No free school meals during Feb half term

[noblegiraffe]

The new guidance on free school meals says that schools should not provide food or vouchers during Feb half term.

This won’t be needed as some general funding is going to LAs and they will be expected to provide food/support for the week schools are off.

This is bonkers, right? They’ve only just sorted it so that kids get more than a manky banana, cheese and dry bread for lunch and they’re going to switch to a different system for a week?

Does this government just really hate feeding hungry kids?

YANBU: sticking with one system for feeding disadvantaged kids would be best

YABU: it’ll be fine, no one will fall through the cracks and the transition will be seamless.

@noblegiraffe

Food banks usually pick up the slack in the holidays but I am surprised to see people against feeding hungry children on a parenting site.

In the Tory party, yes. But they are notoriously selfish and heartless.

Nobody is 'against feeding hungry children', but it's YOUR responsibility as a parent to do that. Why would the children go hungry? It's about prioritising feeding your child rather than sitting on Mumsnet on your expensive devices that you can afford in place of a loaf of bread and pack of ham for your child.

"It's about prioritising feeding your child rather than sitting on Mumsnet on your expensive devices" - would those be the devices that have been generally essential for home schooling and may be again and are essential for submitting a claim for UC in England and for many other essentials of daily living?

@LindaEllen you need a device to claim UC as it's all online now.

What happened to parents paying to feed their own children?
Yes children shouldn't go hungry but the responsibility to ensure they don't falls on their parents, not any one else.

@Pottedpalm

I don’t understand the need for FSM for all in KS1. We are not in a deprived area and you can’t move for Range Rovers and Mercs at picking up time. Maybe stop the fsm for thise who don’t need them and divert the savings?

I think the argument was that it’s cheaper to provide them for everyone than to pay for the admin to assess the claims for who is and isn’t entitled

I will never forget watching that news report last year where they broke the news live on air to a mum they were interviewing, telling her that the government had changed their minds and were going to be providing food for children in the holidays after all. The look on her face as she broke down and started crying in relief… I always remember that whenever these threads pop up every school holiday and people insist that the parents are just taking the piss so that they can spend their money on acrylic nails or whatever instead. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

@UnicornMadeOfPinkGlitter I work in a school and we’ve just had an email to send out from the LA about clubs in the Christmas holidays. Which will provide meals as well as the activity
. Our LA is doing the same, the fact that it leaves low income working parents of FSM children, with no provided lunch to send to the paid holiday club does not seem to have occurred to them.
Also parents have to get the activities which isn’t possible if you are isolating, vulnerable, can’t afford the bus etc
Teens on FSM do not want to attend activities. It’s a really badly thought out idea. Vouchers were simple and children could easily access food without their parents jumping through hoops.

I wonder if @me4real can explain what it was that lead her to resurrect a 9 month old ZOMBIE THREAD to leave an asinine but goady comment that had been repeated several times in the 23 pages of posts prior?

What happened to parents paying to feed their own children?
Yes children shouldn't go hungry but the responsibility to ensure they don't falls on their parents, not any one else.

OK, but if the parents can’t, or don’t, for whatever reason, then what? Too bad for the kids, I guess?

You can insist that you don’t want children to go hungry but if you object to them being fed in this manner then that’s exactly what you’re advocating for. It’s all very well saying that parents should be able to do this and that but that doesn’t change the reality of the situation people are actually living in, right now.

My husband’s mum worked harder than anyone else I’ve ever met, throughout his childhood, and looked after him and his siblings on an incredibly tight budget. They had FSM and he can remember knowing - without her ever actually saying it - how much she would dread the school holidays because of all the extra expense they brought. If there’s something we can do to alleviate that for people then I am all for it and I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge it.

What?? they are only going to feed them for the 5 week days? But what will they eat at the weekend?
Maybe somewhere should be open to give them a free evening meal too?
Or maybe parents could do what they are meant to do and look after their kids and the feckless ones neglecting their children be dealt with appropriately?
There seems to be a hell of a lot of people wanting everything for nothing. Benefits, food banks, free school meals and they still want more freebies. You can be sure the parents are not going without.

With careful budgeting and going without luxuries, a lot of parents would also be able to pay for other essentials the state currently provides free for their children; like health care and education. Are the people begrudging a cheap packed lunch arguing for an end to those tax payer provided benefits too?

This thread is vile! Imagine wanting children to starve (and FYI: a large amount of children WILL for those of you living your cushty lives, voting Tory with no sense of what the real world is like for the poor) just because the handouts are free?

This entire fucking thread smacks of class division, and reminds me of this utterly despicable review over homelessness and blankets. Photo attached

@ancientgran yes. There have been plenty of documentaries over the past decade showing pale/weak adults (mostly who work btw) who regularly go without eating so that their kids can have an extra meal.

I know people who, if we go to a cafe together, can only afford a plate of toast for breakfast and that is without having kids.

My friend who works had to move to a different part of the country because landlord put up rent. When we came to visit we bought him a mug in Waitrose which meant he could also get a free cup of coffee. This is how people live

@5128gap

With careful budgeting and going without luxuries, a lot of parents would also be able to pay for other essentials the state currently provides free for their children; like health care and education. Are the people begrudging a cheap packed lunch arguing for an end to those tax payer provided benefits too?

