Most liked posts in thread: Marcus Rashford and the 'free school meals'.

The problem is in term time providing free school meals in the grand scheme of things is fairly cheap, most of the costs, after all, are sunk costs as they need to be paid for just to have the kids in school for lessons. Providing them out of term normally means vouchers, I believe they were getting £15 a week when I highly doubt the cost is anywhere near that when the schools proving them (On my local news they went to a Manchester school for Breakfast club, they were getting half a bagel with some butter and a class of orange. Looking at a Food Wholesale site you can get Bagels for 17p each so for half its 8.5p and a carton of orange juice can be got for 71p for 1 litre. With glass being about 200ml that's 5 glasses so 14p. That's 22.5p per kid for breakfast. You could give them a slice of toast instead and get the price down further. Also, schools most likely are getting them even cheaper than that, certainly, when I was at school they bought orange juice in massive containers, not sure what they held but certainly more than 1L

Now if you open schools at meal times you might get the cheap costs of food again but you now need to bring staff in which means more pay, this included most likely having to bring some teachers in to monitor the pupils. It may then end costing more than the vouchers. Also if you also don't have the kids who pay for school meals coming in because let's be honest why would they if the school wasn't the only way to get a meal, they may not get the same bulk prices, especially for perishable items that they can't buy and store the excess until term starts

And if you just scrap half term and have kids in non-stop you now have a number of weeks of paying everyone the school needs to operate that you weren't previously paying so cost is suddenly jumping up. You also risk burn out for the kids without a break which means most likely you are then paying teachers to babysit kids while they watch movies or do 'fun activities' which is a bit of a waste of fully trained teachers.

So these two options may financially not make sense over vouchers but you can't police how vouchers are spent. There is no guarantee that if they aren't getting a meal anyway that they will with the vouchers.

Also often as someone else mentioned the kids that struggle the most aren't actually those from the worst-off families. They already get a number of benefits, benefits that during COVID have had a boost. It's those kids whose families are borderline, these parents get no or little help as they don't qualify for any benefits but are on low wages that even at the best of times is a struggle.


Mind you having looked up the stats it really isn't the issue that is being made out IMHO. Rashford keeps talking about millions of kids but looking at official stats it's not. There are 8.82million pupils in the UK 186k take School meals but only 96k are apparently eligible (and not all of them take them up). Anyone actually eligible according to the guidelines is already on one of the benefits that received an increase of £20 a week until April 2021 so in theory, they already have more money in their pockets which should cover extra food outside of term time

 

What people are missing though is most of them (ie anyone who isn't now on benefits due to losing their job due to COVID) are all getting more money each week than they were pre-covid because all the qualifying benefits have seen an increase higher than the value of the vouchers. It's one thing if they couldn't afford to feed their kids properly before but if they still can't keep them fed you have to ask what are these parents doing with the extra money and are they going to use the vouchers to feed their kids or on themselves?

 

First of all MPs haven't awarded themselves anything. MP pay rises are decided by an independent body ever since the whole expense scandal. The MPs have no say about how much and they also can't stop it. The best they can do is when they get it is to donate the extra to charity

And you are still missing my point. Everyone drawing benefits that entitle their kids to free school meals is on an extra £20 a week and that remains until April. Most of their situations haven't changed due to COVID so if it's deemed that Kids should be able to be fed on £15 a week which is the value of the vouchers then the £20 they are getting should be more than able to cover it. Either £15 is enough so until April giving out vouchers outside of term isn't needed or £15 isn't enough so why is the call being for £15?

 

You can't act like money isn't a factor, the New Forest isn't full of Money trees after all. Anything extra spent on giving them free school meals during holidays has to come from somewhere and that means doing damage to others. For example, if it comes out of the school budget like providing term time ones does that means every student is going to suffer while if it comes out of the government's pockets it's going to be clawed back in various taxes which could make things hard for some people for a long time. In an ideal world, money wouldn't be a factor but we live in the real world and it is.

And I didn't misunderstand your point. I stated you are either having to have school as normal or you are wasting teacher's time having them watch over kids when they are doing activities like watching movies. Legally any gatherings of kids require at least 1 adult for every 30 kids, even if you don't have teachers oversee them that has a massive cost. They would need at least 3200 adults just to oversee the kids currently on free school meals, if you open it up to anyone so those working didn't have to worry about childcare then it could be even worse. 3200 adults getting a minimum wage is £1.25m a week based on 5 days of attending and a day being 9 hours. That's only 200k less than the cost of vouchers and that's before the cost of making the food. It just doesn't make sense to spend so much on whats basically a holiday club when those kids are largely of parents who don't work so child care isn't needed. So you are basically paying childcare for kids who don't need it just so you can feed them while kids who need childcare as their parents work but aren't entitled to free meals don't get. And all because you can't trust the some parents to take the voucher (and extra money) to feed their kids rather than benefit themselves.

