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The historian James Vernon describes the school meal as a ‘peculiarly modern institution’. Initiated by European philanthropists in the late nineteenth century, its practice spread across the globe as a ‘central tool of welfare and development programs’ before becoming a ‘favored target of neoliberal welfare reforms during the closing decades of the twentieth century’. More than just a means of addressing poor nutrition, school meals also sought to promote ‘social education’. This reminds us that policies such as feeding schoolchildren can be pursued by different actors and for different ends; and that their provision, and attitudes towards them, change over time. The focus in what follows is primarily on England. Political devolution in the late 1990s changed the United Kingdom’s welfare landscape although the Scottish government’s decision in September 2024 to shelve, on financial grounds, much-heralded plans for an expanded school meals service shows that all UK administrations face similar pressures. As used here, the term ‘feeding’ embraces at various points school meals, the provision of milk, and initiatives such as breakfast clubs.
The period before the First World War was crucial in raising issues about the feeding of children by the state which persist in policy debates. With the introduction of compulsory elementary education in England (and elsewhere in the UK) by around 1880 it quickly became apparent that many children were unable to benefit due to their poor physical condition, to their own detriment and to that of economy and society more broadly. Hence concern was expressed over the future of the ‘children of the nation’, a vogue phrase which implicitly saw children as potential ‘social investments’, or human capital to be enhanced. By the end of the century a patchwork of local initiatives to feed ‘necessitous children’ already existed. In Edinburgh, for instance, the Flora C. Stevenson Committee for Feeding and Clothing Destitute Children was founded in 1878 and by 1907 was the city’s largest single provider of school meals. The formidable Stevenson told a Commons Select Committee on School Meals that it would be an ‘evil day’ were Scottish authorities obliged to provide school meals. What was required was an awakening of the public conscience, not the undermining of parental responsibility.
A further cause for concern was unease about the ‘quality’, or population health, of the British people. In turn, this raised questions about the ‘future of the race’ in an era of growing international competition, economic and military. It was widely felt, moreover, that while the physical condition of many adults was beyond saving, children’s health would benefit from direct intervention. An official committee set up to examine the nation’s ‘physical deterioration’, and which paid much attention to the state of the nation’s children, reported in 1904 that witnesses overwhelmingly agreed that the time had come when ‘the State should realise the necessity of ensuring adequate nourishment’ for schoolchildren. Collaborative voluntary/local authority schemes in certain urban areas, for example Birmingham, were also noted, further evidence of local initiatives.
In practical terms, school meals had the immediate advantage that under compulsory education schoolchildren were an easily-accessible ‘captive audience’ – ideal from a public health standpoint. And although not always explicitly articulated, school meals were seen as having the potential to enhance children’s social skills. Social researchers such as B.S. Rowntree, meanwhile, had identified a lifetime cycle of poverty a labourer might experience. This included the period when, after marriage and the arrival of two or three children, ‘poverty will again overtake him’ and last for at least ten years, that is until his children began to enter the labour market. Again, school-feeding seemed to offer some sort of pragmatic remedy.
Politically, the pre-1914 era saw the arrival of ‘New Liberalism’ which proposed that society was an organic entity, not just the sum of its parts, and hence that injury to any component had implications for the rest of the social body. This was an important counter-argument to unqualified individualism and the notion of ‘economic man’, each much beloved by classical economists (then, as now). The same period saw the emergence of organised working-class politics, notably in the formation of the Labour Party and bodies such as the Women’s Labour League, both active campaigners for school meals (children as key to the socialist future). Some left-wing organisations even demanded the ‘state maintenance’ of all children, a propaganda bonus for their political opponents.
In England, the legislative breakthrough came under the reforming Liberal administrations of 1906-1914. The 1906 Education (Provision of Meals) Act, originating in a Bill introduced by a Labour MP then taken up by the government, allowed, although it did not compel, local authorities (rather than Poor Law bodies) to provide school meals to ‘necessitous children’. This was to be funded by local taxation and without any formal stigma attaching to parents, although in principle they were expected to contribute to costs. The Act’s evident modesty notwithstanding, it did not go uncontested. Social welfare’s voice of individualism and voluntarism, the Charity Organisation Society, described the Act as ‘a big step…towards the entire maintenance of children by the State’ (an allusion to radical socialist ambitions). It would undermine parental responsibility and, thereby, the family, the foundation of a stable society. If school meals were to be provided, this should be by voluntary organisations which would do so without calling on public funds and were better-equipped to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving. The moralism of this approach remains, for some, a foundational issue in welfare provision, as does that of costs. It is important, too, that the 1906 Act was one of a raft of welfare measures enacted at this time, some of which were of more immediate political significance, for example those addressing unemployment. Child welfare thus had to compete, as it still does, with other areas of policy for resources, political and administrative commitment, and public attention and support.
