So sick of hearing about bloody free school meals food parcels

[muminthesummer]

It's been done to death now. It was wrong, there's been apologies, it won't happen again. FFS please let it go now.

The food parcels are poor; that is now acknowledged.
What needs to be properly investigated is why they are so poor.

The narrative of greedy Tory-donor company creaming off public money isn't the whole story. Chartwells can and do supply decent meals to private schools. Why aren't these food parcels better?

There have been several scandals around the quality and quantity of food over the years, yet they are expensive for parents that have to pay for them.
Joanna Blythman's book "The Food Our Children Eat" made the point that school meal charges are used to supplement the school budget elsewhere. She said the actual cost of the food provided to children was far less than their parents are charged.
The book was published some years ago, but is that still the case?

In 2012, Martha Payne caused uproar when she began to blog about her school dinners. Eight years on, how far have they really improved?

Those inadequate food parcels will come as no surprise to campaigners who have fought to improve school meals. Perhaps the reason for them is that there is little political will for ensuring state pupils are properly fed. The question is, how much of this is down to Government policy and funding, and will they do anything to improve the food given to our children instead of blustering and sweeping it all under the carpet?

Imo the best thing to do would be for staff and caterers to be employed directly by the schools, but they often aren't now because it's cheaper to get a supplier who pays that employees pension contributions, annual leave payments etc which they fund by squeezing as much profit as possible out of activities, than to pay staff yourself.

Many procurement processes are heavily weighted to being the cheapest, the offshoot of which is that in order to deliver the output for the allotted cost and specification, quality suffers, and you have malicious compliance as a result of poor contracting, not the schools fault btw. An example is when military meals became PAYD, each meal was stipulated to require x grams of certain food groups. For protein, they would include chicken thigh bones etc in the weight, so the government and personnel were paying for x amount of protein a meal, but as the contract didn't specify it had to be 100% edible and bones didn't weren't specifically mentioned, they left them in. This is the same up and down the country, school meals need an overhaul, and there needs to be better governance of these companies.

@herecomesthsun

FSM & DM - yes lots about it.

I meant this thread.

@muminthesummer are you a troll? No reply since your shitty post.

Using a function provided by a forum isn't really stalking

Well the Govt has shot itself in the foot again and said no free meals during half term.

They really are a bunch of over privileged morons without a brain cell between them

Well maybe the government would learn their fucking lesson then, just don’t fuck about with free school meals. We know they don’t give a shit but it’s a tiny tiny amount of money they spend on it overall.
You would think anyone with an ounce of a brain would just continue to support free school meals so at the very least they don’t come across like the heartless, nasty bunch of cunts that they are.

I mean they are, but surely they get bored of this FSM shambles too?

So sorry it's so tedious. Glad it won't be happening again as one firm says it will be adding £3.50 more into the package they envisaged providing but looked to be worth just over £5 on the basis of supermarket prices - yay.

If the harsh words are a bit much to be troubling with, there are also a number of different image examples from various parents and schools who have no connection to one another, that might be a quick scan, I'm especially liking the half items wrapped in cling film: www.itv.com/news/2021-01-12/free-school-meals-parents-blast-woefully-inadequate-food-parcels-for-children-learning-at-home

Fuckin disgusting!

Apologies are for when you make a mistake.
Unfortunately it’s pretty difficult to accidentally provide bugger all to hungry children, whilst pocketing not even half - more than half of the funds allocated. Absolutely disgusting.
Children get the raw end of the stick always, when in actual fact their well-being ought to be priority. But then, that doesn’t generate revenue does it, unless you take food from their mouths of course.

It's been done to death now. It was wrong, there's been apologies, it won't happen again. FFS please let it go now.

Yet it already has. That's why people keep going on about it, so called apologies mean nothing when policy doesn't change.

@tootyfruitypickle

Well the Govt has shot itself in the foot again and said no free meals during half term.

They really are a bunch of over privileged morons without a brain cell between them

They're still providing the funding- as was always planned through the local councils. They haven't cancelled anything.

£30 a box!!! Where has our tax payers money gone? Not on the children that’s for sure. Scrutiny is essential or corruption will increase. Disgusting so bang on it as much as you can.

Someone is lining their pockets at the expense of children

"It won't happen again".

I have no words for this utter tripe.

It was wrong, there's been apologies, it won't happen again.

This has to be one of the most optimistic sentences ever written on MN. This government have quite a track record of not learning from their mistakes.

Is it £30 per child for 5 lunches?

How does it cost £30 to make 5 lunches for a child? For anyone?

No, it’s £30 for 10 lunches or £15 for 5.

Give the government a break. We're in a pandemic and they're trying their best. Boris owned it on PMQ's and thanked Marcus Rashford, yet he's still criticised. He can't win.

@User158340 We're in a pandemic and they are absolutely not trying their best. they are still wrangling as much money for selves and pals out of this crisis as they can, instead of putting human safety first. They deserve our scorn. They are shameless.

@Feathersinthehead

Yet you are posting excessively about GSSEs and keeping your child motivated, which I find tedious. Lazy, indifferent children can do retakes if it matters to them. Hungry children can’t learn, inadequate nutrition has a serious impact on later health and learning. It needs to be seen as a scandal and popularised, otherwise nothing changes. I couldn’t afford baked potatoes as a student, they took too much electricity to cook. That lunch box has been slung together without thought or respect for the recipients.

What an awful thing to say and since when did it become okay stalk posting history to ironically prove how much better you are than the op?

*to