Laura is a mum-of-two in Coventry. Her five-year-old son receives free school meals, but soon that will stop: After Year 2, universal infant free school meals ends and Laura fears she won’t qualify for means-tested provision. She’s tried paying for packed lunches before, but she struggles to afford it. “The closer it gets, the more I’m thinking about it”, she says, fearful of how she will feed her children once free school meals are taken away.
Laura is a Coventry South constituent of mine – and she’s not alone. Around a million children live in poverty but don’t have access to free school meals, which is little surprise when families need to earn less than £7,400 a year to qualify. And an inevitable consequence of means-testing is that some children living in poverty slip through the net, whilst those that don’t are often stigmatised by their peers.
Spiralling energy bills and soaring food prices mean more and more families are struggling to feed their kids, with children going to bed hungry at home and forced to learn on an empty stomach in school.
This shouldn’t be allowed to happen in one of the richest countries in the world. That’s why I am proposing the Free School Meals for All Bill, a proposal to extend free school meals to every primary school child in England.
Extending free school meals for all shouldn’t be controversial. It’s done in countries from India to Sweden. The Scottish and Welsh governments are committed to it too, but the Conservatives refuse to back it, denying kids in England a hot healthy meal each day.
If they were serious about levelling-up, backing my Bill would be the place to start.
The arguments in favour of it are overwhelming: The London borough of Newham self-funds the policy and found it improved concentration, attainment and behaviour. Another government study found that it resulted in children being four to eight weeks ahead academically – with children from the poorest families helped most of all.
Westminster Council, which adopted the policy earlier this month, calculated that it will save families up to £550 per child, per year. For mothers like Laura, that could make all the difference.
The policy would significantly improve children’s health too, as was seen when obesity rates fell after universal infant free school meals were introduced in 2014. This is little surprise when just 1.6 per cent of packed lunches meet the Government’s School Food Standards.
This is backed up by teachers, with one explaining to me that they could see the difference, noting that a good meal staves off pupils’ tiredness and improves afternoon lessons.
Tackling education disadvantage, combating child poverty and improving health and learning – this is why the policy is backed by the No Child Left Behind coalition, led by the National Education Union and ranging from faith leaders and trade unions to city mayors like Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.
And if anyone asks how it could be paid for, there’s an easy answer: private schools currently receive a tax break worth £1.7 billion a year – that’s nearly double the cost of this policy. So what’s more important: Protecting tax breaks for elite private schools, or feeding hungry kids? This is the real levelling-up agenda the Tories pay lip-service to.
The Tories’ decision to let children go hungry is another political choice from a government intent on letting the rich get richer, while the rest of us are left behind. With more and more families choosing between eating and heating, and with more and more children going hungry, I’m calling on this government to act. It’s time we had free school meals for all.
Seems insane to me we force kids by law to be in school 7hrs a day and dont feed them.
Even with all the links between nutrition and…well everything.
A well-fed child is better educated. An educated child grows up to question their government.
I wholeheartedly agree. As a teacher in a secondary school I get so angry seeing pupils unable to afford anything for lunch or having insufficient food to get them through the day.
This comes back to the key issue with our social support systems – the gap between your life on benefits and your life working is too narrow on the earnings side and too wide on the support side.
As soon as you start working or earning a little bit to build your life up, the government removes levels of support and you often end up worse off and with less free time.
This means that unless you suddenly get an excellent job, you are usually just as well off on benefits as you are working and you have a lot more free time to take care of regular chores, parenting or caring.
School meals are just a part of this problem.
The Tories aren’t interested in levelling up, they never were it was all smoke screens and deflection.
Investing in kids is investing in the future of the UK. Giving kids, even those at private schools, a free lunch that is actually nutritious will go a long way towards that. There is no job out there that does not benefit from healthy employees and the habits built in childhood last a lifetime; healthy children are much more likely to become healthy adults. The money spent on free school meals would almost certainly be recouped several times over by productive employees years later, so there is no risk to rolling it out nationwide as soon as possible.
