Teachers feeding hungry children

I agree with Ariadne

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.

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.

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.

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

I salute the teachers.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Stony ground, eh, glam? How sad that the course is not more aprreciated, but it's often the case that the people who stick at things are not the ones who need it most. Hope things do improve for your DD and her course.

DD is at the moment on a course called Family and School Together (FAST) and she along with 4 other volunteers are holding classes for mums to show them how to budget and shop for best results,the course has been going only 4 weeks and is a 3 month course on Monday of this week there where only 5 women and 1 man at the meeting out of the original 12 who started,so what ever help you give some families they don't seem able to keep it up,there is no problem with child care when the sessions take place as a childrens club is set up and the staff provide them with a meal cooked by the members,if things don't improve they could loose the funding.

Just for the record, school lunches at DDs Scottish state primary school are extremely good. The HT eats them as well. I'm getting just a tiny bit tired of people saying school dinners are bad. Some school dinners are bad, no doubt, but not all. Please don't tar them all with the same brush.

A baked potato with a cheese filling (say) and a flapjack sounds pretty filling to me, depending on the size of the potato. Perhaps not perfectly balanced, but certainly filling.

As for the kids who only have two choc biscuits – it could be because that's all they'll eat and parents have discovered this over time and don't want to 'waste' other food on them which will only come back home uneaten, or it could be that they've eaten the rest already at morning break. I've come across both scenarios. One of my good friends at secondary school used to bring sandwiches. She was always dieting (and always hungry). She used to eat the sandwich fillings and give the bread to me at morning break. Then she would have nothing, or not much, at lunch time and I would have a school dinner. I'm pretty sure all of this and more still goes on.

The school dinners I had in the sixties and seventies were fine. Well cooked and good straight forward food. No complaints from me.

Sorry. Back to thread. Just trying to chuck in some balance. I'm sure plenty of kids are perfectly well fed on school food.

Nanaej Perhaps parents who fail their children should be made to go to classes so they learn to cope. They will never learn if the state takes over their role for them.

I have to say that no one taught me to cook or to manage money but we have gone through times when we were desperately hard up and I got on and learned. It is just common sense but then that is not very common!

Lunchboxes - I have seen children with "lunch boxes" that contain a couple of chocolate biscuits!
Interesting isn't it that the country afforded proper, filling school dinners when it was very much poorer than it is now. I was visualising my own school dinners which although not well cooked were substantial. Now you get something like one baked potato with a filling and a flapjack (puddings compulsory under FSM)
Or a miserable slice of pizza and a salad.

Feeding children shouldn't be an educational requirement, it's the parents responsibility surely. Perhaps the parents need educating

AlisonMA they can't all do it because everyone is so different and has different life experience etc!

If you don't know how to manage and plan spending a very limited budget, and believe me there are people who don't, punishing the kids is not really going to help!

I totally agree parents should take responsibility for their children but until there is a parenting exam prior to having a baby there will be families who fail their children deliberately, accidently or through inadequacy. Different actions needed for different circumstances.

I do agree that all children need breakfast but wonder if providing it for them instead of expecting their parents to do so is just encouraging the welfare dependancy?

I have a friend who receives tax credits so presumably does not earn enough to keep her family but her 2 teenage girls are well fed and have a good life with occassional days out and campling holidays. If she can do it, why can't others?

Maybe we should take a harder line on parents' responsibilites and make them look after their own children? After all if you are a drug addict and don't look after them they are taken away from you. Maybe such a threat would make them sit up and take notice. I know this sounds hard and is going to upset some of you but I really don't believe throwing money at every situation is going to change things.

but not the kids fault..they did not choose their parents! As I got more experience (as a person and a professional!) I did challenge parents whose kids were not fed and sometimes discovered all kinds of terrible issues that needed professional help but other times found it was parents either unable or unwilling to get themselves properly organised. As a school we phoned one mum every day at 8:00 to remind her to start coming to school. She suffered from OCD and had to go through a series of actions before she could leave the home. our prompt helped her to start her routine so the kids were not so late!

I can remember my childrens' primary school there were always children who arrived at the last minute or even late. Always the same children, these were the ones who didn't have breakfast as the whole family preferred to sleep in rather then get up earlier and have breakfast. My daughter used to say these kids are the contents of their lunchbox at break and would have little left at lunchtime so mooched from the other children. In the end all lunchboxes were removed until lunchtime to stop this. This was a fairly affluent area no council estates etc. Just lazy parents.

We always had a packet of cereal in the staff room for kids who came to school and obviously had not had breakfast. I have given my lunch items to children who were hungry. It was not a rare occurrence even in Kingston! I agree that sometimes it is bad financial management, poor prioritising etc of parent but if there is a child in school who is very hungry it needs feeding. I think the figures are probably about right.
It is dreadful that in our comparatively wealthy country that any child should be hungry. I think the lack of family /generational support has been lost for many women, maybe as far back as 70's, so there are 2-3 generations now who have not had a good model of 'housekeeping' & 'mothering' and a few parenting classes are not going to fill that gap!

There are multiple explanations but if a child is hungry he can't wait for legislation or parental education to take effect. Here in the southwest, an area of high unemployment and deprivation, teachers organised for over 900 children to indirectly receive vouchers for a voluntary organised food bank last year. Big Society, but not acceptable.

I think jess's point that people on low incomes (and with rotten jobs) or people unable to get work who are on benefits, often suffer from depression as a result of feeling useless to their society. It's no wonder if, indirectly, their children suffer too. I wonder where along the way we lost that together feeling that seems to have grown up during and after the war, and where along the way government forgot that the nation's children are the nation's futue work force and need nurturing properly, which would include helping their parents out of depression.