Universal Free School meals

And has society in the UK followed a good trajectory since.....I thought I heard recently enough the amount of food banks in the UK had exploded, its no longer just schools people have to be fed in...real third world type stuff.

I cant help thinking that it has to happen shows something isnt being managed correctly.

Maybe you are all correct and theres no argument or alternative view here that having large proportions of a population that need food provided by the state in a supposedly wealthy developed country means something aint right with the system.

More than 200m allocated to this ever expanding scheme this year with non -Deis schools now involved.

I dunno. It seems to me it would cost about 30m to buy the food for the kids who need it.

Very few policy proposals are bad in isolation but hard not to think there are more deserving areas for that cash.

If you need a school to supply your food....need mind you, not would prefer, would find it convenient, think its a good idea etc.…are you not poor/hungry/homeless......

Im having trouble seeing how its unrelated tbh

This is a good idea. Many parents are not capable of providing proper meals to their children, so this will go some way to addressing that.

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Wow. A much bigger issue than the provisional or not of school meals. We've a massive parenting problem. Even those on social welfare get plenty to buy food. Whinging about poverty but all have huge tvs, x boxes and phones. Loads of fillers, fake tan and botox. I know this from my work where I'm in homes as part of my job. The "poorest " have the best stuff but whinge to the CWO and SVP they've no money. Communions have to be seen to be believed. But they can't, apparently, buy food. Check out how many fake-tanned, fake nailed communion and confirmation makers show up next day for the "breakfast club".…

But children who are going without food ARE ALSO going without sleep, clothing and emotional support.

How is so hard to understand: a parent who is not feeding their kids is not doing lots of other stuff too. Family support is not punishing the parents, it's supporting the kids to break the cycle.

Feeding kids at school is a band-aid. And a loose fitting one at that, 'cos schools are only open for about half the year.

one of my kids (7) gets a sandwich with ham or turkey and cheese, a banana, another piece of fruit ( blueberries currently) and a small container of full fat flavoured Greek style yogurt ( with the least amount of sugar I can find). He currently eats the sandwich at eleven and the yoghurt at lunchtime and is starving after school. He’d eat a bowl of porridge every morning.
so I’m hopeful of two things

1. He will get more protein in his diet with the hot meal
2. He won’t be starving in the afternoon.
   

We will see how it goes

In general I think this will benefit a lot of children. people should give it a chance

Some of this criticism may be valid but the hysterical way it's presented would make you question it. If standards aren't being set or are insufficient then suppliers will exploit that. It's not rocket science.

You would think they are feeding kids with poison.

Much of these ingredients are things you would not recognise or ever have in your cupboard at home.

A lot of kids are probably eating ultra processed foods already at home. So, that's not quite true. Nevertheless, they should strive to provide nutritious meals that don't contain harmful ingredients.

What’s really terrifying is that we are now institutionalising consumption of UPFs. With the roll-out of this scheme to every primary school, every child in the country is going to sit down and open a packaged meal with highly processed food, every day, five days a week. The scheme reinforces this idea that food comes packaged and labelled, and ready to eat, and that you have no interaction with where it comes from, how it was made, and who made it.

Seriously? That sounds like a bias against the very idea of the scheme.

https://www.irishtimes.com/health/2025/01/09/hot-school-meals-scheme-a-progressive-government-policy-set-to-put-childrens-health-at-risk/

I remember speaking with a social worker who visited a number of families in Dublin and it wasn’t uncommon to visit kids who went to school on an empty stomach and were given ham sandwiches for their dinner. Many visited after school clubs where they were fed a hot meal and without that they would never eat a proper meal.

giving kids a meal at school at least makes sure they get a proper meal five days a week, albeit term time only.

Annoying to say the least that a pseudo-medical article is presented as written by "Dr. So-and-so" when he is a Ph.D. not a medical doctor.

But there's worse. "These kinds of additives, especially in their combination and through regular consumption, are disease-promoting" yet no evidence whatsoever is provided for this bald assertion. "Associations" are not evidence. Correlation is not causation.

The Irish Times, is, or at least used to be, better than this. They used to print articles by David Grimes that tore this sort of pseudoscientific scaremongering apart.

Edit: typo

He is but it is poor editorial standards from the IT to not clarify that a pseudo-medical article written by a "Dr." is not a medical doctor.

You can continue to provide a lunch for your kids if you want, they're not obliged to eat what is provided.

If you consider the waste in public spending, the waste from feeding children, even if their parents can afford to feed them better themselves, is completely negligible. It's never a waste to feed anyone. As mitigation they could enforce a policy that if the food is not being eaten for x days in a period, it is discontinued for that child.

zzz

It's click bait.

Absolutely ladened with fear mongering and aspirational flim flam.

The absolute state of the headline.

Crappy parents will be crappy parents no matter what at least now the child will have had a hot meal.

Institutional food is better than no food at all which is what this scheme is attempting to resolve.

Whatever about the quality of the food, it's going to generate an enormous amount of waste because everything is served airplane style in foil trays with disposable cutlery. If the average primary school has 480 students (say 60 in each year) then 5 days a week means 2400 foil trays, cutlery and whatever other disposable crap they're given to eat thrown in the bin every week in every school.

I know it's unavoidable because most schools wouldn't have the facilities for serving on proper crockery and washing up afterwards but it still seems incredibly wasteful.

They use reusable crockery and utensils in my sons school.

The car board container gets sent home with the child.

It's a tiny cardboard box made from sustainable materials apparently.

The chances of any card board getting recycled in this country is pretty slim anyway.

I don't see how bringing in a container would be workable?

Bringing in their own container would only work in the schools that have the facilities to make the lunches themselves onsite. Most of the ones I know are getting the meals delivered hot just before lunch time. For food safety practices & to prevent cross contamination of any potential allergens (such as gluten and dairy), they have to be packaged individually with the child's name on them & the meal inside.

I know my niece's school they have normal cutlery that they use as the school has a small kitchen area with a dishwasher where these things can be put after lunch. And the containers are recycled by the school. Food waste isn't too big either as they put all the leftover lunches (generally children who are out that day) onto a table in the hall & either allow children to swap their meal for another or get an additional one if they're hungry. I think the teachers then take any leftover after that for themselves. My niece has a great appetite so always goes for seconds if there's some available.

It's a long way from the cardboard sandwiches we got in school in the 1980s.

Remember the aim of this is to make life a bit better for the kids who need it, not to cast judgement on parents

I don’t think anyone is opposing kids getting a free school meal.

Didn't realise the scheme had been extended to secondary schools.

Bit harder to get teenagers to stay in and eat a hot meal, when all they want to is go get chips or hang around the local shop.

Do the parents choose the meals?

Maybe they need to talk to their children about what they will eat. Various hot rolls are available from the menus I have seen.

Either way this scheme is for primary schools, it must be another initiative or the school are doing it off their own backs.