With a ruling class whose ethos is built on the idea that the poor deserve to be poor, I can’t see the current administration doing anything about this.
Growing up in Portugal, I had a full school meal in kindergarten, free milk in primary school (no hot meal because my schooling was all in the afternoon) and really affordable (subsidised) 3-course hot meal every school day in secondary. The latter one was based on the parents’ wages – there were 3 levels, level 1 means you get the meal for free, level 2 means you get a small deduction and level 3 means you pay in “full”. I was level 3 because both my parents worked – the total cost was about €2.20 p/meal, so €11 p/week. (I’d also try to go have the meal up to an hour before canteen closed so I could have seconds, which I did all the time because dinner ladies preferred to feed kids than have food go to waste. I’ll also add that the dinner ladies throughout my childhood would cook everything from scratch and during mid morning break, you’d smell the nice food cooking. They were also known to try to entice anyone and everyone to have the leftovers for free too.) needless to say, I was shocked when I moved to the U.K. as a teenager, because the school meals are so bad and such bad value for money. I remember coming home after first day at school and telling my dad he needed to talk to the school about the school meals, because I couldn’t believe what I was served as a meal (dry awful burger patty and a handful of chips…) System definitely needs to change and feeding children should not ever be a source of contention when we all pay taxes. I’d rather every single child is fed a hot meal every school day than to see anyone go without and the money go into the pockets of politicians/corporations or whatever other institution/individual for their personal gain.
Yes, schools should give all children a free school meal. Absolutely.
It should not be means tested etc.. and should be backed by professional nutritionists and medical professionals. There should be vegan/vegetarian options as well.
At the same time make food sensibly affordable for all families and make energy prices sensible enough to allow families to cook. Ensure parents have access to information and lessons on how to provide a healthy and balanced diet for their child. I don’t mean make microwave meals cheap – I am on about vegetables and meat products and other ingredients that are used to create a balanced meal. If companies want to fleece people on the prices of pre-packaged pre-prepared meals let them but ensure that people can easily (through education) and cheaply create their own decent meals at home with re-heating something that has been fully processed.
There’s no money to feed the children. Tax payers money is for the political class and their donors. The nurses can fuck off as well. But dodgy PPE? Here’s £300 million. Knock yourself out
It’s horrendous, I live in a fairly rural area and my kids frequently tell me how 2 or more of their friends have at best a half sandwich or maybe a biscuit for lunch.
We’ve started sending them in with extra while we can so they can “share” and informed the school who are trying to make sure they have a warm meal as well but no-one should have to face this.
inb4 ‘why are we giving free food to the children of people who earn 40k/50k/a shilling’
Nice idea Zarah. Maybe you should have a word with the Labour councillors in Stirling who, in cahoots with the Tory councillors, vetoed a proposal to give low income kids a warm meal over the winter period, because, SNP bad.
Like the Tories will go for that. We’re about 1 year away from families having to pay for school places.
Efficiency wise, free school lunches for all is a no brainer. Packed lunches will never match properly done school lunches for nutrition, and it’s one of the most incredibly productive investments we can make. Low cost, massive life long rewards.
Nahhh. I think instead give friends and family billion in PPE contracts to make like 5 masks. That seems like a much better allocation of our resources
/s
Did a footballer not get told to shut up and keep playing football for saying this? Maybe it’s because he’s just a footballer that he was told to shut up
I don’t even know why it’s a debate at this point. Feed the fucking kids!!
Free school meals for all would cost at liberal measurements 950 million. In the grand scheme of public spending it’s really not a lot of money and what it avoids is massive. Ask anyone who works in or around a school kitchen and you will see that the current system allows for a ton of kids to slip under the radar and go hungry, and if a kid isn’t eating well at school they probably are not eating well at home either. Yes it will mean paying for school lunches for single household children earning 100k a year but surely it’s worth it to make sure every kid can be fed.
