This is going to lead to so many more issues for schools.
It was a noticeable issue when I was teaching five years ago. I would bring in food for a few kids in my class so they could have breakfast; I was not the only teacher who did this.
“Why couldn’t they go to breakfast club?” you might ask. Breakfast club charged for both looking after the kids and for food. It might only have been 50p or so a day but that £.250 (more if you had multiple kids) would have been felt by those families very hard. It meant that you had kids who were eating two meals a day but both were dependent on them being at school. You worried about them over the weekends and holidays.
Also, before the inevitable people crawl out of the woodwork, those kids should not go hungry, ever. It does not matter if their parents worked or not, they should not suffer when we as a society have the ability to feed them for so little money.
I moved to the UK from Poland in 2005 when I was 19. I started work a week after I arrived, in a hotel, as a waiter, on minimum wage. We rented out a 3 bed house with my fiance and we were comfortable-ish, and it only got better as the time progressed.
Today, hypothetically, if Brexit didn’t happen and I was 19 and had a chance to move to UK, after working out the finances etc, there is no way I would have done it.
It was a very attractive opportunity back then, for someone even with very basic English and no specialized skills, to arrive in the UK, find a job and build a life. Now, I don’t know how life is supposed to work for someone born here, entering the job market, if they don’t have numerous safety nets in the form of family/friends.
ffs…..everyone wants their 15 minutes
I worked in school kitchens for a while.
There’s a whole load of issues that people don’t see. Local authorities quite often will say all this work can be done in three hours for minimum wage. It can’t. The women in the kitchens often ended up doing unpaid work to get all the kids fed, kitchens cleaned, ordering done.
Then there’s the miniscule budget to feed those children but also meet nutrition/allergy targets.
It’s a hard job that pays peanuts, with the added sadness of having to say no to hungry kids, because if you make them extra, like a sandwich, you are ‘stealing’ and will lose your job.
6 comments
Yh fk that.
This is going to lead to so many more issues for schools.
It was a noticeable issue when I was teaching five years ago. I would bring in food for a few kids in my class so they could have breakfast; I was not the only teacher who did this.
“Why couldn’t they go to breakfast club?” you might ask. Breakfast club charged for both looking after the kids and for food. It might only have been 50p or so a day but that £.250 (more if you had multiple kids) would have been felt by those families very hard. It meant that you had kids who were eating two meals a day but both were dependent on them being at school. You worried about them over the weekends and holidays.
Also, before the inevitable people crawl out of the woodwork, those kids should not go hungry, ever. It does not matter if their parents worked or not, they should not suffer when we as a society have the ability to feed them for so little money.
I moved to the UK from Poland in 2005 when I was 19. I started work a week after I arrived, in a hotel, as a waiter, on minimum wage. We rented out a 3 bed house with my fiance and we were comfortable-ish, and it only got better as the time progressed.
Today, hypothetically, if Brexit didn’t happen and I was 19 and had a chance to move to UK, after working out the finances etc, there is no way I would have done it.
It was a very attractive opportunity back then, for someone even with very basic English and no specialized skills, to arrive in the UK, find a job and build a life. Now, I don’t know how life is supposed to work for someone born here, entering the job market, if they don’t have numerous safety nets in the form of family/friends.
ffs…..everyone wants their 15 minutes
I worked in school kitchens for a while.
There’s a whole load of issues that people don’t see. Local authorities quite often will say all this work can be done in three hours for minimum wage. It can’t. The women in the kitchens often ended up doing unpaid work to get all the kids fed, kitchens cleaned, ordering done.
Then there’s the miniscule budget to feed those children but also meet nutrition/allergy targets.
It’s a hard job that pays peanuts, with the added sadness of having to say no to hungry kids, because if you make them extra, like a sandwich, you are ‘stealing’ and will lose your job.