Exposed: £650m school lunch scam
Children are offered pizza and chips in bid to claim more cash
SCHOOLS are putting tempting meals such as fish and chips on their lunchtime menus to boost the amount of Government cash they obtain from Nick Clegg’s £650 million free dinners scheme.
Funding for individual schools depends on how many pupils eat cooked meals instead of bringing in their own packed lunch.
The sums of money – schools are paid £2.30 for every lunch they provide – are calculated by counting the number of pupils who eat the dinners on two days of the year.
But The Mail on Sunday has seen emails from schools to parents suggesting that heads are ‘cooking the books’ by getting as many pupils as possible to eat the lunch on those days by offering popular – but not necessarily healthy – dishes such as fish and chips and pizzas.
Critics said schools were therefore distorting the true take-up of free meals and could end up with more money than they needed by exaggerating demand.
The hot meals, which are given free to children in the first three years of primary school, were introduced by the then Deputy Prime Minister Mr Clegg in 2014 following fears that ‘ unhealthy’ lunch boxes were fuelling obesity. They have become a political football during this General Election, with Labour promising to roll them out for all primary school pupils while the Conservatives are vowing to axe them for all but the poorest children and replace them with free breakfasts.
At present, schools are handed the Government money – more than £430 a year for each five- to sevenyear-old who eats the free dinners. One primary in Sevenoaks, Kent, told parents earlier this month that it was offering a ‘special census day BBQ lunch’. It said: ‘Census Day is a special day for the school as some of our funding for the year is dependent on how many children have a school lunch on that day.
‘ Therefore, we would ask that parents look at the menu with their children and hope to see as many children as possible enjoying this meal next Thursday’.
Another in Berkshire, said it was ‘essential’ that the infant school had ‘maximum take-up’ on census day, and children were offered fish and chips rather than pasta.
Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said: ‘Schools may be technically playing by t he rules but they are cooking the books. They are likely to be generating a surplus of money which they can then spend on other things.’
Supporters of free dinners, who include chef Jamie Oliver, say they are vital for children’s health and boost academic achievement. But this newspaper found last year that tens of thousands of pupils who had been in an extended version of the scheme for five years were getting fatter while their grades showed no significant improvement.