When I was in a terrible enough position to have to RELY on these 'Free handouts' to feed my kids, it was literally a choice between paying bills and putting food in their mouths (I survived on leftovers).

That was my careful budgeting; getting in to insubordinate amounts of utility bill related debt and taken to court because I couldn't pay Council Tax - the fines for which then got taken off my UC and made it even harder for me to feed my DC.

If Healthcare and Education were added on top as fees I could not have afforded to look after them. No amount of budgeting can help families in dire circumstances.

And before ANYONE tells me I "shouldn't have had kids I couldn't afford", I had them when I could afford them. Circumstances change and you should ALL appreciate what you have because you can so easily lose everything in the space of a day.

I think this is always going to be an issue that people struggle with.

On one hand, most decent people wouldn’t want to see any children going hungry. But many people also struggle to understand who is in need and to understand the multitude of reasons and not decide those in need have brought it on themselves.

So, families who qualify for FSM and who are often short of money to pay for food - it can be due to lots of things. Very often, families have debt so big chunks of their money are going on that every month and therefore they don’t have enough for food and other essentials. Quite why they are in debt itself can be due to a variety of reasons….sometimes due to poor money management skills, and sometimes due to all kinds of unexpected things which happen and make life so difficult if you don’t have any savings.

The thing is people are very judgemental about the cause of debts or poor money management etc. Many people will say ‘everyone should manage their money properly and if they don’t they will have to take the consequences’….but what people forget is just why lots of people don’t have any money management skills to start with. They were never taught those skills nor had them modelled to them. Budgeting on an extremely limited sum of money is actually extremely difficult and many very capable people would struggle to do it or find it impossible if an unexpected expense also arose, never mind people who sometimes aren’t the most skilled and capable. So just blaming people for their money difficulties is really unhelpful.

And then we have the issue of children don’t we. Most people don’t like the thought of children being hungry, but many it seems would rather that than possibly provide support, and it turns out that even a small number are receiving money they don’t need or could have actually chosen to manage better. I’m of the view that with benefits it’s about providing for those in need, and that in doing this, you always end up with some ‘waste’ and money goi g to those who don’t really need it…but that has to happen in order to reach those who do. I wouldn’t leave the kids hungry, in order to ‘teach a lesson’ to the small numbers who oerhaos genuinely are scamming the system.

People simply have no grasp of the actual incomes people are trying to live on. They see a headline UC figure, but forget or don’t realise huge numbers had to take a loan from UC to tide them over during a benefit delay of several weeks….and that loan then takes a massive chunk from their weekly UC amount for months to come and makes surviving impossible. So the system has created poverty. Instead, they just say ‘you should budget’ etc etc.

I don’t think it is entirely clear cut where the line for children’s food benefits should be. Previously we had FSM for children 5 days a week in term time. Well who is to say that’s right? Should it be 5 days a week 52 days a year? Should it be 7 days a week? Should it be 1 meal, 2 meals, 3 meals?? There are loads of possibilities. Each extra of course costs more. It is necessary to consider cost and need and there actually aren’t straight forward answers.

I agree with you Ghoulette. My comment was addressed to people who see no contradiction in accessing state funded services for their children such as health and education, (which many could afford if they went without in the same way they expect other people to) while seething about other people's children getting free food.

The extermination of poverty by exterminating the poor.

Did someone revive this thread just so that people could have a forum to post about how much they’d prefer kids to go hungry to avoid the chance of some adult possibly getting slightly more than they need?

Worth remembering that the same MPs who voted to allow kids to go hungry voted yesterday to try to get their colleague off the hook for taking bribes.

It’s fine to overlook things when a person is profiting in the hundreds of thousands but we need to be careful if a kid might accidentally get a free sandwich.

@bargInhunter

This thread is from Jan 21 when we were in lockdown!

And people are still bickering about the deserving or undeserving poor instead of focussing on the many very expensive fuck ups and current cover ups of sleaze our current government has indulged in.

@SW1amp
Would that arguement ( cheaper to pay for meals for all) not apply throughout school though?

MN is just the Daily Mail comments section now, isn't it.

"By parents for parents" my fat arse.

Shameful.

@QueenofKattegat yep. MN is not representative of most peoples views though. Only well off selfish fuckers.

The problem is there a bigger issue if parents can't afford to feed their children even for a single week, and local authorities doing it actually doesnt help.

The problem is noble, it costs money. Everything costs money and the government is clean out of it.

Some people literally do think there should be zero personal responsibility and that the government should provide everything.

[quote MyDcAreMarvel]**@UnicornMadeOfPinkGlitter* I work in a school and we’ve just had an email to send out from the LA about clubs in the Christmas holidays. Which will provide meals as well as the activity*
. Our LA is doing the same, the fact that it leaves low income working parents of FSM children, with no provided lunch to send to the paid holiday club does not seem to have occurred to them.
Also parents have to get the activities which isn’t possible if you are isolating, vulnerable, can’t afford the bus etc
Teens on FSM do not want to attend activities. It’s a really badly thought out idea. Vouchers were simple and children could easily access food without their parents jumping through hoops.[/quote]
It’s not the responsibility of the school to feed the parents as well ffs!