Would giving all children free school meals actually safe the public purse money long term?

[Kendodd]

Really good quality, highly nutritional, tailored to children's needs and vegetarian. I know this would cost a lot, but if it improves the nations health long term, would it actually cost less?

Agree.
If all that’s needed is healthy meals at school the Govn, Schools and parents need to insist on this. For the health of our kids!
There is no need , however , for it to be free just because it’s healthy.

More taxes on processed foods, sugar, salt etc. That might help the country to a healthier life.

Free school meals are a great idea - I'm in London so all my school's students eat FSM - the very rare child brings a packed lunch and that is invariably down to extreme fussiness or severe allergies or very specific dietary restrictions.

Making the meals vegetarian won't be cheaper - cheap meat is very cheap - but it would expand the the fibre, nutrients and vitamins on offer.

Fussy children will eat very poorly whether it is FSM or paid or pack-up. If they are fed a diet of fast food and UPF at home, they will find real food an adjustment. Most of the children eat pretty well, though.

Some parents kicked off when rules about the free, provided fruit at snacktime came in (and no snacks from home). Now the children attack the pears and satsumas and bananas on offer. It's nice to see them enjoying fruit.

Fsm should be the norm, and they should be better. Like any policy, to succeed it needs to be funded and implemented well.

Oh Emma, give it a rest @blackpanth You’re like a broken record. 😅

ikr. Any opportunity. I’m surprised she hadn’t mentioned her dad, he’s a butcher you know and she needs meat. 🤣🤣🤣

Bit shit for Year 7s and Year 12, don't you think?

No both year 7 and year 12 would still get fsm until the end of year 13.

Ahh keep on being childish its okay 🤣🤣

All the posters saying it’s not a nutritional meal without meat or their kid dislikes all veg or chucks half their dinner in bin anyway (presumably because they are full from high calorie processed crap snacks) like that’s normal.

being poor drives obesity in this country. Kids don’t need more calories they need more nutrition.

so I think your principal is great op but it would be undermined by parents and our general societies attitudes to food waste.

Exactly!

that was ops entire starting point but people have just jumped on the veggie label as bad.

Not when there's a change of phase.

Higher taxes in Scotland also fund university fees, prescriptions, personal care etc, not just FSM....

Some vegetarian meals/option - yes.
Exclusively vegetarian meals/options - no.
I'm all for using local produce and making it (mostly) healthy.

They wouldn't eat it so you'd just be wasting more money and there are is enough of that in the public sector already.

9% of the NHS budget is spent on type 2 diabetes.
Of course in an ideal world parents would feed their kids properly, but they don't. You have to look beyond short term.

I think the ship has sailed in terms of getting children in the UK to eat healthier food in school settings. I just can’t see children who’ve got used to eating junk food, when they want, grazing through the day and not being made to eat what’s on their plates, settling for this. And their parents working make them.

im in France, two kids who are up into secondary now and school meals here are so different: the whole concept is just different. Choice is not a priority. French children are generally brought up to eat what they are given, no choice. And lunch is always a full meal of starter, main course, cheese, dessert. I work in a school and eat in the canteen often. The last meal I ate there was

Selections of salads: beetroot in vinaigrette, white cabbage in a pink peppercorn dressing, mushrooms in a tomato sauce, green salad.

choice of sauté de boeuf (beef stew) or white fish
choice of pumpkin gratin and / or green beans

small piece of cheese - Brie or raclette (it changes daily) plus a couple of slices of baguette or a plain yoghurt.

small piece of cake / small coffee mousse / fruit / flavoured yoghurt.

how many British kids would happily eat that ? Yet the great majority of kids in our school do.

Big differences.: no choice. There are no alternatives to the above. No sandwiches / rolls / crisps / sweets / muffins / etc. No baked potato bar, etc. No morning ‘snack bar’ (bacon rolls at school - really ?) in fact no morning snack. They start school at 8am and don’t eat lunch until 12 and somehow they survive. Nothing to drink in school other than water - no fizzy juice, no vending machines, no fruit juice, just water. Chips or a pizza slice might be served once per term. Burgers? Never. No packed lunches.

it costs to provide this quality of food. France has a means tested system of charging for such things - which the uk says would be too complicated / expensive to implement. I can’t see how : ours is taken from your income / tax return, which produces a coefficient that is applied to lots of means tested things like school trips, school lunches, in school childcare. I pay €4,22 per meal, my friend who’s on a low income pays €0,22 per meal.

well firstly that’s bollocks because healthy vegetarians exist but secondly the whole point of this is it’s one meal of the day 5 days a week. .no meal, vegetarian or meat is going to be 100% of the nutrition a child needs for the day so you would be free to fill the rest of their nutritional needs of the day with meat if you deemed that appropriate.

Higher meat consumption is strongly correlated with obesity. We should be encouraging kids to eat less of it and normalise getting calories from other more nutritious sources. not continuing the status quo.

does anyone care that breakfast clubs are normally vegetarian? No, because it’s not labelled as such so they don’t even notice.

I didn't say healthy vegetarians don't exist.
I didn't suggest high meat consumption.
I didn't suggest the lunch would/should contain all the nutritional requirements.
Ideally it would be two healthy choices 4/5 days - one with meat or fish and one without, plus 1/5 meat free day with two veggie options.
Veggie options shouldn't routinely be those awful bland meat substitutes, but actual vegetables, pulses etc.
I didn't suggest continuing any status quo.
I didn't mention breakfast clubs.

