Alex Sampson, Plymouth Socialist Party
Keir Starmer’s Labour government announced a week before the cutting spending review that it will extend the free school meals programme to include the children of all families on Universal Credit in England. It claims this will lift 100,000 children completely out of poverty. Currently, only children from households earning less than £7,400 a year in total are eligible!
While the aim of ensuring children aren’t starving at school is to be welcomed, the Labour government is applauding itself while ignoring the elephant in the room – funding. Currently, schools only receive £2.58 per child for school meals, which is rising by a pitiful 3p to £2.61 from September, while the average hot school meal actually costs about £3.16 to make. Schools are already subsidising free meals for children from budgets already stretched after a decade and a half of cuts. This will only become a bigger problem once eligibility increases.
Woefully underfunded schools, especially in poorer areas, struggle to find the money for school meals, unfunded pay rises for teachers and increasing day-to-day running of a school in a cost-of-living crisis. Inevitably, the quality of education in these schools will be further eroded as overstretched headteachers make further cuts to support staff and other important school services.
Free school meals should be universal. Councils can implement that policy now; all school students in Tower Hamlets, east London, where the council is run by ‘independent’ party Aspire, get free school meals, for example. A council carrying out the policy needs to combine it with a campaign for government funding.
How to end child poverty
Government ministers, who dine on heavily subsidised steaks and salmon, tell us they are committed to ending child poverty, but their actions show these words to be empty. Child poverty doesn’t happen in isolation. If a child is going to school hungry, then their parents are already starving. This government could make huge steps towards ending child poverty by scrapping the two-child benefit cap, ensuring that all parents are paid a decent living wage of at least £15 an hour, given secure, safe, reasonably priced housing, free childcare and free school breakfasts and lunches for all children, all fully funded.
Of course, Labour, like the Tories before them, will tell us that such policies are unaffordable. We say that they are perfectly affordable if we used the wealth of society to fund them. By taking into public ownership the top 150 companies and banks under democratic workers’ control, we could plan production for what we need not what makes a profit for a few. In such a socialist society no child would ever have to go to school hungry, and every child would receive the high-quality education they deserve. Working-class children would be able to achieve more than they can ever manage under this blighted capitalist system.
