Teachers feeding hungry children

Are hungry people expected to bow and scrape to their providers Alison ? I would have hoped that the food was given generously and without prejudice.

This totally sums up my argument for free school meals for all young children without the need to beg and scrape for assistance.

I meant

The Mayor of Athens is quoted as saying 'there aren't words enough to thank them' so maybe that's why! [wmile]

petallus I saw that on the news last night at it appeared to me that mostly they just took the food and didn't say anything to the generous farmers who were giving them the food. Didn't look to me like they said thank you!

I see from my newspaper that thousands of people joined a queue for free food in Athens yesterday. An estimated 25 tonnes of fruit and vegetables were snapped up in the space of three hours.

As far as I could see from the accompanying photo no-one in the queue was smoking or eating crisps. Don't know about the flat screen tv though

I had to spend hour meeting with the private meals provider when I was a head. The meals were dire and service poor. The women employed by the company to 'prepare' meals in our school kitchen were paid peanuts and not the most on the ball bunch you would wish to meet. The cook had a very tight budget and menu rules that the company said she had to follow. This led to a very odd set of meals for children. The area managers were apparently nutritionists. I wish that we had had the money to do it ourselves and directly employ a cook and kitchen staff but the contract was set by the LA for so many years. Once in place quality plummeted. That is the free market for you!

Gilly oops, misread it, probably because so much has been said about breakfast. Sorry, shouldn't do things in such a rush.

I didn't mention breakfasts Alison only lunches and milk. Obviously if parents want to take their children home for lunch or provide a packed lunch that would be fine but at least there should be a free lunch available to those who want/need one.

I do think breakfast clubs are a good thing though (not for everyone) but lets not forget all children don't have parents who work conventional hours. My grandchildren often don't know whether they are coming or going with mum and dads shift patterns.

Well, I wouldn't be outraged and I am sure Gilly meant that the meals would be on offer, not obligatory. If the profit motive were removed, so that the meals were made in school kitchens by staff employed by the school, the meals could be hot, nutritious and not too expensive. There would be no stigma, either.
Outsourcing of many services by schools, hospitals, prisons, etc. has allowed some firms to become incredibly rich and I don't believe that they are delivering good value or good services in many areas. Private prisons are much less successful than state-run prisons. Companies wishing to tender for these contracts don't offer lavish hospitality to ministers out of the kindness of their hearts and many ministers involved in the awarding of contracts are employed by the successful bidders after they leave office. The whole system is rotten but neither this or the last government has shown any appetite for tackling corruption - I wonder why?

Alison you are right about parents getting annoyed if offered things or given advice! As school governors we had a huge debate about what, if any, advice we should give parents about healthy lunch boxes...did the school have the right to ban sweets /chocolates etc etc..the person most vociferous and accusing the GB of supporting a Nanny state was a v middle class parent.

It is true parents have the responsibility to rise their children but do they have the 'right' to support the development of unhealthy eating patterns?? So complex the balance between rights and responsibility!

Oh Jess I hope DS1's teacher didn't label him, he was clinically underweight for most of his childhood and I would feed him well and generously and then buy him sausage rolls and crisps to take to school to try to fatten him up!

Gilly I know you are well intentioned but can you image the outrage if all children were given free breakfast and lunches? Would they be good enough? Would it be right to make children go to school early? Why should the state dictate what my child eats? etc., etc., etc.

It is true that there are "hopeless parents" but lets not forget it is the children who we are talking about. Why can't lunches and milk be free to all children up to a certain age (say 10). In the grand scheme of money wasting that seems to be the trend in this country (think Olympics and jubilee) would it really cost that much to ensure all children have at least one decent meal a day during term time? This is 2012 after all.

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.

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.

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

That makes sense.

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

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

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.

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.

FlicketyB were you a curtain twitcher?

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.

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!

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"?

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.