In light of this news story: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/feb/19/london-to-offer-free-school-meals-to-all-primary-pupils-for-a-year

I thought it useful to publish something I wrote some time ago, in 2021, that never saw the light of day. I’m so glad to see this step taken in London, and keen to determine what impact it might have: almost certainly, the effects will be long term and may take more than a year to be realised, but I’m so glad of the start.

Take a moment and hold your breath. Hold it for as long as you can until you feel you may pass out. Don’t let that happen, but once you get to the point where you have to gasp in that breath, take a few moments to reflect upon just how long it takes your body to return to what feels normal and comfortable. It’s a while.

Consider at what point, as you held your breath, you stopped thinking about what was going on around you. At what point could you start to hear your own heartbeat thumping in your ears? At what point did you start to feel faint, to notice difference in your vision, to feel the pull of your lungs? As you gasped your first big, glorious lung full of air, were you thinking about what you were learning?

Our most basic need is to breathe. Without air, we last at best a few minutes before our one wild and precious life is lost to us.

Once we can be assured of air, our next need is water, and after that food. Our remaining physiological needs, according to Abram Maslow, need to be met before we can have our next needs on the hierarchy met – those related to safety. So once we can be sure of sleep, clothes, shelter, we can focus on health, personal, emotional and financial security – these needs are even more pressing for children, as they generally have a greater need to feel safe. Beyond this comes love and social belonging, including the need for family, friendship and intimacy, and then esteem needs (esteem for others and for oneself). According to Maslow, cognitive needs come next. Our ability to sustain creativity, foresight,  curiosity and to create meaning – the very lifeblood of the classroom context – relies on the long list of prior needs being met.

We know that so many of our children have gaps in these needs as they enter our classrooms each morning. Seeing the list laid out and knowing our communities as we do, we cannot be surprised that for some children learning is low on the list; that for some it is a struggle to find that space in which creativity, curiosity, foresight and the creation of meaning come easily. What is truly alarming, in the UK in 2021, is just how many children are tripped up at the hurdle that comes almost immediately after ‘air’.

Hunger in children in the UK is real and is an epidemic of its own. In a country with 1300 branches of McDonalds, there are 2000 food banks. Since the pandemic started, an estimated extra 600 000 people have needed to rely on foodbanks – a figure which adds to the figure of 5 million that already existed as we entered 2020. Whilst food poverty in the UK has long been an issue, the last 5 years have seen rises of up to 123% (Trussell Trust data) and these inequalities and hardships inflict the deepest wounds on those least able to affect the outcome: our country’s children.

This is a problem for those both in and out of work – according to the Rowntree Foundation, two thirds of children living below the poverty line in the UK today are in working families: families where there may be double or even triple the number of jobs to the number of adults; where zero hours contracts are the norm; where in-work benefits, job security and holiday pay are foreign concepts; and where a pandemic indiscriminately scythed through even these roles, leaving families looking to schools and food banks for their next meals. Where Universal Credit is a factor, families have just this week lost £80 per month towards food bills, so that now a family of four receives £1049.29 per month to live on. Thanks to the child benefit cap this is also true for families of five, six, seven…the funds are stretched ever further. The government’s own estimates suggest that whilst across the population, 8-9% experience food insecurity, this rises to 41% of homes where there are three or more children. Yes, do go back and read that again. Yes, you are allowed to weep.

A significant proportion of our children are coming to school hungry each day and going to bed hungry each night. The same children are likely to be going to bed cold. They are the same children who are likely to be going to bed in a home that is sub-standard, that may have mould growing at a rapacious pace. They might not have their own bed, or their own space, a desk to work on, a family dining table, books in the home…the same children may be living with adults who themselves are struggling to cope with the daily humiliation of living in food insecurity.

Working in a school where there are a lot of hungry children can be a challenge. Long-term hungry children do not grow at the same rate as their more affluent peers; they are more pallid and carry a different air. There can be a resignation and a defeated-ness that only comes with long term hunger, and it’s in our schools, in the UK, in 2021 [2023…]. A colleague describes taking a group of adolescent boys from his inner-city school to play a team of the same age from the more affluent suburbs: “They looked at least two years older, and completely different. It was not a fair match. One team looked as if they had been fed on steak, the other on strawberry laces.” In the same school, on lunch duty last week, a child deftly took another child’s uneaten fish and chips from the tray under my nose as I stacked the trolleys; such was his technique that I didn’t even notice, and it took an intervention from a colleague to discreetly find the child and offer him an untouched meal: a meal he refused out of shame, in spite of what was certainly a constant low growl of hunger driving his choices.

The actress Kathy Burke reflects on her experiences growing up in London in the Channel 4 documentary Money Talks: “Growing up poor in the 60s and 70s, I never felt that I was scum…they really make you feel like you’re scum now if you’re poor.” On meeting the lead for a food bank she is confronted by the reality of societal expectations of those experiencing food poverty: that they should not enjoy luxuries. As the manager of one London foodbank comments, food is one worry but there are other pressures: the mental health costs of living with shame and embarrassment. “My gift to you is some respite,” he states, before describing a scenario where a mother visiting the food bank chose to get her nails done with the money she saved, to the consternation of many. In his words, “Does she live another week? Yes. Is she nice to her children for another week? Yes. We’ve achieved our aim.”

