Hungry children should not be forced into a situation where they have to scavenge and steal food, a charity boss has warned as she made the case for free school meals to be extended to all pupils living in poverty.
Stephanie Slater, chief executive of School Food Matters, one of the charities that together with the Food Foundation is backing the Feed the Future campaign, said: “We have to decide as a nation that it is wrong to make hungry children forage for food and that extending free school meals to all children in poverty is the right thing to do because one thing we know — hungry children cannot learn.”
Chief executives of some other groups that signed up to Feed the Future also spoke out, saying that as the cost-of-living crisis deepens, it is critical to help the 800,000 children in England in poverty who miss out on free school meals because their parents earn above the threshold of £7,400 a year.
Naomi Duncan, of Chefs in Schools, said: “Our chefs are seeing children come to school with no money and no food, who don’t meet the criteria for free school meals and yet are hungry and don’t know who to ask.
“For 120 years, governments have recognised that hungry children cannot learn and together we have built a school lunch system that is admired around the world.”
Barbara Crowther, of the Children’s Food Campaign for Sustain, said: “We are letting children down by perpetuating the draconian means-testing regime on school food. Let’s start by expanding access to all children in poverty. We’re investing in the country’s prosperity by investing in children.”
Parents queue at school food banks
The queue began 45 minutes before the weekly school food bank opened. It started outside the glass-fronted school entrance, snaked along the wall and, by the time produce-laden tables were assembled at 3.15pm, wound around the corner into the next street.
This was a typical Wednesday afternoon at St Mary’s RC Primary, a school in the shadow of the multi-billion-pound Battersea Power Station development but where 50 per cent of the 195 pupils are on free school meals. And yet the bulk of parents in the queue were neither the jobless nor the poorest in the school.
Towards the front waited Shawn, 45, a single mother of two and a phlebotomist who works part-time, 20 hours a week, preparing blood for testing at a doctor’s laboratory and whose daughter does not get free school meals. Shawn said: “I am on universal credit because I earn so little but as my income is above the threshold of £7,400 a year, my daughter does not get free school meals. I also have a second child, aged three, to feed and I come to the food bank every week. I come early because this queue can get very long. I aim to get at least one day’s meals.”
I watched Shawn load up her carrier bag with pasta, cereal, eggs, rice, yoghurt, lemon, tinned peas and tomatoes. “This is a good variety, it helps us a great deal,” she said. Shawn had skipped lunch, as she does every day. “It is too expensive to eat three meals a day and feed my children,” she added. “A year ago I would spend £50 a week on groceries, now that has doubled.”
Behind her stood Maryam, 38, also a working single mother on universal credit whose daughter similarly does not qualify for free school meals. “I work 28 hours a week for the criminal justice system assessing offenders with drug alcohol problems and recommending sentencing,” she said. “My job is stressful and to not have free school meals just adds to my anxiety. I have lost three teeth and can’t afford the dental work to replace them.”
Maryam added: “I am even more worried about my best friend who is in a worse situation and can’t afford to feed her children and I often subsidise her. She works part time for a car dealership and has three children who don’t get free school meals because she is above the threshold. One of her children has autism.”
Shawn and Maryam are two of around 50 parents who rely on the weekly school food bank which is supplied by City Harvest, London’s second biggest food surplus distributor, and supplemented with long-life produce by the Wimbledon Dons Local Action Group.
Executive head Jared Brading put the food bank in context. “We started it during the pandemic and what we are seeing is that there is a tier above the free school meal parents who tend to work part-time in low-wage jobs whose children are not entitled to free meals and who are struggling the most. I would say about 20 per cent of our families are in this hidden working poverty category. They are probably the biggest users of our food bank. Within 45 minutes or so, all the food we have laid out will be gone. We are about to start a Monday food bank as well.”
London’s two biggest food redistribution charities, the Felix Project and City Harvest, together deliver fresh produce to 187 food banks set up in schools in the capital, comprising 50 tonnes a week, the equivalent of more than 115,000 meals. Nationally, the FareShare redistribution network supplied 646 schools and 274 out of school clubs with 1,377 tonnes of food in the five months to August this year.
The Felix Project report that the number of school food banks they supply in London has doubled in the last three years to 166, while City Harvest say their numbers have “almost doubled”. This against a backdrop in which 2.5 million people accessed food banks in 2020-21, up by almost 31 per cent from the previous year.
Steve Winningham, CEO of City Harvest, said: “School food banks are on the rise. Beginning in Covid, these hubs served people trying to support their families, especially without access to free school meals. We have seen our numbers almost double in two years. All our food banks would take 50 per cent more food if we had it to give. A quarter of our charities recently asked for a second delivery each week.”
One school food bank supplied by the Felix Project is at Mandeville Primary in Hackney, where 62 per cent of the pupils are eligible for free school meals with the remaining 38 per cent classed as working poor and where, every Monday, around 80 families line up to collect food. Again, it was the working parents who arrived first and I watched as some loaded up prams with strawberries, tomatoes, aubergines and cabbages.
One father of two, Rock, 53, a caretaker at a local estate, swung a bin bag he had filled with vegetables, juice and mayonnaise over his shoulders. “I come every week,” he said. “We struggle to have enough food for the children because everything is going up except my salary. My 11-year-old got free school meals because Mandeville give a free lunch to everyone, but now she has started secondary school she will no longer be eligible. I worry — will they let me continue to use the food bank? It’s going to be twice as tough.”
Mandeville’s associate headteacher Marc Thompson said: “This is a proud community and people don’t openly talk about hunger. The biggest issue at the start was the stigma of letting people know you’re on the breadline, but that is less the case now because many are struggling. We had to stop parents taking extra for families whose children are not at Mandeville. We spotted it because their containers grew from bags to shopping trolleys to several shopping trolleys. It was painful to do this. Something needs to be done.”
Both heads said they supported the call by the Feed the Future campaign on the Prime Minister to extend free school meals to all children in households in England receiving universal credit. Mr Thompson said: “The idea of children coming to school and being unable to get a healthy lunch is horrendous. There is a strong link between children who struggle and the quality of food in their lunch boxes. This campaign is something we very much support.”
Mr Brading said: “There are untold studies that prove that a child’s ability to concentrate is impacted by whether they have been properly fed. Extending free school meals to all children living in households in poverty should be seen by those in power as an investment in the future of this country. It’s providing our children with a basic human right.”
