The double standards of pro-lockdown teaching unions are breathtaking
It doesn’t matter how you explain it. If the story involves Tory MPS voting against free lunches for deprived children, the headline is going to be that Tories hate poor kids. Throw in a famous footballer and you’re really stuffed.
Campaigners for extending free school meals do also have a point. The Covid recession is brutal and poverty is on the rise. The Government ought to be trying to pre-empt the worst effects. Whether a poorly administered scheme for handing out holiday meal vouchers is the best way to do that should be up for debate, but some political battles are not worth it.
What rankles more than the free school meals row, however, is the double standard among its supporters in the unions and Labour Party. Even as they accused their opponents of callousness towards the poor, they argued that we ought to race into a national lockdown that would hit poor children hardest. The two-week, half-term “circuit breaker” pushed for by the National Education Union, for example, would have once again shut down all schools at huge cost to the education of deprived children when there is precious little evidence of Covid transmission among under-15s.
After this year’s fivemonth break in schooling, we ought to be abolishing half terms rather than extending them. Research by the Education Policy Institute found that during the previous lockdown, the poorest third of children spent a whole hour less each day on educational activity than middle-class and rich children. Every two weeks, they lose 10 hours.
The quality of the hours they do get is probably also compromised. The research found poor children are less likely to have access to a suitable space and computer in order to study. So if the proposed “circuit breaker” were extended beyond a fortnight, as one might expect, the disparity would grow. There is even less argument for it, given some tentative indications that Tier 3 restrictions, which stop a long way short of closing schools, can get case numbers down.
The most effective way to support deprived families is to keep schools operating normally. But you will never hear teaching unions or their political allies argue for that. They prefer to stick to the emotive single issue of school dinners.