at home while their parents or guardians worked.

‘We have all these children, some starting at the 100-meter line and starting 250-meters back. We all expect them to get to the finish line at the same time,’ George says.

‘I sat there and thought, what’s the point? What am I doing it for? Who am I doing it for?’

The kids, he quickly realised. Raising money for anti-child-poverty charities was a no-brainer; letting the world choose 29 challenges for him was too.

All 29 challenges George did in August:

Day 1: Ear a raw onion
Day 2: Break a world record
Day 3: Climb 100 flights of stairs
Day 4: Learn and play the recorder
Day 5: Egg and spoon race for 3km
Day 6: Swim 100 lengths
Day 7: Learn and perform the Nations of the World song
Day 8: Plan and buy a food shop for a family of four
Day 9: Golf 72 holes using kid’s clubs
Day 10: Fight the Rock
Day 11: Give out 100 positive messages
Day 12: Learn sign language
Day 13: Live off £1 all-day
Day 14: Get a Fortnite tattoo
Day 15: Travel to three countries, three landmarks
Day 16: Sit and pass a SAT test
Day 17: Get a celebrity donation
Day 18: Ride 15 different forms of transport
Day 19: Climb Ben Nevis
Day 20: Spend all day in a cinema
Day 21: Pet 50 dogs
Day 22: Run 30km
Day 23: Donate blood
Day 24: high-five everyone at the Child Poverty Action Group
Day 25: Ride every Tube line end to end
Day 26: Complete a decathlon
Day 27: Build a raft and sail it
Day 28: Host a pub quiz
Day 29: Shave your head

‘Climbing Ben Nevis was a big bucket list thing for me,’ Geoge says of Scotland’s 4,413-feet-tall mountain.

‘Everyone around me was like, “Have you got the right equipment?” and I was just so laissez-faire about it.

‘I kept seeing pictures of kids on top of it – if these kids have made it, why not me? And… it was a tough old slog. It was such bad weather.’

Slightly easier than hiking Ben Nevis was breaking a world record – well, kind of. ‘I’m a massive Beatles fan and I named as many songs as I could in a minute – I got 24 and the record was 23.’ (Guinness World Records has yet to rubber stamp this, however.)

There was the day he fought the Rock – kind of. Rather than fight the towering former WWE actor in the ring, George spent the day eating and training like him before heading to the park and ‘if the Rock happens to be there I’ll fight him, and if he doesn’t, I’ll count that as a win’.

Dwayne Johnson didn’t show. It’s 1-0 to George.

Or the day weeks in the making. Phoning, texting and direct messaging anyone in his contacts who may, by chance, know a celebrity up for donating money to Challenge 29.

The ‘celebrity donation’ challenge was easily one of the hardest for George – yes, even harder than climbing Ben Nevis. A friend of a friend, however, worked at a radio station where Judd, drummer for the band McFly, was set to appear.

Judd donated to the fundraiser anonymously. ‘I will say it was a nice, really generous amount,’ George says, ‘it wasn’t a penny.’

Out of all 29 challenges, the last being George shaving his hair off, just one he wasn’t able to do: Donating blood.

According to NHS Blood Donation, people who have been tattooed have to wait four months before being able to give blood. George was freshly inked with a stick-and-poke Fortnite tatt his girlfriend did.

‘When I came home from the clinic, in my head, I was all like: “I’ve messed the whole thing up. Everybody going to want their money back.” A real horrible spiral,’ George recalls. He’ll be back at the donor centre in December though – he is determined to see every single challenge through.

Geogrde understands how this all looks. A not exactly handsomely-paid teacher climbing mountains just to help uplift children from poverty.

‘I’m gutted that we live in a county, a society, that has so much excess, where I have to put myself forward for things like child poverty,’ he says.

Katie Cartwright, the head of regional fundraising at Action for Children, knows this too.

‘We provide practical and emotional care and support to vulnerable families, and we can’t continue to do this without the generosity of our tireless fundraisers like George,’ she says.

‘Together, we can ensure more children have safe and happy childhoods. We are truly thankful for his incredible efforts, and for choosing to support Action for Children.’

And George isn’t finished. On the last week of October, he will be doing the 30 milers, an exercise for Royal Marine recruits to run and march through the Dartmoor Hills. All once again for charity.

‘They have to do 30 miles in eight hours,’ he says, explaining that his friend, a captain in the Marines, will help arrange the excursion.

‘The people around him are excited to see a hapless civilian go do it – I think they’ll get a bit of a kick out of it.’

But George doesn’t just care about children when he’s in the classroom, posting about their ideas for movies on social media or inhaling a red onion while half-sobbing for charity.

After all, he hopes to have his own children some day.

‘Children are just wonderful – they’re just amazing beings,’ he says. ‘We should really cherish that period of life.’

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