It is time that all children were provided with free school meals.

School meals are not seen as a cornerstone of education, but rather as another financial commitment that needs to be met. However, providing children with food at school could act as a powerful tool in helping our young people to learn better and to lead healthier lives.

There is a public health crisis among children in the UK. As a society, we should intervene and provide all children with healthy, free school meals, and show our young people how to develop healthy-eating habits. 

This week, a government-commissioned report by The National Food Strategy stated that children’s eating habits in the UK are a “slow-motion disaster”, and warned of a “toxic connection between poor diet and inequality”. 

Warnings such as these are nothing new. Often the news bulletins focus on the proportion of children going each day without proper meals. A study by University College London found that many children were surviving on just over £2 a day for food. Meanwhile, in 2017, the University of Liverpool found that young people were seeing as many as 12 adverts per hour for junk food, during prime-time family TV programmes.

Free school meals for all pupils

At the heart of all of these statistics is one running theme: our children’s diets are broken. So what can we do to fix them? 

In the face of this public health crisis among young people, schools should intervene. We should take a far more interventionist approach to children’s diets and provide free, healthy school meals for all. The reward for this approach is a healthier, happier population, with positive eating habits. 

But there are, of course, obstacles.  

Since the inception of schools themselves, school meals have been a contentious issue. It was as far back as the 1940s when legislation was first introduced to force local councils to provide free meals for all schoolchildren. However, this was quickly deemed too costly.

Since then, successive governments have increasingly sought to cut the school meals budget, often through reducing eligibility. For example, in 1971 the education secretary, Margaret Thatcher (who would go on to become prime minister), was dubbed the “milk-snatcher” for rolling back the provision of free milk in Britain’s schools as a cost-cutting measure.

Currently, all children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 are entitled to free school meals in England and Scotland. From Year 3 upwards, eligibility for free school meals is means-tested, and largely dependent upon parents’ receipt of state benefits. 

The privatisation of school meals has attracted much criticism, too. It has been claimed that private caterers are prone to cutting the quality and nutritional value of the food they supply, to cut costs and maximise profits. And it is feared that, as the standard of school meals falls, the lure of easily accessible junk food for young people grows stronger.

Healthy eating helps pupils to learn

It has been proven that there is a direct link between what children eat and how they perform at school. In 2015, a Cardiff University study tracked children’s eating habits and teacher assessments over 18 months. It showed that those children eating healthier items for breakfast were twice as likely to be performing above average at school.

These findings are put in stark context when you consider a 2017 Unicef report that found that almost one-fifth of children under the age of 15 in the UK were living with adults who struggle to pay for food.

Aside from seeing school meals as a tool with which to combat food insecurity, some countries see them as a key part of their curriculum. In Finland, for example, school meals are seen as an investment in children’s futures: improving their health and wellbeing. The Finnish education system sees school meals as a pedagogical tool, through which children are taught about nutrition, healthy eating and maintaining socially positive habits in eating with others.

It could be argued that school meals provision should not just be confined to lunchtime. Organisations such as Magic Breakfast provide schools with food to help children receive a nutritious start to their day. And this is important: a recent study by the University of Leeds found that children who rarely eat breakfast do less well than their classmates in their GCSEs. This kind of food inequality entrenches actual inequality, and prevents children from making the most of their education.  

And, while we’re at it, would it not be a good idea for schools to provide children with a healthy snack at the end of the day? That way, we would avoid sending hungry children home at 3.30pm, so that they end up handing over their parents’ money for crisps, sweets and fizzy drinks.

The key stumbling block

The key stumbling block to the introduction of free school meals for all is obviously cost. It has been estimated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that provision of free school meals for all school children in the UK would cost up to £950 million per year. This is a considerable figure in the short term, but it needs to be seen in the context of huge long-term benefits. 

The IFS found that, during a 2012 pilot of universal free school meals in the North East, the children involved made approximately two months’ additional progress over a two-year period, compared with children from similar areas in the UK. 

And improving children’s health through better diets would provide significant savings further down the line. In 2015, it was estimated by Public Health England that poor diet cost the NHS £11 billion a year. A healthy population translates into a healthier economy, as people take fewer days off through illness caused or aggravated by poor diets. 

The provision of locally sourced free school meals could also give a huge boost to local economies, and help to reduce the environmental impact of our food supply.

We need a cultural shift in perception: we need to move towards seeing school meals as a pedagogical tool in teaching children to make healthy choices, and where we move away from the notion that school meals are just a financial expense that needs to be covered.

Schools are places where we nurture young people, so that they can lead happy and fulfilling lives. And if we put this notion at the heart of education, then we should not stand idly by as poor diet damages the health of our future generations.

Matthew Murray is a primary teacher, and the creator of the literacy website www.2starsandawish.com. He tweets as @2_starsandawish