Raise threshold for Free School Meals - children in poverty going hungry

[noblegiraffe]

The cost of everything is rising, but the threshold for qualifying for free school meals has been frozen since 2018.

In 2018, if your household income after tax (but before benefits) was below £7400, your children qualified for free school meals.

In 2022, it is still £7400. If inflation had been taken into account, the threshold would be around £8575. £8575 would buy you as much now as £7400 would have bought you 4 years ago (and that isn't taking into account things like energy that have gone up in price by far more than inflation).

This means that approximately 110,000 children are missing out on free school meals that they would have qualified for if the threshold had risen with the cost of living.

I find it mad that the threshold is that low, tbh. If a household income is low enough to qualify for benefits, surely one of the priorities of the benefits system should be to ensure that the children in that household are getting at least one reasonable meal a day?

There is a campaign group that wants all families on Universal Credit to qualify for free school meals www.theguardian.com/education/2022/oct/12/want-to-boost-growth-expand-free-school-meals

But if that's a step too far, surely we could at least keep eligibility at 2018 levels and not say that households need to be even poorer than then to qualify?

www.theguardian.com/education/2022/nov/10/children-not-eligible-for-free-school-meals-going-hungry-say-teachers

The threshold is too long but I don't think free lunch meal is the right Avenue to solely tackle the poverty.

I think free breakfast would be a much better system- as if you hadn't or hardly eaten since your last lunch which you had a school you can't concentrate on the mornings learning which often is the most important part of the school day - phonics, English, maths.

Working in a school the waste from the foundation and ks1 free dinners is appalling.

Low not long

If parents can't afford to feed their children, it needs to be addressed through the benefit system so every family can afford to pay for their child's meal.

How is that any different to the benefits going directly to the school to pay for the meal (effectively ring-fencing the money for food for the child)?

School lunches went badly wrong with the introduction of plastic cutlery and polystyrene.

What??

Our local secondary school is always running out of hot food so children have a piece of pizza or baguette and a biscuit.There is insufficient place to sit inside so they walk around outside in the rain and cold.This is a disgrace.For some children On FSM this is their main meal.On the other hand another school of similar size has hot freshly cooked meals sitting down in a dining room with china plates and proper cutlery.Parents need to protest at this inequality.

Yes I've read a few articles recently where teachers have said they cook toast and bagels in the classroom. I guess it would be fairly easy to set this up in a dinner hall. Or cereals or porridge pots would be easy to supply or even cereal bars, yoghurts, fruit etc.

The, the £7400 threshold was always too low.

I wonder what the cost difference would be if they scrapped free infant meals for every child and instead replaced it with free school meals for every child in X circumstance.

It's not always about the rich paying meals for the poor. But currently we have a system where taxpayers money is finding meals for children who's families can afford it whilst other children are going hungry.

What are secondary lunches like? When I was there it wasn't really meals but a selection of stuff like sandwiches, pizza slices, chips and snacks which always seem odd. They did have ready made packed lunches for some children but sadly many felt embarrassed to take them :( always seemed odd to not have actual meal options but assumed it was down to logistics.

It’s a problem, in our school, pupils often buy a panini/ toastie at first break which is cooked and kept hot then collected at lunch from a designated station. Because it’s all prepaid it’s really speedy, so only wait a minute or two. fsm is only valid for food purchased at lunch time so the queue for that is massive and slow.

Friday's choice at my secondary was roast beef, Yorkshires, roast potatoes and veg, veggie toad in the hole, jacket potatoes, pizza slices or sandwiches.

A lot of parents found they could buy better food than the school meals when they had the voucher value to spend during covid and it works better in the holidays too. Year round food!

I understand the idea about ring fencing it for food for the children but i dont know if its fair to assume that the parents of pp children wouldnt bother to feed them if they had more money to do so - most would. Although Id be more confident about that if social services was properly funded to quickly identify and support those that werent getting a lunch but i am not confident on thst

Rather than universal fsm up to year 3 they should have a 2 tier system eg

under 7400 fsm and pp

7400 - for example 16000 fsm only

But can we afford to pay for kitchens and cooks and canteen service every day for children in poverty? That is a different question. Don't forget the vast majority of the cost of school dinners is paying staff to cook and serve it, then clear away - not the food itself.

