Free School Meals
Firstly, I’d like to welcome BVM back and thank Miranda and the editors for the invitation to contribute.
Free School Meals for eligible children during the holidays have dominated the news recently. I voted with the government on its amendment to Labour’s proposition of extending Free School Meals during holidays up until Easter 2021 and I’d like to explain why.
The government’s amendment to the debating motion tabled by Labour which I backed included outlining what has already been done to support families affected by the pandemic. Overall, the package for supporting people is larger than those of comparable economies and Chancellor Rishi Sunak is widely credited with having done a good job. This has included upping Universal Credit by £1000 and distributing large sums to local authorities – including millions to Wiltshire Council - to make local provision for vulnerable people. I’m pleased to say this extends to the 8000 vulnerable children identified in Wiltshire during the school holidays.
Cutting through any partisan political opportunism, what I hope this debate now does is focus attention on better ways of helping vulnerable children whose life chances will have been damaged further by COVID. That means so much more than ad hoc meal vouchers, a popular way of dealing with the short term though they may be.
I’m thinking about things like lunch and breakfast clubs with catch up activities on the menu as well as food. The levelling up agenda means focusing on children left behind, now with every prospect of lagging behind further because of COVID. It means attending to their nutritional needs, of course, but also the education and skills that will give them a chance to maximize their potential throughout life.
Beyond school, it means looking afresh at Further Education and apprenticeships which have been shamefully neglected in our modern obsession with poorly taught degrees in subjects of little relevance to working lives or the UK economy on which we all depend.
I look forward to more news on a rebalancing of our education and skills priorities shortly. Maybe at last we will learn the lessons of economies that have been so very much more successful over the past couple of generations, notably Germany.
If Marcus Rashford’s campaign has a lasting legacy, it may not just be about food. I hope it is in getting to the heart of inequality of opportunity in this country.