The final question is telling. For hungry children who live with food insecurity, it is not just the hunger that is a problem, but the lack of safety that enshrouds them as the adults around them struggle. The long-term stressor of the unknown for adults so often leads to terseness with children, intentional or otherwise. Children in this situation are triply disadvantaged: first they are hungry, second they lack the safety of knowing when they will next eat, and third they suffer the consequences of this situation on their caregivers’ mental health.

This is England in 2021. [Well, actually, it’s 2023 now and if anything this situation has worsened, rather than improved.]

We are looking forward to 2030. What needs to happen to arrest and reverse this rapidly rising trend? What role can schools play in disrupting the cycle of food inequality and with whom can we engage to eradicate this issue over the next nine years? Are we relying on Jamie Oliver to explore and expose the quality of school meals? Or praying to the brilliant Marcus Rashford to step off the pitch and into the way of the politicians and policy-makers to demand a better deal for the children at the back of the queue? Perhaps.

Perhaps as a sector we need to consider what it would take for us to promise that no child will go hungry. What would it take for every child in the UK who needs it to be provided with breakfast, a hot lunch and a packed tea each weekday, and vouchers towards family meals over the weekend and school holidays? What would it take for the school day to start with breakfast and to end with tea, for everyone? What would it cost, and what difference would it make – and how much might we save in the long term? If not in the difference it could make to the quality of learning in our classrooms, what would we save as a country by removing the psychologically devastating effects of food insecurity from a generation? What might we save in the costs of additional mental health care, irrespective of those saved by increased physical health for children in their formative years?

During the pandemic, schools stepped into a space not previously occupied, providing food packages for families and vouchers to supplement the week’s groceries. In some schools this included using wholesale buying power to provide generous quantities of fruit and veg, whilst providing rare commodities like pasta and flour when supermarket shelves had been cleared. Providing quantities that could feed a family rather than a single child meant that families could in practice create meals and enjoy a short-lived period of food security together. What would it take for this to become systemic? To be as normal and as easily accepted as the daffodil-covered sugar paper cards that reach homes on Mother’s Day? What would it take for it to be a natural extension of the school experience that children and their families are provided with a greater level of food security because they are children and because they are families?

A thought experiment: Our Multi Academy Trust serves approximately 12,500 students, with 27% of that number eligible for Free School Meals. This is Group A. Let’s remain true to the current understanding that for every 4 children living below the poverty line in the UK that claim Free School Meals, there are a further 6 who are in working families and who therefore do not qualify. This means that across our trust, there could be 68%, or roughly 8,500 children, who are experiencing some level of food insecurity. This is Group B.

Producing meals at scale, it is envisioned that a child could be fed breakfast, a hot lunch and a packed tea for £5 per day. For Group A, the trust already receives £2.30 per day towards the cost of this provision. The remaining cost, when added to an additional commitment of £15 in vouchers each week of the school holidays, is around £2m. To include also Group B, the equivalent cost is £7.8m. In comparison to the total Trust income of £Xm, it’s a sizeable but not incomprehensible chunk. Had the (now unfunded) Teachers’ Pension increase not lampooned such a significant proportion of schools’ working budgets, this may have been possible to raise. In terms of what this would mean as a proportion of our business, it would be a 7% cut in hours and pay across the trust, or losing just over 2 hours of school per week per child.

At a national scale, for the 8.3million children currently in state funded education, at a rate of £5 per day, three meals would come at a daily cost £41.5m – this is for group A (FSM) group B (working poor) and group C (more affluent). This equates to £8 billion per year. Is this the cost of a commitment to no child going hungry in the UK? Is this the investment that might prevent other health-related costs? According to the Rowntree Foundation, the cost of child poverty is upward of £25 billion per year – £17 billion of which could be returned to the Exchequer if child poverty were eradicated altogether.

Ensuring no child goes hungry would not end child poverty. This investment in our children’s health, though, would make a significant and much-needed difference.

Schools cannot meet every human need, and yet so very many are within our gift and jurisdiction. By finding and filling the gaps in our children’s stomachs we may provide the best and most useful public service that could enable a significant shift in educational attainment for some of those most frequently prone to underachieve. And if we fail, we address at least part of the root cause of the health issues for a generation. This cannot be done by one school alone, moving as a maverick and stealing headlines en route; this must be a system shift that all schools subscribe to, an act of faith where we collectively hold our breath.

As we send our children into the classroom with not just the air they breathe but the basic need of food and water met, providing the psychological safety that comes from knowing from where the next meal will come, we build a thread through the hierarchy of need that whispers ‘you matter’ ever louder until the growl of hunger is silenced for once and for all.