The real schools issues are welfare and housing. No party offers to help | Laura McInerney

England is on the turn, like a pint of souring milk, and schools are smelling the whiffs. The number of children in care is rising; gun and knife crime are up; waiting lists for children’s mental health referrals are lengthening. The question is: how long before the whole thing goes completely off?

No major political party has got to grips with this during the election. The Conservatives and Labour are offering schools more money – about £4bn a year – but this will just stem the flow of redundancies. Schools are shedding staff as costs rise and budgets stay flat.

These billions will barely touch the sides when considering the wider context in which schools are working. See, it is the welfare cuts in the other parts of the system that are starting to gnaw. Pupils are being forced to move with their families – sometimes 40 miles away – because their parents can’t afford inflating rent costs given tumbling housing benefit. To keep at least their schooling stable, especially if they’re doing GCSEs, children now take three buses each way. Imagine how exhausting that is for a 15-year-old. Imagine the impact on their exam results.

In addition, the number of children in care has started to rise disproportionately in some parts of the country. While in London, numbers of primary-aged children in care have dipped, in the north-west and south-east they are up by 37%. “Parents can’t afford to feed them,” one local authority worker bluntly put it. The increasing number of homeless adults on the streets don’t have homeless children with them for a reason: they’ve put them into care.

Elsewhere, children with special needs “too difficult” – read: “too expensive” – for mainstream schools to educate, are pushed into full-to-bursting special schools or into the private sector, at growing cost to the state. And London gun and knife crime is up 25%, at levels not seen since 2011.

If the generation starting school now see current trends continue, they will be educated in larger classes, on less cash, and look forward to higher debts than the generation before. They are unlikely to own a home until their 40s – if at all – will earn less, retire later and, after all that, die younger than their parents.

These are complex problems in need of complex solutions. So what are the main parties offering? Grammar schools and a battle over lunch v breakfast.

The Conservatives have three big-ticket items on their education manifesto: free breakfasts, grammar schools and forgiveness on student loans for serving teachers. All are uncosted and vague. Best guesses by the party, however, suggest the breakfasts will be worth about 7p a child. No one knows how many grammars there will be. And on the loan forgiveness, it’s unclear whether debt will be wiped away, or merely paused.

Labour is little better. Its schools policies, which you can count on your hands, promise a meaningless reduction in “bureaucracy”, £1bn to provide free lunches to primary children and to give teachers “more direct involvement” in the curriculum.

Both parties have made a welcome pledge on mental health but, disturbingly, appear to be keeping the majority of planned benefit cuts. The Lib Dems have pledged to scrap planned cuts, but their chances of gaining influence look as sturdy as a chocolate teapot.

All this feels as if we are staring down a barrel of a things-getting-worse shotgun, whoever gets power. And what aches most is we know how it ends. Anyone who recalls the 80s and 90s knows you can’t keep cutting benefits and services without people bleeding, or, in schools, children bleeding.

The schools manifestos are weak. Grammars are a terrible idea. Coco Pops v sandwiches is a sideshow. The real issues, even for schools, are welfare and housing. That is what both parties need to sort out, before it is too far gone to save at all.