Fight the Cost of Living Crisis With Free School Meals
4.3 million children in the UK live in poverty, and the cost of living crisis is making things worse. To protect their health, their wellbeing, and their learning without stigma, we need free school meals for all.
Luton Tribune Club is fighting a grassroots campaign to demand free school meals for all primary school children. (senkaya / Getty Images)
Child poverty backdrops this latest capitalist crisis, in recent years ushering in a damning rise in infant mortality. In adulthood, people are facing shorter lives. These unprecedented changes in the state of public health are unacceptable, and urgent action is needed to reverse them and end the inequalities they represent.
One often-overlooked element of public health, particularly the health of children, is school food. School food, and universal free access to it, are critical to protecting the physical and mental wellbeing and learning potential of children. But in its current marketised and fragmented state—largely run by private companies, charities, and volunteers, with crises in school budgets forcing headteachers to choose between cutting staff or feeding hungry pupils—our school food system cannot deliver child health or support education.
Following state interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic, calls for universal free school meals (UFSMs) are growing internationally, for example in the USA, no less than in the UK. Here, trade unions, health professionals, NGOs, media figures, and academics are campaigning to increase eligibility to the means-tested system, calling for the threshold to be raised to £20,000 and for free school meals for children from all families on Universal Credit.
Many thought that Henry Dimbleby’s recommendations for the National Food Strategy to increase eligibility, together with Marcus Rashford’s exposure of child food poverty would force the UK government to implement changes like these. But it didn’t. The eligibility in England remains at £7,400. Only UFSMs for all primary and secondary age children will mean no one is left behind.
The Benefits of Universality
Cost-benefit analysis of UFSMs show reduced costs to health systems and increased benefits for economic growth. This means the absence of a right to food for all children at present is the result not of practical decisions, but of the ideology and political will of those in power. What needs to be tackled is the choices being made by central government, which promote inequality in the hope of keeping the working class ‘in its place’.
In Brazil, by comparison, under the Workers’ Party, 40 million children were fed throughout the school day by the state. A system of food councils linked schools with local food growers, so schools would be central to developing the local food economy.
Our school food system should also be integrated to plan for feeding children throughout the year. Our schools should be ‘anchor’ organisations as part of local and regional authorities’ food strategies, with procurement and supply chains focused on developing local economies and sustainability. In the 1970s, school food procurement was regionally organised, for example by the Greater London Council. It can be done again.
But there are also things that need to change. Planning for school food must include nutrition standards. Although food provisioning by schools was won in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, this provision did not account for nutritional quality—it was only in 1941 that nutritional standards for school meals were set, along with a heavily state-subsidised school meals programme.
In the 1980s, these reforms were rolled back by Margaret Thatcher’s government, with the deregulation of school meals services, the removal of nutritional standards for schools, the infamous ‘snatching’ of free school milk, the introduction of Compulsory Competitive Tendering for school catering contracts, and the effective removal of home economics from the curriculum. The mechanism for ‘choice’ for the child consumer was introduced by cash cafeteria system and later, ‘dinner debt’. The rational child actor was, theoretically, to be educated into making the ‘healthy choice’.
In reality, the school food system became a dumping ground for ultra-processed food. There was no regulation of school food between 1980 and 2000. The diets of children in the 1950s were of greater nutritional value than those of the 1990s.
Under New Labour, nutritional standards were introduced, vending machines were removed from schools, and the National Fruit Scheme and breakfast clubs were started. But the individual consumer choice agenda overshadowed state intervention. In 2022, nutritional standards remain, but are voluntary for quasi-privatised ‘academies’, which in 2018 absorbed 72% of secondary schools.
This means for most secondary school students there is no regulation of school food. The disparity in nutritional value of free school meals was made clear when the pandemic hit and private companies were contracted to provide ‘hampers’ to children in receipt of free school meals while in lockdown. Photographs taken by mother Louisa Britain, among others, showed just how poor their standards were.
Food insecure families, predictably, often have unbalanced diets. The government has not assessed the nutrition status of families in poverty since 2007, although in 2019 ten questions about food access are included in the Family Resources Survey. Teenagers suffer at school through the stigma of means-tested free school meals, and those who can’t afford to buy school food suffer the stigma of dinner debt. Good quality universal free school meals are a clear way to counter these problems.
Taking Action
Tower Hamlets council is, at present, the only authority in the UK committed to providing UFSMs to secondary school students. Increasing the uptake of school food will likely depend on the meaningful involvement of the students themselves in decision-making about the whole school food system. Research in Scotland showed that secondary school students often opted to spend lunchtimes outside school to buy preferred foods or to socialise; in school canteens they faced long queues and limited space and time to sit and eat with friends.
Involving school students in the physical environment and sustainability as part of the school food system is crucial if they are to eat at school. In aiming for this, we can draw on the experience of the 1980s, when a large and vibrant union of thousands of school students took action in response to the Thatcher government’s plan to institute mandatory training schemes, and forced a U-turn. Similar action by young climate catastrophe activists successfully brought that crisis to the public’s attention. Taking a similar approach with the Right to Food and UFSMs campaigns could spark action for a modern School Students Union, and allow young people to take a lead in making decisions about the wider food system.
There are other levels at which to take action, too. In London, nearly 40% of children live below the poverty line, yet only four of the city’s thirty-two councils provide UFSMs for primary age children. Simply passing the buck to central government is not a response—but accumulative savage cuts imposed by the Tories may leave no option other than Labour councils using their combined power to follow the lead given by the unions in the past year year, and fight the government.
In practice, campaigning for UFSMs and the use of school kitchens for community restaurants means campaigning for an end to outsourcing, taking school catering away from the multinational food companies and putting it back into public hands. It also means fully funding local government and reversing the privatisation of schools. In turn, a democratically planned approach to school food procurement based on sustainability will drive the local food economy in ways that captures creativity and skills across our communities.
Those communities, our workforces, our school students, and our trade unions must be involved in deciding food strategies. Only by building a grassroots movement for the Right to Food linked to fundamental systemic change can we secure good quality food, a good education, and good health for every young person in this country.