I love how nearly every policy that will infringe rights in the technology space is about protecting the children but when it comes to keeping them fed and alive…nah not important.
Tories: “Best we can do is level everyone else down.”
While I’m all for free school meals for all kids, one point that isn’t often raised is the drop in quality of school meals over the last ten years.
I’ve heard some horror stories from my wife, who is a teacher in a secondary school. Her academy trust has a multi-year contract for a catering company to provide school meals, and the meals are absolutely shocking, to the point where I’ve said that it’s the kind of thing you should raise with a MP. Here’s a few choice examples from just this week alone:
* Kid finds hair (not just a single hair, multiple strands) and is sad because they don’t want to eat, but are starving. Teacher goes to return food and ask for another, and gets accused of lying by caterer behind the till – who has the same red hair that’s in the food.
* Vegetarian and vegan options being a meal, with the meat taken out, or removed by hand. IIRC this is literally a Simpsons joke, but one kid was offered a bun for their meal because the school didn’t have vegetarian sausages for hot dogs.
* Sandwiches costing the same, if not more than a supermarket, despite being cheap white bread and a single slice of water-thin ham. Tacos having half a teaspoon of meat, and the rest lettuce.
* Huge arguments with senior leadership at schools as kids have gone hungry, but the catering companies being almost literally untouchable because their deals are with the parent companies/trusts. This had escalated at my wife’s school, to the point where the company walked out right before lunch because the headteacher raised a complaint for the lack of service-level agreement for quality and amount of food.
It sounds really sad, but some parents do the Jamie’s School Meals thing of handing meals through the bars of the school, and some kids go to the supermarket and buys meal deals for the kids because it’s cheaper. Some kids even go as far as simply not eating and waiting to spend their money outside of school, basically going the full day with no food. Even if the option was there, I’d love to see some assurances that the meals are of a high quality.
No. The quickest way to level up the country is to provide childcare between 7am and 7pm to allow thousands to escape benefits and enter the workforce. FACT
I live in CA. This because a law here and is working very well. Two meals a day are provided each day. If there are snow days or during summer, you can go pick up the lunch at the school, if able. Everyone eats. No stigma, no one hungry.
[https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp](https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp)
I work in a school for children with behavioural needs, so they automaticaly have breakfast or lunch if they come here, and it makes a big difference to their day.
I remember years ago seeing a documetary about French schools where they basically treat school meals almost like an extra a lesson, giving children access to food that is delicious and healthy.
If you do that every day for 13 years something must sink in, most of them will start to realise that frozen pizza isn’t the be all and end all of tasty food.
I wish they’d stop saying “levelling up”. The fact they have a “levelling up minister” burns me up inside more than when you get a KitKat with no wafer
By all means offer children a free school meal, but I’m confused at what is stopping parents from buying a loaf of bread (£1), lettuce (40p), ham (£1.25), cheese (£2) and then giving a cooked meal at dinner time. Buy it from Lidl and its at worst, £8 a week per child if you throw in a few days with a tuna can and with upfront £6 for a tupperware box? Buy a 10kg bag of rice for £14 that will last your child months, a boiled egg (£2 for 15 eggs), some carrot sticks (34p for a bag of carrots) – how do people have children, but can’t afford, as a parent I really don’t get it.
My wife and I would both go hungry to feed our son, I dont understand why they would feed themselves, but not their children. Parents find the time to feed themselves, but not their children thats like a safeguarding issue.
By all means provide children a school meal (who the fuck is against that especially for those extreme cases), but isn’t there a deeper issue here.
Giving every child a free school meal is noble and fair but it isn’t going to “level up the country”. Nonsense.
Means test free school meals like we do already and spend the extra money making them substantial and better quality. Also offer food vouchers in the holidays. Most schools offer tiny amounts for FSM and poor quality. I have been teaching 20 years and the change over time is noticeable.
