Free school meals for all infant children

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What do you think? I think it's a great idea.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24132416

"I don't call a child who just wants some seasoned food and some vegetables with a bit of bite fussy. I call them normal."

Quite. DS1 had school dinners for a while, when they ran the pilot, here. He went off so many different foods, including a lot of the vegetables he'd loved since he was a baby, during that time, that we're still working hard on re-expanding his diet, years later.

My dd would beg for a stir fry at the weekends, desperate for some fresh crunchy veg.

I don't get how this is going to work practically- most schools won't be able to provide hot food for all the children. Most schools round here have been crammed full with pupils due to shortage of places, so there is simply not the room to make or provide room to eat hot meals. It's going to lead to tensions between schools and parents when they say they can't provide hot meals that have been promised to the children from the government.

I haven't read all the posts - I don't agree with FSMs for everyone, but just wanted to defend school meals.

At my DCs school (of approx. 400 children), around 95% I think are on school lunches which is full capacity. They have a waiting list for children wanting to get on the list for school dinners. If you decide to come off school lunches, you're unlikely to get back on for at least 1-2 school years. When Year 6 pupils leave, their places are offered to Reception, any left over go to people on the waiting list.

There were 57 out of 62 starters this year that signed up for school lunches. There are 2 girls in my DDs class who have packed lunch. Everyone else has school lunch.

Todays choice was salmon (fillet) or braised steak (always a choice of main course). Roast potatoes. Carrots. If they didn't want a cooked meal, they could have a ham sandwich or help themselves from the salad bar. Pudding was fresh fruit or a yoghurt.

It costs me £6 a day for 3 children, so £30 a week. I personally think its money well spent.

From some posts, not every school is as good as ours but please don't assume every school lunch is the same and its certainly not "slop" or lacking in nutrition from my experience.

We are wondering who is going to fund £50000+ for refurbishment of teaching space to make a kitchen; who is going to pay for an industrial dish washer (plus extra water usage) and crockery and cutlery for 180 children? We have a deficit budget FFS!

In our LA, hot school meals were stopped by the Thatcher government. Kitchens were knocked out and have been used as teaching areas for years and years. We have no facilities for cooking or even hot food collection/storage/disposal.

We are by no means the only primary school in the area lacking these facilities, and I think there are other schools in other counties in our situation. Just getting our schools ready to accept hot meals would add hundreds of thousands of pounds to the bill!

I don't want my youngest to have FSM. His older brothers tried them, one of them (a fussy child with no medical reason for avoiding many foods, but in a family where the other 4 people eat just about anything so not sure why my parenting skills only went awry on him ) managing to eat no more than a mouthful every day for the week we tried.

More to the point, the infant school already has to do 2 sittings for the children that already have school meals. If everyone had them they would need to run 3-4 sittings which would just be a pain to manage. They also get meals from another local school that still has a big kitchen, but if they had to feed all their pupils then they wouldn't be able to sell the service to several other schools...

I don't agree with FSM for all infant pupils either.

If you are on a low income you already receive FSM so no change there. All it will do will be give freebie meals to those that can afford to pay for them.

The £600 million could be spent in so many other ways, to help our failing education system.. that would benefit all IMO.

I'm not sure about this one.

Our 2 DCs currently have school dinners for which we pay £80 a month. It's not a small amount but something we feel is important and worth paying for.

Like some of the other posters I think that the money should be spent elsewhere. Families earning less than £16k can get free school meals.

Thumbs down from me.

If there is evidence that universal free school meals improved learning outcomes across the board then I'd be all for it, but they don't. They are only of value to children who have an inadequate diet at home. Really a big, big waste of money providing them free to higher income families.

If I thought it would be beneficial to DS then I would pay for them now, not take them just because it's free.

He will qualify for a year of it but will not be having them.

He is currently waiting and ASD diagnosis. He has the same lunch day in day out. Strong cheddar on wholemeal bread, fresh orange juice or apple juice and some fruit. He eats it all, he panics at the mere hint of anything else going in there. He sees some food just for home - he is horrified petrified even at the thought of chocolate or crisps going into his lunchbox as they are to be eaten at home (this is all him btw not me!!)

I also can't abide the prison trays, everything lumped in together, so unappealing. It would certainly put me off eating, scraped plastic yak.

The schools I have worked in, food has not been great and most went in the bin. Year 6 children getting the same as reception children. I got a free school meal as a member of staff but mostly I was left feeling yakky and stodgy afterwards. It was tasteless too.

Things laced full of sweeteners to avoid the sugar.

Burnt food, veg boiled to no goodness etc.

Yes some schools may have nice food but MOST don't and I would like to see what's in the stuff too.

What happens when they reach juniors and it's no longer free? And how can they ban packed lunches when juniors won't be getting them provided for free?

Some schools are 3 form entry, how would they propose they all sat down together to eat with staff? 90 children per YEAR group?

I've worked in schools for too many years and the assumption is that the food is up to scratch and, in far too many instances, it is not. Choice is poor, portions variable and verge on the small. What if the school does not have a kitchen, which many don't. I agree about the breakfast, dinner issue raised above too, which is where do you stop? I work in a secondary school where the menu is OK, but students don't have the money and given the range of physical types, also do not eat anywhere near enough to benefit them nutritionally. I'd be more concerned about the lack of PE and exercise for many. It is an easy 'good news item' for the Libs and yet again avoids the real issues facing families today.

