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

I think if parents can't afford to feed their children then the obvious answer is that benefits should go up so they can. Schools feeding children breakfast and lunch, then uproar in holidays when people are expected to feed their own children. The whole thing is fucked up. It's like you don't trust people to feed their own kids. If people can afford to feed their children but aren't getting schools to do it just a sticking plaster, passing the buck on while kids are left in shitty homes. It's a crappy cycle and I don't see why it is seen as a positive thing.

This has all been debated on other threads. It's likely that those being able to get UC whilst earning 3k a month are UC claims that have things like higher disabled childrens elements on and a high rent element and carers element, or maybe even multiple child disability elements so making the Uc amount very high. A couple with one child born after 2017 and having a mortgage rather than paying rent will have a much lower UC amount and therefore may not qualify although I would have thought that on a household income of only 1k, if you had a child you would still qualify for a small amount? Maybe you were misadvised.

Most could be trusted to feed their kids but there will always be some who fall through the net- chaotic households, financial abuse, addiction etc. Look at that case recently where they were getting allegedly getting 7k a month in benefits but the kids were found amongst dead dogs and animal faeces. I doubt they got a good breakfast before school.

Just playing with the entitled to calculator and for a couple with 2 dc earning 4K gross at £2k each roughly £3.4K take home with £1100 a month childcare costs and £800 a month rent to a private landlord would be entitled to £209 a week UC. Roughly £850 a month

They'd have to have a take home pay of very nearly £5k a month in order to reduce the UC amount to nil.

I think parents often don't realise quite how much they can earn and still be entitled to UC which is why when people come on threads saying they are skint the first thing they get told is to check their entitlements.

It's madness that a good proportion of that Uc is just going to pay private landlords mortgages off. People should be up in arms about this. I really resent my taxes going to pay for this I really do - not blaming the people having to claim it but the whole way the system is set up to benefit the rich and these stupid politicians running down social housing which needs to be far more available.

It is unfortunate that if you own then you're not entitled to help with costs in the short term to help pay the mortgage. If you'd of had a child in the same scenario you'd of been entitled to (roughly) £600 per month UC and child benefit.

School lunch breaks are getting shorter as a way of controlling kids behaviour. Too much free time and they're up to no good. My last school had a 25 min lunch.

I’m with @Foolsandtheirmoney

It is hard to make ends meet in the UK for people with dependents who are on low wages. The vast majority of parents get very stressed and depressed if they are struggling to meet their family’s basic needs. The system should be designed around the needs of the majority, ie address their lack of money with an increase in benefits, in line with inflation.

With a better financial safety net in place, it becomes more straightforward for school staff and other professionals to identify families with more complex underlying issues such as financial abuse or addiction, that need more professional input.

If you were entitled to £600 in UC you'd then need to take home over £2090 before you'd stop getting any UC. Add in £600 of childcare costs then you'd need to take home over £3K before you stop receiving UC. You can see how easily you could be entitled to something despite a relatively high income when you have children.

Say you were earning £45k with a take home pay of £2851 a month, you would still be entitled to UC in the above scenario but the taper will of reduced that to less than £100 a month and you'd of paid over £900 a month in tax/ NI. I know people get upset at the idea of higher earners being entitled to stuff but at that point you're paying in more than you're taking out.

The UK is fairly unique in not giving people some form of tax credit/ advantage to compensate for the high cost of raising children. If the government were to increase your tax free allowance by when you had a child, fund childcare properly (like Canada/ western europe) and invest in social housing then working parents wouldn't routinely be entitled to use the benefits system.

It is a bizarre scheme that rather than invest in large scale projects to ensure affordable housing and childcare for everyone they look at individual costs decided by private providers. How to piss your buying power/ economies of scale up against the wall, No?

Parents get at least £20 a week Child benefit for one child and more if They have two
That benefit is for the benefit of the child however many people spend this on other things including other household bills it should be used solely for the benefit of the child
I save mine and use it to buy packed lunch stuff but of course I think all primary school children should get free school meals
I get universal credit top-ups as I work part time but I don’t qualify for school meals, Anyone on any type of benefit should get free school meals for children
we Subsidise prisoners!