@rickyrickygrimes I wonder how many French children actually only eat the baguette and cheese though?
If they don't eat the full meal are they forced to sit all afternoon until they do?
Do teens come out of school and head to their nearest takeaway place (France has them too....🙄)?

And I never mentioned vegetarian substitutes. Although they are often less full of fat and salt than their meat counterparts it wouldn’t really normalise getting nutrition from non meat sources or be much cheaper than meat which defeats the point for this exercise.

If you think they don’t need meat to be healthy why so insistent it should be a choice nearly every day? Should we make sure bread is to?

I didn't say you did mention meat substitutes - I was clarifying my stance, seeing as you decided to invent my opinion for me on your previous comment. As it is, many of the substitutes are bland processed mush - I've tried lots of them, while I was a vegetarian and as a meat eater. Actual vegetables are so much tastier.
Do you understand the meaning of the word choice? If you do then you'll understand why there should be a choice to eat foods people actually enjoy eating. Lots of people eat meat and fish, and it's perfectly healthy to include it in a balanced diet. Nobody will be forced to eat it though - they can choose the veggie option on any day.

Big differences.: no choice. There are no alternatives to the above. No sandwiches / rolls / crisps / sweets / muffins / etc. No baked potato bar, etc. No morning ‘snack bar’ (bacon rolls at school - really ?) in fact no morning snack. They start school at 8am and don’t eat lunch until 12 and somehow they survive. Nothing to drink in school other than water - no fizzy juice, no vending machines, no fruit juice, just water. Chips or a pizza slice might be served once per term. Burgers? Never. No packed lunches.

That's what makes it work in Finland too, there's no menu options, no unhealthy snacks (in lower years they can take in a small snack for the afternoon though if they have a longer day, like a sandwich or some fruit), everyone eats the same (special diets aside, in which case they get the closest possible version according to their dietary requirements, though when its blood sausage my coeliac DD gets normal sausage rather than GF blood sausage for some reason, maybe cost). In 6 and a half years of school she has never had chips or pizza there, it just doesn't happen. And its the same in nursery too (in my town literally the same as the same kitchen provides the school and the nursery lunches) so children get used to it from a young age which must help a lot with fussiness.
Teenagers don't get supervised at lunchtime though and some will skip lunch and go to the shop to buy junk food, but there's always going to be some amount of teenagers like that no matter what system (although my town is drawing up new school plans at the moment and one of the options they are considering is moving the school to a different area and one of the pros they give for that choice is that the teenagers won't be able to go to the shop at break time!)

@Needmorelego Some of them do, sure. And plenty will load up on pasta and skip the salad. And yes teens that can leave school will buy stuff to eat - but there are no chip shops, no Greggs, fast food chains are expensive here, no cheap chicken shops, afaik etc. There are plenty boulangerie selling sandwiches, but again they are expensive - €5-6 per sandwich. Ditto kebabs - which are probably the most popular fast food - it’s not cheap. Most teens either eat in the canteen, as it’s cheap and their parents pay, many come home (mine do) and eat something out the freezer or that I’ve left. DS often goes to a friends house and they cook as a group - they make attempts at chicken curry etc. Cheap takeaway food doesn’t really exist in the same way here, and portions are much much smaller. And they usually get a decent lunch break: DS 13 gets 1,5hrs, DS 16 gets anything btw 1hr to 2/3 hrs.

And it’s as much what isn’t made available that’s important and the lessons they are being taught about food. They are being taught all through primary and into secondary that snacking between meals isn’t necessary, that salad and veg are normal everyday foods to eat, that eating what is put in front of you is normal, that you don’t need juice with every meal. These lessons stick, they are reinforced at home and this produces a nation that eats its greens because that’s normal.

My daughter told me in her secondary school people complained there were no healthy options. They brought them in at lunch but now they are not selling and then canteen staff are complaining they are losing money on them!

I heard a really interesting program on the radio about an experiment carried out in Sweden. They provided a free school lunch and the children could eat as much as they wanted - the food was very healthy and sugar-free and not beige.

They noticed two things: the children ate far more than they expected and the results of tests showed that their afternoon performance had greatly increased. They then did the same with breakfast and the test results showed morning performance massively increased.

They were then going to do an evening meal. However politicians said that if the children were having three big free meals a day, then benefits should be cut slightly to accommodate that. There was an uproar from the families and the whole scheme stopped.

Sadly I think you're right. There's been loads of 'my kids don't eat that food' posters even dismissing salad a 'rabbit food'. These are the attitudes our children are growing up with. Bottom line, children eat crap food that makes them fat and unhealthy because adults give it to them. And from this thread plenty of adults are willing to lobby for their right to continue to feed children crap.

There's also definitely an undercurrent of I feed my children well and won't be paying to feed better any children whose parents don't feed them well.

Vegetarian, for all those objecting to this, multiple reasons for this. It's cheaper, it's healthy (I would also exclude UPF/meat substitutes) it would be easier, meet religious requirements, better for the planet. There's plenty of time for meat in the rest of the week and I'm sure even the most rampant meat eaters aren't going to argue children need meat at every meal for good health (considering 25% of the planet are vegetarian ).

For what it's worth, I'm not vegetarian myself and my own children are right at the end of their school career so this policy wouldn't benefit me or them. It would benefit others though. If lunchtime is too short, then it needs extending and if this means extending the school day, so be it. I also really like the Japanese idea of children cleaning their own schools.

Cleaning their own schools is good, teach them how to clean and keep places clean. At my DD's school each month different classes clean the surrounding area of the school (i.e. the playgrounds), and at the end of the school year an even bigger clean of the playgrounds is done by everyone.