Awful idea, the money could fund building work for schools or TA's. Let parents choose how to feed their children and fund that choice not taxpayers.

Some children will have a worse diet as many parents simply wont bother with a decent evening meal as they will rely on the school delivering.

Nobody has actually said who will fund this, what if its to come from the schools budget rather than extra cash? What will children lose out on?

Is this a done deal then? It's a total slap in the face for those who have lost their child benefit and also have DC year 4 or above - they've now been doubley shafted by this bunch of toss pots!

Happy, I believe it's being funded through central government, according to an article I read in the Independent. I've no idea how it's being funded though. I guess they will be raising taxes or cutting spending somewhere else. Apparently George Osborne will enlighten us at the Autumn spending review

I agree feelthis, we have lost CB for 3 dc, so that's 2.5K just gone. We are a single income family just above the threshold. DC 3 will get this election bribe and we'll also get the married couples measly £150 a year. It doesn't come close to what we've lost in CB though

I am all for it.
Call me naive but if all children are having school lunches then theoretically the quality will increase as suppliers are guaranteed the business and can work more efficiently. It will also create jobs.
Just because a family has money it doesn't mean they provide their children with healthy food. On a school trip today I observed a boy with educated, wealthy parents who had a pepperami, Nutella sandwich, chocolate bar and a packet of crisps. High sugar, high salt and minimal nutrition.
What we eat does affect the way we behave and act. If by providing good nutrition you are able to prevent some behavioural issues then it is money well spent.

Utterly crazy.

This year, our school is having meals shipped in for the first time, because local council funding cuts meant that the school kitchen had to close. :( We had to say goodbye to the wonderful cooks, who knew all the children and their dietary requirements, favourite foods and so on.

And now they're going to give us the shipped-in stuff for nothing?

Priorities??

Haven't read whole thread but from what I've read I'm a bit surprised at how much opposition there is on here. I totally get the view that there may be 'better' ways of spending money, but very few government funding decisions are a zero sum game. You don't spend money here, by taking it away from there. Sometimes you have to make a decision to invest here, and hope to reduce costs as a consequence somewhere else - and I can definitely see that spending more money on providing good (and I know that's not always the case) hot meals could lead to a) better concentration and therefore standards in the class room, and b) health benefits for the children involved. I realise that on MN every packed lunch is uber healthy and much better than the alternative school meal. However, I know from experience in real like that this is not the case in most instances and some of the packed lunches I have seen have been less than nutritious and the school meals here (despite very limited space and brought in meals) are pretty good - although not home-cooked standard of course.

I also think that 'universal benefits' can be a good thing - they give everyone a stake in the welfare state and reinforce a message that recipients of benefits aren't all 'scroungers'. We all pay into the system and at times of our life we all take out of the system. Our time in primary school is as reasonable point as any for us to being 'taking out' of the system, regardless of our parents wealth or lack of it. If you say that 'rich' families (over 16K?) shouldn't get FSM then it's not a big step to say that other 'rich' families (over 30K? Over 40K? Over 60K?) shouldn't get free education at all....

Those 'rich' families don't get free education frizzly. They hire tutors to bump up their children's grades.

True. But they still take up a space in our very very very oversubscribed local school.

Also it's quite a good alternative to child benefit (for higher earners) if you think about it - at least the money goes straight to the kids rather than being used for fags, booze, loose women or whatever it is we were spending it on before.

What you mean i am going to have to give up the booze and the fags !

I think it is a good policy which is based on proper evidence. As with every policy, there will be challenges to implement it. I had decided not to do school dinners for my youngest two (of five) due to the cost. But I am very pleased that they will have this option now.

a good idea but wouldn't work for me as ds doesn't like school dinners he is very fussy with his food and goes through fazes . i dread to think what they think of us as parents by his lunch box he went today with bread and butter( didn't want anything in his sandwiches) a sausage roll and a yogurt.

but foxy don't you think when he sees most of the other children eating dinners he will gradually learn about food. Coz that's what school is about ... learning ... and food is such a hard and important part of that.

spoken as a mum of five. Paid for dinners for DS1 @ £2.75 a day for a year on ideological grounds before a lunch time assistant told me he was picking the tuna baguette option each day and only ate half of it. Grrrrr!!! But something sank in at some stage and now he is 13 and a bit of a fun foodie.

I don't know where to start with this really. It seems a crass, ill thought-out attempt at vote-grabbing. Surely there are more effective ways of reaching the least well-nourished children? I really object to being told that we'll lose one universal benefit but gain another one. Where does the money come from? What about small companies who supply small rural schools like ours? They will have to massively upsize very quickly in order to cope with demand - that doesn't sound like a bad thing but might be impractical. And as loads of other posters have pointed out, most schools lost their kitchens decades ago and there's no room or money to replace them. It's just so badly thought out.

DS1 has packed lunches most of the week and school meals twice a week, because those are the only two days they offer something the picky little beggar will eat. At least I know how much he eats of his packed lunch - anything uneaten comes back again! And though our school meals aren't too bad (not made on premises, they come in from a local company that supplies other small schools) I think the meals I make him are just as nutritionally balanced. As for the benefits of hot meals - most of them are yakking at lunchtime so much it's gone cold before they eat up, anyway!

Long story, I'm not sure the good research that the policy is based on is really informing the policy though. The pilot schools had free school meals for the whole school. The policy is only going to give free school meals to half the school. The whole school cultural change fsm was credited with in the pilot schools is not a given when only half the school get the fsm.