Housing has long been understood as a necessity for a liveable life, for many a safe and secure home has been taken for granted. With an ever growing 'housing crisis', where the amount of social housing has declined, where private rents are increasing, and work is, for many, becoming more insecure and precarious, housing insecurity and homelessness is becoming more prevalent.
This thesis contributes to the scholarship on female specific homelessness, focusing on the intersections of housing, homelessness, motherhood and education. I consider the emotional and affective consequences of these political decisions on the lives of individual women and their families. I explore the effects of navigating housing, homelessness and education systems simultaneously; a set of issues which remain relatively under-researched. The work presented draws on accounts from women who were experiencing housing that was lost while being the mothers of school-age children, and practitioners working in the fields of housing and education using semi-structured interviews.
The research found that living in temporary accommodation caused significant disruptions to the women's identities, and to their children's education. The thesis explores the ways in which homeless women in Manchester are able to make decisions around their futures, and the futures of their children, when faced with systemic barriers to housing and education and when battling with the emotional and affective impact of mothering through crisis periods of homelessness. It also finds that teachers, while keen to support families experiencing homelessness, were insufficiently prepared or trained to support the kinds of behavioural, physical and emotional effects of homelessness which clearly interrupted children's schooling.