Surely it is to the benefit of the child to have household bills paid so they live in a house with light and heat? I know someone who used to buy nappies, wipes and formula with child benefit money. It makes no difference if it goes in the household pot which purchases nappies, wipes and formula. I can't imagine a time when I've spent less than child benefit on the children. They suck up all my disposable income.

I do like the idea of free school meals for primary children. In Scotland they are introducing it and are now up to P.5 It does have to be paid for through tax though. I know my exh gets to take home £150 less than his English colleagues a month for doing the same job. A bit of me quietly likes to think it's the states way of making him fund his children properly. He pays more tax than I get in UC too.

We shouldn't give hungry kids a slice of white toast because it might give them diabetes and push them into obesity is one of the most fucking stupid arguments I've seen articulated in a long time, particularly when the alternative is to give them nothing.

I do like the idea of free school meals for primary children

Why is this always restricted to primary kids? Why should 11+ be allowed to go hungry?

Agree - teenage years vitally important too when they are growing so fast. my teenage boys were constantly starving, I absolutely hate to think of teenagers not getting the nutrition they need.

It's really hard to get nutritious meals into high school kids in the short period available. My eldest goes to high school and is on a steady diet of cheese and ham paninis (ordered in the morning so it's ready for lunch for collection) and a cake. I pay for his food and it costs slightly more than the lunches in primary. I balance it out with lots of protein and veg at home.

I'd be happy to fund meals for older children but I highly doubt the meals they would get would be good for you.

A teeny derail here, but entirely impertinent. Does OFSTED still use the PANDA report? noblegiraffe will know.

This was something still used when I left the UK in 2006. In brief, one aspect was the correlation between FSM and lower attainment, so schools were banded. What made it contentious was that although the correlation held all the way up, so the more FSM, the lower the attainment, OFTSED stopped it at say 45%. The upshot was that schools with 60% FSM were held as being the same as those at 45%. NB my figures may not be accurate, but the principle is.

The government couldn't give stuff about those on FSM as evidence by their willingness to nobble their own system, but it would be embarrassing (sic) for them if more schools were edging up the % for FSM and had to have their PANDA reassessed.

Obviously PANDA may not exist any more, but a version of it might.

Another ancient recollection from secondary school in the early noughties was the low take-up for FSM by older pupils for social reasons, i.e. embarrassment. I'd be surprised if this has changed much.

Perhaps the solution is indeed raising taxes and people who have good jobs paying for the meals of low/no income families. But where does it stop?

it could start and end just here, give hungry kids at least one good meal a day.

The threshold has always been too low.

But I believe in universal free school meals.

Last year in the USA they had universal free lunch for everyone and it was bloody brilliant. Even in normal times the American threshold for free or reduced lunch is higher than the UK one. It's appalling that the UK does such a poor job of this. Hungry children don't learn.

“Kids pretending to eat out of lunchboxes that are empty”

this is awful to hear
twitter.com/timesradio/status/1592844500757454848?s=46&t=OH2MKSszyeI1l68B7mExfw

Dominic Raab was specifically asked in Parliament if Free School Meals could be extended to all families in receipt of universal credit and his response was that the number one priority was to get inflation down.

So children must absolutely go hungry in the pursuit of that aim, then.

twitter.com/kateosbornemp/status/1592866165843693569?s=61&t=ulH341pk3m4B-eU22HgIow

What a horrible, soulless government we have.

Just take away free meals and Phil premium from children whose family are no longer on low income. It was only meant to be like that until UC was rolled out but now that’s taken years longer than expected. There’s probably a significant amount of children who only qualified due to temporary situations especially in the pandemic and are still getting fsm. Target the money to those actually currently on a low income.

Oh yes, the real problem is too many kids getting FSM who don't deserve it.

Starting at 8 would be very hard to staff.

My child's free school meal is literally the only hand out we get. We have average income and never get any help with anything... always just miss out. If my child stopped getting his free KS1 meal, he'd have to go into packed lunch as we couldn't afford £50 a month for a hot meal. His older brother has packed lunch.