A mother has told how being put in unsuitable temporary accommodation leaves her struggling to cook for her son or take him to nursery.

The latest Scottish Government figures, up to March 31 of this year, showed 10,110 children are living in temporary accommodation, a 5% rise on the previous year's figures, while 33,619 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness.

One person who spoke to the Herald as part of our child poverty series has a broken knee but was given temporary accommodation in a second floor flat with no lift.

She lives with her three-year-old son, and struggles to fulfil everyday tasks, with the tenants union Living Rent looking to help her.

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The single mother, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Herald: "I was an asylum seeker and got my status approved, so they had to move me away from Mearns Accommodation and give me a permanent house.

“During this process they said they didn’t have any permanent housing so they moved me into temporary accommodation in the meantime and said they’d have to look for a permanent house for me.

"The flat they gave me is on the second floor, but when I got there I didn’t have any option because if you don’t take it you’ll be homeless.

“When I got there I told them it wouldn’t be comfortable for me.

“I have my son to take care of, when I go for shopping how am I supposed to take all the things I get from the shop, and my son, up the stairs? Even going down to take the bins out is a nightmare for me.

(Image: Northern Echo)

“They said, ‘don’t worry they’ll move you out in a couple of weeks’ but I haven’t heard anything from them since.

"The house is very, very small it’s open plan where you have a kitchen in your living room so they told me to open the window when I want to cook.

“On the second day I wanted to cook and I had to open the window because of the smoke and steam.

“My son was sitting on the chair, I went to the toilet and when I came back I saw him with his head sticking halfway out the window, I had to rush over and pull him away.

“Since then I’ve found it hard to cook because it’s very risky.

“My son asks me to open the window so he can put his head out and look at the buses and things, but the place is for a single person - it’s not for a mum who has a three-year-old son.

"I have a letter from the hospital and they said they would move me but nothing is happening.”

Having a broken knee means attempting to negotiate the stairs to her second floor flat on crutches, making everyday tasks such as taking her son to nursery difficult, if not impossible.

The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) project, carried out by the University of London, the University of Oxford and the University of Nottingham found that a good nursery education is crucial in development, particularly for children from more deprived backgrounds.

Pre-school education benefits were greater for boys, for pupils with special educational needs, and for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds

An earlier start in education is related to better intellectual development and improved independence, concentration and sociability it found, while the OECD found early childhood education and care brings a reduction in child poverty and exclusion.

The single mother says: "The worst part is that now I’m depriving my son of going to nursery. I don’t have the strength to go down, take him to nursery, come up again, go down again to pick him up.

"So most of the time now I can’t take him to nursery, because I can’t really move my leg. I have to take my crutches to get up and down the stairs. If I have visitors I have to throw the key out the window so they can open it from downstairs.

"This morning he was crying asking me if he was going to nursery and I said no, because just looking at the stairs, going down, taking him to nursery, coming back, going to pick him up in the afternoon – I’m in too much pain I can’t do it.

“So he cried, and I told him ‘let’s see how tomorrow will be’.”