With a near-record number of homeless families in temporary accommodation in England, the BBC has spoken to children and parents about being moved from place to place.

Koby Anderson is very tired — so tired that he sometimes sleeps at school “in the principal’s office,” says his mother, Lily.

For six months, the six-year-old has been living in the same bedroom as his mother and one-year-old brother Isiah, who wakes up “a lot” at night, says Koby.

The family are crammed into a one-bedroom flat in Bristol after becoming homeless in September. It was provided by the municipality and you cannot bring your own furniture as you could be moving at any moment.

“I liked the other house we stayed in, but this one is a real hit,” says Koby. “I miss my bunk bed. There is a piece of wood under my bed where I keep all the things that are particularly important to me. Hundreds of cards in my special box. I thought it wasn’t safe enough to bring her here.”

Lily says her son refuses sleepovers at his friend’s house because he’s afraid the family will lose their shelter. “He had a nightmare the other night because he thought he was going to be on the street. I obviously told him that’s never going to happen, but he said, ‘In my dream, I was in a sleeping bag, you were next to me and we were sleeping on the street.

“He had night terrors, bedwetting. He was referred to the mental health team. It had a massive impact.”

The family history is not unusual. They were initially left homeless by a “no-fault” eviction after their landlord decided to sell. In its 2019 manifesto, the government promised to ban these types of evictions, but has not yet done so.

Lily, a part-time nurse, couldn’t find an alternative because rents had skyrocketed. In any case, says Lily, the fact that Universal Credit tops up her salary means “agents don’t let me see they want couples.” With 19,000 households on the Bristol council housing waitlist, temporary housing was the only option.

They spent the first eight weeks in two Travelodge hotels with no access to cooking facilities, subsisting on takeaways or the generosity of friends. “We had to check out every week,” says the 29-year-old. “We all carried the suitcases to the car, and Koby was screaming and crying because he didn’t want to go to school because he didn’t know where we were going to end up.”

Lily spent the day waiting to hear from the Council where they were being sent – often back to the same hotel. Their current property, a block of 12 apartments all housing homeless families, is an improvement on hotel life, but certainly not a permanent home.

The latest official figures show that nearly 100,000 households in England were in shelters at the end of September, almost a record number.

The Department for Leveling Up, Housing and Communities tally includes more than 125,000 children, thousands of whom live in hotels, boarding houses or other inadequate housing. Similar figures for Scotland show more than 9,000 children in shelters, a record high.

For many homeless families, temporary shelter can be anything but.

In Thamesmead, south-east London, seven-year-old Pyper and her mother Tammy Ebsworth have been living in makeshift accommodation for six years after a relationship crisis left them homeless. They now face further upheaval even though Tammy is eight months pregnant.

When the 28-year-old told her local authority that her property would be too small when her baby was born, they offered her a larger flat in Colchester, 60 miles away. She declined, and was told that she had “deliberately made herself homeless” as a result. They were ordered to vacate the property by February 14 and are only there because Tammy is appealing the decision.

“If I moved all the way to Colchester, who would take care of my daughter when I went into labor?” asks Tammy. “No one will be able to come down and see me. It’s too far. I would have to change hospitals, change doctors, change schools. We won’t know anyone, I don’t know how Get anywhere.”

While Tammy talks, Pyper crouches next to her, drawing and doing math problems. Dealing with the prospect of moving is a “nightmare,” says Tammy. “She won’t be able to see her father and grandma on a weekend like this. She hasn’t slept. She’s quite a handful right now.”

“It makes me sad because I’m going to miss this house, miss my family, miss my friends, everything,” says Pyper while scribbling a sad face on a piece of paper. “I do not want to go.”

Research by the homeless charity Shelter last year found that homeless children often have to change schools or lose more than a month of schooling altogether. Others have less than 48 hours’ notice that they need to move.

In next Wednesday’s budget, the charity wants the government to increase housing benefits that have been frozen since 2020, while rents across the country have risen 7.5%.

“Unless that happens, it is inevitable that this government will oversee a significant increase in homelessness,” says Polly Neate, Shelter’s executive director.

The government says housing benefit levels have been raised “significantly and in excess of inflation” during the pandemic, “benefiting over a million households by more than £600 on average per year” while “tens of thousands of social rent housing units are being built .

On a recent morning Koby ran out of his block of flats and when he saw that it had snowed overnight he made a small snowball which he fired at his mother and brother before laughing heartily – a typical six year longing for a place where he can call home.