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

Parents already get child benefit and up to £244.58 per month per child born after April 2017. You shouldn't need more money.

What a weird way of looking at it. All children deserve food, parents must provide this, the state steps in if parents are unable to. There’s no need to continue to provide fsm for parents who are not on a low income and can provide the meals themselves. Help
must go to those who really need it

Hi there. So, I'm actually a student myself! I'm elligable for Free School Meals and Pupil Premium due to my household income being £12,000/a.

I'll be honest here, I don't really understand money that much (something that schools fail to spend more than half a term teaching), but I feel like my free meals money isn't nearly enough for what I'm getting.

I'm a Sixth Form student and we have a seperate canteen to lower school students. Lower school students have many options:
Pizza deal (Pizza, drink of choice, pudding of choice)
Pasta deal (Plain pasta, drink of choice, pudding of choice (or topping of choice, or both if you pay over the free meal amount)
"main meal" deal (meal of the day, usually nutritious, including veg, meat (and a vegetarian/vegan option), some sort of dairy and fibre, plus a drink OR pudding (or both if you pay above the free meal threshhold)
sandwich deal (Average corner shop main meal? sandwich, pudding of choice, and drink of choice.)

This is great. All of that and you get £2.50 a day which pays for it all.

Except that's for lower school. We aren't allowed to use their canteen. We can pre-order, yes, but only within a certain time threshhold, which not everybody has free due to morning lessons. And you can only pre-order pizza or pasta, as far as I'm aware (I've never seen anybody order something else)

The sixth form canteen? You still get £2.50, but the food is more expensive. Yes, you get "fun" options. Pringles, fries, wedges, chicken. It's all good. Until you're paying £2.20 for a measly packet of 4-10 popcorn chicken when you can probably get three times the amount on the 3 for 10 deal at iceland. It's terrible.

There are no vegetarian OR vegan options unless you want chips. There's far less variety and there's no nutrients. What's worse, is the food isn't filling at all. It's like McDonalds food. It gives the illusion of fullness for about 20 minutes but then you're hungry again because it hasn't given you all the stuff you need to survive the day.

£2.50 isn't even enough to get a meal deal where you'd actually be getting something half filling (meat of choice, chips, drink of choice), which costs £3.50. I spoke to one of my teachers about this on the Y12 induction day and he said they were working on a meal deal that pupil premium/fsm kids could buy, and now I'm almost in y13 and it hasn't happened, so unless we're expected to spend half our bursary on food (bursary is for transport, supplies, uniform, thus why fsm money doesn't come under it, they're different for a reason!) or they were meant to raise the fsm threshold for sixth form students, which they haven't, we aren't getting the nutrients we need as STILL GROWING children.

They need to raise the money or offer better food.

(I'm not sure of whether I should put this here, but to all of you with kids moving up into secondary school, the school I'm talking about is Netherthorpe. Don't waste your time with it, it's an absolute shitshow of a school and I regret staying on for Sixth Form (I'm only staying for Drama A-Level))

"You shouldn't need more money" living under the presumption that all families have children born after 2017 is silly. Due to the 2-child cap and being the only one under 18, my parents get NO child benefits for me. This wouldn't be a problem if we weren't earning only around about £16,000 a year due to £12,000/a from my mum's work and the rest of the measley amount (it may be less, it may be more) coming from PIP and Universal Credit.

Feeding four mouths, this is NOT enough money, especially with both my mum's pay and the benefits being so sporadic. Sometimes, like right now, I will be eating 10p packs of morrisons noodles every night for a week or more because my parents cannot afford food on top of everything else. It is so bad that my mum WAS (she has thankfully gained weight and is not so worrying anymore) borderline anorexic, so skinny it was unhealthy.

If you think that needing money to survive is "too much" you are silly and obviously do not need this sort of help yourself. You shouldn't speak on a situation if you do not know the feeling of being in said situation. You can have an opinion, yes, but you shouldn't speak as if it were fact.

Interestingly having universal free school meals in Scotland has apparently lead to a drop in childhood obesity. Generally I don't think the state should be paying for kids' food (and the rate of malnourished children is tiny and half that of severely obese children in early primary years) but if it has a significant impact on obesity rates - with later cost savings for the NHS and on disability benefits - then universal free school meals make sense. Very depressing how shit most parents are at feeding their kids though - overweight & obese kids are being failed by their families (and yes I've heard of Prada Willi syndrome - very rare, currently only 2000 affected people in the UK and their weight still has to be managed, as does the weight of kids with SEN etc)