31 comments
Laura is a mum-of-two in Coventry. Her five-year-old son receives free school meals, but soon that will stop: After Year 2, universal infant free school meals ends and Laura fears she won’t qualify for means-tested provision. She’s tried paying for packed lunches before, but she struggles to afford it. “The closer it gets, the more I’m thinking about it”, she says, fearful of how she will feed her children once free school meals are taken away.
Laura is a Coventry South constituent of mine – and she’s not alone. Around a million children live in poverty but don’t have access to free school meals, which is little surprise when families need to earn less than £7,400 a year to qualify. And an inevitable consequence of means-testing is that some children living in poverty slip through the net, whilst those that don’t are often stigmatised by their peers.
Spiralling energy bills and soaring food prices mean more and more families are struggling to feed their kids, with children going to bed hungry at home and forced to learn on an empty stomach in school.
This shouldn’t be allowed to happen in one of the richest countries in the world. That’s why I am proposing the Free School Meals for All Bill, a proposal to extend free school meals to every primary school child in England.
Extending free school meals for all shouldn’t be controversial. It’s done in countries from India to Sweden. The Scottish and Welsh governments are committed to it too, but the Conservatives refuse to back it, denying kids in England a hot healthy meal each day.
If they were serious about levelling-up, backing my Bill would be the place to start.
The arguments in favour of it are overwhelming: The London borough of Newham self-funds the policy and found it improved concentration, attainment and behaviour. Another government study found that it resulted in children being four to eight weeks ahead academically – with children from the poorest families helped most of all.
Westminster Council, which adopted the policy earlier this month, calculated that it will save families up to £550 per child, per year. For mothers like Laura, that could make all the difference.
The policy would significantly improve children’s health too, as was seen when obesity rates fell after universal infant free school meals were introduced in 2014. This is little surprise when just 1.6 per cent of packed lunches meet the Government’s School Food Standards.
This is backed up by teachers, with one explaining to me that they could see the difference, noting that a good meal staves off pupils’ tiredness and improves afternoon lessons.
Tackling education disadvantage, combating child poverty and improving health and learning – this is why the policy is backed by the No Child Left Behind coalition, led by the National Education Union and ranging from faith leaders and trade unions to city mayors like Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.
And if anyone asks how it could be paid for, there’s an easy answer: private schools currently receive a tax break worth £1.7 billion a year – that’s nearly double the cost of this policy. So what’s more important: Protecting tax breaks for elite private schools, or feeding hungry kids? This is the real levelling-up agenda the Tories pay lip-service to.
The Tories’ decision to let children go hungry is another political choice from a government intent on letting the rich get richer, while the rest of us are left behind. With more and more families choosing between eating and heating, and with more and more children going hungry, I’m calling on this government to act. It’s time we had free school meals for all.
Seems insane to me we force kids by law to be in school 7hrs a day and dont feed them.
Even with all the links between nutrition and…well everything.
A well-fed child is better educated. An educated child grows up to question their government.
I wholeheartedly agree. As a teacher in a secondary school I get so angry seeing pupils unable to afford anything for lunch or having insufficient food to get them through the day.
This comes back to the key issue with our social support systems – the gap between your life on benefits and your life working is too narrow on the earnings side and too wide on the support side.
As soon as you start working or earning a little bit to build your life up, the government removes levels of support and you often end up worse off and with less free time.
This means that unless you suddenly get an excellent job, you are usually just as well off on benefits as you are working and you have a lot more free time to take care of regular chores, parenting or caring.
School meals are just a part of this problem.
The Tories aren’t interested in levelling up, they never were it was all smoke screens and deflection.
Investing in kids is investing in the future of the UK. Giving kids, even those at private schools, a free lunch that is actually nutritious will go a long way towards that. There is no job out there that does not benefit from healthy employees and the habits built in childhood last a lifetime; healthy children are much more likely to become healthy adults. The money spent on free school meals would almost certainly be recouped several times over by productive employees years later, so there is no risk to rolling it out nationwide as soon as possible.
