Teachers feeding hungry children

I think this is such a complex issue. Poverty, deprivation, ignorance, chaotic lifestyle, breakdown of the extended family; all play a part. The causes are multiple and I think the solutions have to be too. They also need to be consistent and properly funded if the cycle is to be broken. Yes some school lunches are better than others, but the budgets are very small.
I do remember when my children were small there was a family nearby with 17 children. The mother used to throw them out of the door in the morning and then throw slices of bread and dripping after them.

A baked potato with cheese filling would be well balanced. Protein and calcium from the cheese, carbs, vitamins and fibre from the unpeeled potato.

I think breakfast clubs are good. Free for those entitled to free dinners.

Some parents are never going to be sorted out. Sad fact of life.

Yes the gap between the haves and the have-nots has got bigger. However I do, like so many on this particular topic, think that things are not so bad that children are unable to be fed at home, even if not in the most balanced way. I am left wondering why these children were brought into the world. I feel so depressed reading all this. How many of these children come from homes where there is satellite telly and the latest flat-screens.

If I had seventeen children, I think I might do that too!

Exactly, flower, and many of them bring mobile phones or iPods to school. The picture alongside the Guardian article was unfortunate, as some of the children looked slightly overfed if anything. Perhaps still 'undernourished' though, for all that.

Totally agree with Mamie it is a complex issue ...no one root cause . but also feel that for some families it is not the lack of funds ..it is the way the funds are used.

I've had children come to school hungry because single mum has been out on the razzle the night before ...too hung over to ensure children even get to school, let alone with full tummies; where the eldest child (still of primary age) has had to get up and get the lunch boxes packed because mum has already gone to work; hungry children that have the latest fashion and/or technology.

Our HSA funded a free breakfast club the week of KS2 SATs week ...just so that the children had a full stomach, in a relaxing environment, chatting with their friends ...it was 'sold' as a social event.

Oh well, it is better to learn a foreign language than learn about finances, budgetting, healthy eating, cooking ...no doubt others could add to this life skills list.

And yes, we would go out and by food for children to eat at lunch time who had been sent with out any food.

How very kind those teachers are to provide needy children with food paid for out of their own pockets.

That sort of thing gives me faith in human nature.

Are some of these children starved of affection too? And what of the follow-on generation?

I salute the teachers.

flower sadly yes! I have many anecdotal stories of the experiences I have had of uncaring /careless/clueless parents! One that always sticks is of a little boy, aged just six, brought late into the school playground. His mum was screaming at him 'I am putting you into care like your brother . You are a useless little s*it , it's my time now. I deserve a break' She did have six children ..the one she was screaming at was number three. Eldest boy was in care because she could not control him. The child she was berating was a lovely child but failed to learn and develop because of this parenting (or lack of). Mum got a place on a midwife training course.

Some parents are just grossly disorganised. When my children were at primary school we lived on a small estate of quite large and relatively expensive houses. I regularly saw my neighbour's small son dashing out at 8.30 to go to the village shop to buy breakfast cereal because they had run out of cereal the previous day and his mother (who didnt work) had forgotten to buy any more. Yes, the children got breakfast, but only because the village shop opened at 8.00am and was only 200 yards away. No lack of money or intelligence in the household, just ineffectual parents.

When working in market research I was involved in a project involving people using token meters to pay for their fuel. We were amazed by the number of well off households that paid for their fuel this way because as they openly admitted they were too disorganised to pay quarterly bills on time (this was before direct debits). Many of these were families.

But, but, but - whatever the issues/judgements are about parental responsibility, or lack of it, education, funding etc, in the end children must be fed. They are the priority, and always must be. They are our responsibility.

I agree with Ariadne

Of course. But the more we make allowances for poor parenting, the more children will be born to people who know they aren't obliged to take responsibility for their offspring - the state will do it for them. I don't know what the solution is, but it seems as though it's a vicious circle.

yes Ariadne which is why our school would feed them ...but that is not the long term solution. But ...how do we, as a society, enable disfunctional families to "manage"?

Think it is only going to get worse now that some families are being moved from expensive rentals, where they may have a support network, to a cheaper property area they don't know!

mamie and ariadne I started a thread a few weeks ago entitled poverty and I guess we are talking about one and the same thing. I despise the fact that billions of pounds are being spent on the Olympics (who cares) and the bloody jubilee (for a woman that is so rich she couldn't even begin to count it) when the reality is that children are cold and hungry in this country every day. If I were the queen (deliberately small case) I couldnt sleep at night for the worry and shame (but there again I don't sleep at night anyway) but I would hazaard a guess that her madje will be sleeping well tonight (thank you very much)secure in the fact that she and her brood are "doing well thank you very much".

It is truly obscene that the rich are very much getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and at the end of the day it will be little children who suffer.

FlicketyB were you a curtain twitcher?

Tax credits are payable, I believe, up to a maximum income of almost £40,000 so the fact that somebody is in receipt of them does not mean they are necessarily a good manager (and how would anybody else know?)
Perhaps we should revert to Dean Swift's 'Modest Proposal' that the poor should eat their babies, thus killing two birds with one stone.
I am heartened to see that Gransnetters do not advocate letting children go hungry in order to teach their parents how to be responsible, or using eugenics to limit the numbers of children born to parents deemed to be unsuitable.

Having read through this thread I believe breakfast clubs are the best option. Kids entitled to school dinners should get their breakfasts free, the others should arrange a direct debit for breakfasts and dinners. That way no-one would know which kids were on free food. Others of course would still eat at home.

It is true, and most of us on here agree, that there will always be hopeless parents who can't get their kids off to school, fed and organised, whatever their intelligence, social status or income.

It's the same in other species of course — the hopeless/feckless parent thing. I wonder if the proportions are similar across species.

The proportions cannot rise above a certain level or the species would become extinct.

That makes sense.

But they probably wouldn't anyway – normal curve and all that.

The offspring of inept animal parents tend not to survive.
What the eugenicists observed was that even if they death rate was a little higher amongst the children of the poor, they were still on average raising larger families than the non-poor. Of course they believed that the poor were all round poor genetic stock.
We should remember that the very poor must have looked very different to the wealthy in the 19th C. Just one factor - rickets - stunted and bent many of their skeletons for instance.
Although you can still find examples of big families amongst poor people, contraception has made a huge change and due to a huge improvement in nutrition and health the poorest no longer look facially different to the affluent. (This has changed in the last 30 years I reckon - i remember looking at some kids and there was a kind of raw look that you don't see these days)
I do notice though in "my" school which is in a deprived area of the S of England, that if you compare the size of kids in the bottom and top maths group at, say 14, the top group are much bigger on average than the bottom. Which probably tells us something about nutrition. And the PE staff tell me that they notice a difference between the size of the kids in our sports teams compared to schools in more affluent parts of town.

There used to be a naive belief in some quarters that children who had difficulties with the academic subjects would excel in sports and games. Unfortunately, the exact opposite was true. 'My' pupils were very rarely successful in the physical subjects and were unlikely to be chosen to be on any teams.
The head boy/girl was also likely to be captain of the sports team.