How do I deal with DD’s expensive school snack situation?

[Springisintheair123]

DD attends a secondary school where they do not allow kids to bring in their own snack from home. Instead, they may purchase snacks from the school cafe. I’ve battled with school to change this policy as I can’t afford DD spending 3.50-5 a day. I have said to her there is a £1 limit a day and she must have breakfast in the morning (she doesn’t eat much and so is hungry by break time at 10am). At the same time, she has no idea that 3.50-5/day is excessive for an 11 years old. I understand she’s hungry. School say they provide free fruit (sliced). This is a private school BTW.

Any ideas how to deal with this?

I would suggest a discussion needs to be had with school. They need to back you up on the amount of money she has by not allowing IOUs.
She needs to learn to budget if she blows all the money on Monday then it's fruit for the rest of the week.
School should be supporting the fact that this is a perfect time to learn to budget the students are not going to be able to IOU in Tescos when they get to Uni and they will often have had a whole terms money at once.

When my DS12 first started secondary school, I used to top up his lunch account via the parent pay system, for the month and said to him he had to stay within a certain limit every day. However, I soon discovered that he was spending massively over that limit and I was finding that I was topping up much much more just so that he could have food at school. I soon discovered that I could leave a parent credit on his account and just give him the minimum of £5 a day. Sometimes he spends all of it. Sometimes he doesn’t. Sadly, parent pay doesn’t allow me to top up less than £5 a day, so I have to make sure that I have enough parent credit on there to cover his lunch for the month. We don’t qualify for free meals and the school don’t allow you to pay for lunches in advance.

I would go to the school and say you can’t afford these snacks everyday but you don’t want your child going hungry. I would ask why they can’t bring their own snacks. For everyone saying your daughter should just eat the fruit I disagree. Fruit does not fill up hungry children who are going through a growth spurt. None of us could concentrate if we were hungry.

This is par for the course if your child is mixing with children who are from wealthier families. She just wants to fit in with her peers, which is understandable. My sympathies are with you both. I had a friend who sent his son to Rugby School and said he had huge regrets, because the boy was mixing with little snobs, scoring off on one another all the time about their parents’ cars & expensive holidays. If state schools were better funded and teachers appropriately paid there would be no need for parents to beggar themselves with private school fees.