With a ruling class whose ethos is built on the idea that the poor deserve to be poor, I can’t see the current administration doing anything about this.
Growing up in Portugal, I had a full school meal in kindergarten, free milk in primary school (no hot meal because my schooling was all in the afternoon) and really affordable (subsidised) 3-course hot meal every school day in secondary. The latter one was based on the parents’ wages – there were 3 levels, level 1 means you get the meal for free, level 2 means you get a small deduction and level 3 means you pay in “full”. I was level 3 because both my parents worked – the total cost was about €2.20 p/meal, so €11 p/week. (I’d also try to go have the meal up to an hour before canteen closed so I could have seconds, which I did all the time because dinner ladies preferred to feed kids than have food go to waste. I’ll also add that the dinner ladies throughout my childhood would cook everything from scratch and during mid morning break, you’d smell the nice food cooking. They were also known to try to entice anyone and everyone to have the leftovers for free too.) needless to say, I was shocked when I moved to the U.K. as a teenager, because the school meals are so bad and such bad value for money. I remember coming home after first day at school and telling my dad he needed to talk to the school about the school meals, because I couldn’t believe what I was served as a meal (dry awful burger patty and a handful of chips…) System definitely needs to change and feeding children should not ever be a source of contention when we all pay taxes. I’d rather every single child is fed a hot meal every school day than to see anyone go without and the money go into the pockets of politicians/corporations or whatever other institution/individual for their personal gain.
Yes, schools should give all children a free school meal. Absolutely.
It should not be means tested etc.. and should be backed by professional nutritionists and medical professionals. There should be vegan/vegetarian options as well.
At the same time make food sensibly affordable for all families and make energy prices sensible enough to allow families to cook. Ensure parents have access to information and lessons on how to provide a healthy and balanced diet for their child. I don’t mean make microwave meals cheap – I am on about vegetables and meat products and other ingredients that are used to create a balanced meal. If companies want to fleece people on the prices of pre-packaged pre-prepared meals let them but ensure that people can easily (through education) and cheaply create their own decent meals at home with re-heating something that has been fully processed.
There’s no money to feed the children. Tax payers money is for the political class and their donors. The nurses can fuck off as well. But dodgy PPE? Here’s £300 million. Knock yourself out
It’s horrendous, I live in a fairly rural area and my kids frequently tell me how 2 or more of their friends have at best a half sandwich or maybe a biscuit for lunch.
We’ve started sending them in with extra while we can so they can “share” and informed the school who are trying to make sure they have a warm meal as well but no-one should have to face this.
inb4 ‘why are we giving free food to the children of people who earn 40k/50k/a shilling’
Nice idea Zarah. Maybe you should have a word with the Labour councillors in Stirling who, in cahoots with the Tory councillors, vetoed a proposal to give low income kids a warm meal over the winter period, because, SNP bad.
https://www.inkl.com/news/tories-and-labour-vote-to-deny-schoolkids-hot-soup-and-roll-over-winter-months
Like the Tories will go for that. We’re about 1 year away from families having to pay for school places.
Efficiency wise, free school lunches for all is a no brainer. Packed lunches will never match properly done school lunches for nutrition, and it’s one of the most incredibly productive investments we can make. Low cost, massive life long rewards.
Nahhh. I think instead give friends and family billion in PPE contracts to make like 5 masks. That seems like a much better allocation of our resources
/s
Did a footballer not get told to shut up and keep playing football for saying this? Maybe it’s because he’s just a footballer that he was told to shut up
I don’t even know why it’s a debate at this point. Feed the fucking kids!!
Free school meals for all would cost at liberal measurements 950 million. In the grand scheme of public spending it’s really not a lot of money and what it avoids is massive. Ask anyone who works in or around a school kitchen and you will see that the current system allows for a ton of kids to slip under the radar and go hungry, and if a kid isn’t eating well at school they probably are not eating well at home either. Yes it will mean paying for school lunches for single household children earning 100k a year but surely it’s worth it to make sure every kid can be fed.