There has to be a far more efficient way of getting children fed - school dinners are totally rubbish nutritionally anyway

Petition here:

biteback2030.com/extend-free-school-meals-all-those-need

I didn’t know the threshold had been frozen-that’s dreadful.

I don’t agree that a hot breakfast should be freely available for all UNLESS funding was provided to allow schools to staff it properly. That is not a job for teachers to do.

What sort of a world do we live in where we subsidise wealthy MPs to eat steak for lunch, but children are going hungry?

For those pp seeking to draw a distinction between education and feeding children (@Feysriana and @RosesAndHellebores ), you might be interested to know that free school meals date back as far as compulsory education. It seems obvious, I would have thought, that the education bit wouldn’t achieve its intended effect if the children were starving.

👇

The ‘Education Provision of Meals Act’ was passed in Britain in 1906 (making school meal provision mandatory). It gave Local Education Authorities the role of providing free meals to primary school children.

This was 36 years after compulsory primary school education was made legal (1870 Forster Education Act). The Salvation Army had a national scheme for offering free meals in schools from 1870. foodmatterslive.com/article/the-history-of-free-school-meals-in-the-uk-and-the-changes-needed/

I work in a secondary in a deprived area - lots of children go hungry but do not qualify for FSM for lots of reasons...busy working parents doing two jobs; chaotic home life with addiction issues etc

We are fortunate to get free bagels at breakfast time for everyone from the National School Breakfast Programme. It has made a huge improvement on pupils' work, and also as a side benefit, attendance.

Our students in receipt of FSM can use that money at breakfast or lunch. We offer toast, cereal, juice, hot drinks, bacon or sausage sandwiches.

Free school meals are about so much more than food. It’s a way to identify / label / rank poverty and used to allocate resources and compare performance. It’s more about funding for schools than it is about lunches.

I definitely think that the thresholds need to be looked at. At the moment you either qualify (for meals and a whole host of other things), or you don’t. Earning a few pounds over the threshold means you can miss out on thousands of pounds worth or value (meals, grants, music lessons, school trips etc). A more staggered approach would feel more fair, but would obviously be a bit more complicated to set up.

A huge overhaul of funding education, and funding strategies to combat the impact of poverty on learning, is needed.

You are right Noble that the threshold should be raised, but it should have been raised years ago to a much more realistic amount, not "just" the inflation since 2018. The line is - and has long been - in very much the wrong place.

I don't know the exact figures, but maybe not giving free school meals to all KS1 children, but raising the number of families who qualify throughout school for FSMs, might help balance the books. It is daft to provide free food for all those well able to afford meals and then not have enough in the pot for all those struggling.

I do also think - if we were getting anywhere near thinking about the whole child in school - that providing enough space for secondary aged pupils to actually sit and eat a meal during their dinner time would be a really sensible starting point.

This is a terrible state of Affairs .The other day a School was offering FSM to its pupils, and some low paid members of Staff as well! This was to ensure they had enough food for their DC,without going hungry! WTAF is going on here!

I would like to see all primary children get a hot meal at school every day. As a secondary teacher I used to take a loaf of bread to school each day and had a mini fridge in my form room with spread in. I noticed who did not go in to lunch and told them they could make toast at break or lunchtime if hungry but leave some bread for others and they must clear up after themselves which they always did. Some of the toughest kids would pop by to grab a bit of toast and they tended to behave well in my lessons too.

If they're paying UC on a salary of over £45k a year then they are wasting money. No wonder you're not on the breadline 🤣🤣

Ha sadly no my take home is 1600 ish. My point is lots of people claim UC from those that are really struggling to get by without a job for whatever reason through to people with a job who get it as a top up due to children/rent/childcare costs. It does taper off so at some point you could earn decent money but still be entitled to a quid or two.