A headteacher has revealed the challenges of helping children in one of the country's poorest areas.

Thanet headteacher Matthew spoke out on national radio about teachers washing pupils' clothes, providing children with basic healthcare and helping them out of gangs.

He said: "I love what I do but sometimes it hurts incredibly. The problem we have one of the things I have to do when I'm working with my safeguarding team is to reassure them that as a school we're doing everything we can and more.

"The question I ask all the time to my staff and myself is 'is this good enough for my child?' The answer is no its absolutely not, but there's nothing more that we can do."

The secondary school head explained some of the challenges teachers at his school face: "We have a girl who was heavily involved in gangs, at one point having a gun held to her head, who is now in sixth form and going off to university.

"Last year in our Year 11s we only had two children that we didn't get into employment, education or training and that's despite the lives that some of those have had.

"I have an amazing team. The great thing about working in the schools in Thanet is people work there because they want to, because they absolutely care about the children.

"We wash children's clothes feed them breakfast, take them into hospital when we need to we fight with social services, the police when we need to. I'm not crticising those services they're as stretched as we are. My view is education is a huge part of what we do but we have a responsibility to do the best for our kids.

"We've just worked with an optician coming into test kids' eye sight. My hope in the future is many of our kids don't have GPs we can get dentists and things in."

Matthew told LBC Ofsted inspectors left "in tears" after seeing the work the school does to protect its pupils from gang and County Lines crime.

He added: "Government policy is they won't invest in schools they consider to be failing

"Kids are living in homes that are cold, up until last year the school had a 1960s boiler that broke down every year so the school was cold.

"The reason why the government wouldn't give us money to replace that boiler and replace it was we were not a good school.

"Government policy is if a school is struggling in difficulties they wont give it money. Which to me in a common sense way seems insane. They say its 'market forces, we support the good schools' the whole thing is market forces doesn't serve areas like this."

Yesterday we revealed how one in 99 children in Medway are homeless, compared to one in 203 in Thanet.

Read more: All the latest news from Thanet