£15 school meal box? That’s hard to swallow
Rashford leads fury over parcel ‘meant to feed a child for a week’
IT looks barely sufficient to feed a child for a single day, with its solitary tin of beans, shrinkwrapped cheese slices and meagre portions of fruit and veg.
But astonishingly this food – the contents of a free school meal replacement parcel supposedly costing the equivalent of £15.20 in vouchers – is somehow meant to last a week.
The mother who posted the image on social media worked out the hamper would cost £5.22 from a supermarket, and demanded: ‘Where’s the rest of the money gone?’
There were shocked reactions to the image – and hundreds of other parents posted shots of similar replacement meals.
Footballer Marcus Rashford, whose campaign for free school meals during lockdown
‘Something is going wrong’
led to a Government U-turn last summer, called the situation ‘unacceptable’.
He said ‘ something is going wrong’ with the school meal delivery system – in place until the voucher system used during the first lockdown gets up and running again – adding: ‘We need to fix it, quickly!’
And Justin Byam Shaw, founder of the Felix Project charity which feeds the needy, also condemned the paltry school meals, showing an image of a feast his organisation could supply for £30 – two weeks’ vouchers.
The parent who posted the image said in her tweet that the food was supposed to cover lunches for one child for ten days and was instead of two £15.20 weekly vouchers. Writing under the name RoadsideMum, she said it contained ‘2 days jacket potato with beans, 8 single cheese sandwiches, 2 days carrots, 3 days apples, 2 days soreen, 3 days frubes, spare pasta & tomato’.
She added: ‘I priced that likefor-like from Asda and it came to £5.22. Where’s the other £25?’
The post went viral, with countless other parents sharing images of paltry supplies of pasta, potatoes, beans and crisps.
Rashford fumed that ‘children deserve better than this’, while Downing Street criticised the ‘completely unacceptable’ contents of some of the packages.
However, the company who supplied the school meal replacement in the Twitter image said it in fact represented a week of food, not two weeks.
A spokesman for school caterers Chartwells said: ‘We have had time to investigate the picture. For clarity this shows five days of free school lunches, not ten days, and the charge for food, packing and distribution was £10.50 and not £30 as suggested. However, in our efforts to provide thousands of food parcels a week at extremely short notice we are very sorry the quantity has fallen short in this instance.’
The Government has promised the free school meals voucher scheme will be restarted soon.
Until then, schools are being asked to provide food parcels to children on school meals while they are closed – a situation Geoff Barton, of the Association of School and College Leaders, says has left schools ‘having to piece together provision’.