TBH the best solution would be a combination of having local business, with some governmental help to do what I saw one school doing on the news today and that was to give the parents food packages. Would allow business to help out, especially those in the food industry where currently they have a certain amount of food that is going past the best before date but is still ediable (for example bakers who might throw the excess loaves of bread away at the end of the day but its still perfectly good for things like toast) as it spread the burden, keeps the costs of providing the food low and limits the potential of abuse by the parents. With a combination of donated items from business and using the governments ability to bulk buy you could almost certainly provide way more food for £15 than the vouchers would allow

 

Giving them £15 a week vouchers isn't changing that though because its not just the 96k kids who get free school meals who fall into that, its also the ones whose parents can afford to and do feed their kids but aren't well off. It's a bigger issue, an issue that has so much to do with the parents. There have been plenty of sociological studies on this which shows how the attitudes of our parent's shapes who we are. Outside certain Asian cultures for example peoples attitude on the value of schooling is dictated by how the parents feel they got value form it and when you are living on the dole or minimum wage even if its the parents own fault because they didn't take school serious themselves it often becomes 'School didn't help me' and as such, they don't push their kids enough in school so their kids never really get the importance of school to their future and that pulls them into the poverty cycle. If you want to break them out of falling into those it's not about feeding them, its about making the parents better.

I can just use my Family as a perfect example. It's as working-class as it can be and if you look at the family tree from my Great Grandparents down there are just TWO people on the whole thing who went to uni, that's myself and my sister. And it's not a small Family either, my Grand Dad on my Dad's side is Irish so large families are pretty much the norm, my Dad has 6 siblings each who have multiple kids. My dad as the oldest was lucky, they were still doing the 11 plus to see who got into the Grammer School and he did. That benefited him and as such with me and my sister doing fairly well in school was seen as important. Pretty much all my cousins on the other hand whose parents didn't get the same focus on education are like their parents doing working-class job or living on the dole or are in crime.

So giving them £15 in vouchers isn't going to break that cycle. As I keep saying they are already getting £20 a week more in benefits and COVID hasn't changed their situations. If they aren't using the £20 to feed their kids well then either it means they aren't even trying or they simply don't have the knowledge to be able to do so. For example the breakfast clubs are often deemed to be essential to ensure that the kids have the energy to get to lunchtime, as I've mentioned they seem to get a piece of toast or half a bagel. That's something any parent should be able to do with a little forethought, head to a bakers or store at the end of the day when the bread is being sold off. That's 18-20 slices of bread so 18-20 days of breakfast for a kid. Now sure that bread is going off before you get to day 18 so what do you do, you take two slices out for the next two days and stick the rest in the Fridge, a fridge being something pretty much every family has.

But again its why I prefer the idea of not actually giving them money but giving them food parcels. It helps those who do care as it gives them free food to make meals with while removing some of the potential abuse from those who don't care. They can choose to feed themselves and not the kids obviously but it does remove some of the temptation. Maybe even take a leaf out of the likes of services like Guosto and Hello Fresh and include recipe ideas along with perhaps tips on how to store what they are given to make it last until either the next one or until the kids are back at school

 

The problem with Poverty figures is the UK's idea of child poverty is such that in most countries they wouldn't be deemed in poverty. For example some of the things used to define a child in poverty include

• Not having a home internet connection
• Not going on atleast one family holiday of greater than one week each year
• Not having a Bike or other such leisure equipment
• Not attending a outside the home leisure activity such as swimming once a month
• Not going on a School Trip atleast once a term
• Not having their own room

At one point they was a push to have Sky or Virgin TV as it was deemed that without that kids were 'culturally poor' but I believe it was rejected.

The better a society gets the more 'luxury' things get added to the definitions, We most likely will always have around 4.2mill kids deemed to be in poverty EVEN if for example we were start to see a Basic income introduced for everyone at £3k a month as there would still be people better off than them who had access to things they don't have so where poverty starts would just shift up

 

Absolute isn't absolute though. It's still starts with relative figure. With relative you take the median earnings, find the 60% mark of that and anyone under it is deemed in Poverty. Its then done again each year. Its relative poverty that the government uses.

Absolute poverty does the same but it doesn't get redone each year (does get adjusted by inflation). In our case the 60% of median mark was taken in 2010/11 tax year.

They also aren't really giving you poverty numbers. Someone in London above the Median might be living in worse conditions than someone in Bradford and two similar countries with similar living costs could have vastly different points of poverty because the wage distribution in the country is wider in one making the median point different. So you could have two people doing the same job for the same company at the same equivalent pay but one deemed in poverty and one not

Anyway Relative poverty has increased since 2010, from about 21% of the population to 22%. Absolute has gone from 22% down to 19% though. That's not a bad drop in about 8 years when the last figures published were taken. It's not something you can wipe out over night, pay everyone over the 2010 median and you bankrupt alot of companies when they can't increases prices and remain competitive and you also raise living costs so you aren't really improving actual poverty

Relative and Absolute as well are also different to how we define child poverty