I love how nearly every policy that will infringe rights in the technology space is about protecting the children but when it comes to keeping them fed and alive…nah not important.
Tories: “Best we can do is level everyone else down.”
While I’m all for free school meals for all kids, one point that isn’t often raised is the drop in quality of school meals over the last ten years.
I’ve heard some horror stories from my wife, who is a teacher in a secondary school. Her academy trust has a multi-year contract for a catering company to provide school meals, and the meals are absolutely shocking, to the point where I’ve said that it’s the kind of thing you should raise with a MP. Here’s a few choice examples from just this week alone:
* Kid finds hair (not just a single hair, multiple strands) and is sad because they don’t want to eat, but are starving. Teacher goes to return food and ask for another, and gets accused of lying by caterer behind the till – who has the same red hair that’s in the food.
* Vegetarian and vegan options being a meal, with the meat taken out, or removed by hand. IIRC this is literally a Simpsons joke, but one kid was offered a bun for their meal because the school didn’t have vegetarian sausages for hot dogs.
* Sandwiches costing the same, if not more than a supermarket, despite being cheap white bread and a single slice of water-thin ham. Tacos having half a teaspoon of meat, and the rest lettuce.
* Huge arguments with senior leadership at schools as kids have gone hungry, but the catering companies being almost literally untouchable because their deals are with the parent companies/trusts. This had escalated at my wife’s school, to the point where the company walked out right before lunch because the headteacher raised a complaint for the lack of service-level agreement for quality and amount of food.
It sounds really sad, but some parents do the Jamie’s School Meals thing of handing meals through the bars of the school, and some kids go to the supermarket and buys meal deals for the kids because it’s cheaper. Some kids even go as far as simply not eating and waiting to spend their money outside of school, basically going the full day with no food. Even if the option was there, I’d love to see some assurances that the meals are of a high quality.
No. The quickest way to level up the country is to provide childcare between 7am and 7pm to allow thousands to escape benefits and enter the workforce. FACT
I live in CA. This because a law here and is working very well. Two meals a day are provided each day. If there are snow days or during summer, you can go pick up the lunch at the school, if able. Everyone eats. No stigma, no one hungry.
[https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp](https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp)
I work in a school for children with behavioural needs, so they automaticaly have breakfast or lunch if they come here, and it makes a big difference to their day.
I remember years ago seeing a documetary about French schools where they basically treat school meals almost like an extra a lesson, giving children access to food that is delicious and healthy.
If you do that every day for 13 years something must sink in, most of them will start to realise that frozen pizza isn’t the be all and end all of tasty food.
I wish they’d stop saying “levelling up”. The fact they have a “levelling up minister” burns me up inside more than when you get a KitKat with no wafer
By all means offer children a free school meal, but I’m confused at what is stopping parents from buying a loaf of bread (£1), lettuce (40p), ham (£1.25), cheese (£2) and then giving a cooked meal at dinner time. Buy it from Lidl and its at worst, £8 a week per child if you throw in a few days with a tuna can and with upfront £6 for a tupperware box? Buy a 10kg bag of rice for £14 that will last your child months, a boiled egg (£2 for 15 eggs), some carrot sticks (34p for a bag of carrots) – how do people have children, but can’t afford, as a parent I really don’t get it.
My wife and I would both go hungry to feed our son, I dont understand why they would feed themselves, but not their children. Parents find the time to feed themselves, but not their children thats like a safeguarding issue.
By all means provide children a school meal (who the fuck is against that especially for those extreme cases), but isn’t there a deeper issue here.
Giving every child a free school meal is noble and fair but it isn’t going to “level up the country”. Nonsense.
Means test free school meals like we do already and spend the extra money making them substantial and better quality. Also offer food vouchers in the holidays. Most schools offer tiny amounts for FSM and poor quality. I have been teaching 20 years and the change over time is noticeable.