Vincent Griffiths-Williamson did landscape work before deciding to take A-levels. He is now living in a hostel after sleeping rough.

The penny dropped when Vincent Griffiths-Williamson went to his room to discover there was nothing left but a bed-frame. The rest was in black bin bags piled up in the street.
When the-then 17-year-old left home after an argument with his mother over paying the rent, it led to four months having to sleeping rough, either on friends' sofas or on a bench in Hyde Park, central London.
He is now sleeping in a hostel while he studies for his A-levels at Quintin Kynaston school in St John's Wood, north London, which this week announced plans to build its own accommodation center for homeless pupils.
Griffiths-Williamson, who left home in June, spent the summer drifting between friends' houses. At least once or twice a week, he jumped over a fence at Hyde Park in the evenings.
“I'd stay with a friend, and he'd go off to college. I'd go off — wherever. If I couldn't get hold of someone that night, I'd go to Hyde Park. “
My mum had thrown out all my coats so it was cold. There wasn't much sleeping. More just sitting on a park bench till five in the morning. I didn't eat.”
Griffiths-Williamson had left school after his GCSEs, and spent a year working as a laborer for a landscape gardening firm, but this autumn he decided to study for his A-levels and contacted the head of the sixth form at Quintin Kynaston. “She got on the phone to the council after I told her I was no longer living at home. I got moved into a hostel in October.” Griffiths-Williamson, who turned 18 two weeks ago, is now studying for A-levels in physics, geography and sports science.
His family life illustrates the challenges the school faces. His relationship with his mother, a single parent, broke down after he was unable to pay her rent on the day she had been used to getting child benefit. “It wasn't just about not paying the rent,” he said. “A lot of arguments had gone on in the house. Home life was really difficult.”
His new home is far from perfect; there are cockroaches in the kitchen, and fire alarms that go off repeatedly in the block. “If you burn toast in one flat, the fire alarm goes off in every flat — and there's over 120 flats,” he said. He is also struggling financially.
He cannot apply for the education maintenance allowance — a means-tested grant for poorer teenagers staying on in education — without proving his household income.
In any case, the EMA has been scrapped by the coalition government and will no longer be paid from the end of this academic year.
The school's head teacher, Jo Shuter, estimates that “about 10” sixth formers are living in hostels while another 30 are at risk of being evicted from the family home.
It is not the only school with homeless pupils but the first to plan the creation of a purpose-built center, Quintin Kynaston House.
The head teacher describes plans to create accommodation for homeless pupils as an extension of the school's holistic approach to its students' lives, which has enabled many of them to get to university despite coming from chaotic backgrounds.
This was highlighted in its most recent Ofsted report, which noted: “It is to the credit of all school staff that students are able to articulate very powerfully how they might have been lost to the system if the school had not supported them in returning to education.”
Guardian.co.uk