As noted, the 1906 Act was permissive, a situation unlikely to change in the inter-war era when parts of the country experienced profound socio-economic depression - precisely those areas, of course, which would have benefitted most from more systematic school-feeding. Nonetheless, advances in medical and nutritional science bolstered the case for such support. In the 1930s the Scottish scientist John Boyd Orr carried out a number of surveys in urban Scotland. These demonstrated that regularly giving children even relatively small amounts of milk had positive health outcomes. But providing milk for schoolchildren, a cheaper and more limited policy than school meals, too proved problematic. Official support was delayed until 1933 on financial grounds and, until 1946, parents were expected to contribute to the cost (thereby potentially limiting impact on the social groups which would have benefitted most).
In 1938 The British Medical Journal reported on recent research by a voluntary organisation, the revealingly-named Children’s Minimum Council. This had identified problems in defining what constituted ‘adequate’ nutrition. But, however measured, many children were clearly undernourished, with both short-term and long-term health consequences. Unsurprisingly, those from poorer homes were especially vulnerable. As to school-feeding, over half of the 316 English and Welsh local education authorities did not provide meals, and 69 did not provide free milk. Taking England and Wales as a whole, just over 8% of children received any food and/or milk - hence the description of the 1906 Act as ‘haphazard’. As the BMJ commented, this was ‘miserably inadequate provision’ (although there was almost certainly a demand issue here, since historically uptake has varied by, for example, region and class). It had been estimated that providing free midday meals would cost around £36mn, possibly regarded by some as ‘beyond the realms of practical politics at the present’. On the other hand, there would be ‘the saving in the cost of medical services and the gain from increased economic efficiency’.
Overall, and despite the findings of medical scientists and of other voluntary bodies such as The Committee Against Malnutrition (another revealing name), progress between the wars was, at best, steady while undoubtedly slow.
In his still-influential account of the social services during the Second World War Richard Titmuss, advocate and theorist of Britain’s ‘welfare state’, argued that the state-provided school meals service had, until the 1940s, been poorly regarded, partly (rightly or wrongly) because of association with the Poor Law. Titmuss was hinting at the stigma which still attached to the latter and thus, by extension, to school meals. But during the war ‘something very close to a revolution’ had occurred in the attitudes of both providers and recipients. The scheme had become a social service contributing to both the physical nurture of children and to their ‘social education’. Titmuss’s optimistic account has been qualified. But it remains important in interpretations of the creation of the ‘welfare state’, including the part played by schemes such as school meals; and in its depiction of the hoped-for social as well as nutritional benefits which would accrue.
The 1944 Education Act, delivered by the Conservative politician R.A. Butler but with widespread support, sought to rationalise the provision of school education, including some associated welfare functions, throughout England and Wales. Among its many components was the compulsory provision of school meals and of free milk (for the former, parental charges could be waived in cases of hardship). Butler himself, an embodiment of ‘One Nation’ Toryism, captured the spirit of the times by claiming that his Act would be ‘as much social as educational’, and would result in ‘welding us all into one nation’.
Butler’s important contribution notwithstanding, the ‘welfare state’, especially during its ‘classic’ phase from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, is a project closely associated with the social-democratic left. Although imperfectly realised, either in implementation or in being systematically thought through, school-feeding was an integral part of this project. Notwithstanding that plans for free and universally-available school meals were abandoned early on, the scheme might still be seen as a ‘success’ in that in 1948 just over half of all schoolchildren received them, the proportion rising to nearly three-quarters by the mid-1970s, while for much of the period school milk was universally provided, at least to primary schoolchildren.
A further dimension to an already complicated situation came with social scientific research in the 1960s which showed that, despite the widespread understanding of Britain as an ‘affluent society’, some 2.25mn children were living in poverty. One consequence was the formation of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) which has since campaigned to reveal the less-welcome characteristics of the ‘welfare state’, particularly as they impact on children, and to propose compensatory measures. With respect to school meals, local activists revealed that recipients might be subject to deliberately humiliating treatment or be given sub-standard food. Frank Field, one of the organisation’s early leading figures, was thus moved to write reports with titles such as The Stigma of Free School Meals (1974) and Free School Meals: The Humiliation Continues (1977). None of this sat comfortably with Butler’s dream of ‘welding us all into one nation’ while again reminding us of the stigma which persistently attaches to many forms of welfare provision.
From a very different starting-point from that of Butler or the social-democratic left, the state-feeding of schoolchildren became a target, on the grounds of cost and the need for personal responsibility, of the New Right. The Conservatives, in power from 1979 to 1997, passed the 1980 Education Act which removed the obligation for local education authorities to provide school meals. This approach had already been signalled by Margaret Thatcher (as ‘milk snatcher’) who, when Education Secretary in a previous Conservative government, she had abolished free school milk, another plank of the 1944 Act, for most primary schoolchildren. Illustrating the enduring complexities of the issue, though, in the 1960s Labour had expanded access to feeding for children of larger families while abolishing free school milk for secondary schoolchildren. Another sign of the times was the fate of the Black Report of the 1970s which proposed universal free school meals as a means of combatting growing health inequalities. The Report was quickly ‘lost’ by the incoming Conservative government. Expenditure on school-feeding, and nutritional standards, fell sharply over the lifetime of the Conservative administrations.
The half-century since the 1970s has seen the undermining of the social democratic ‘welfare state’ with greater emphasis on individual responsibility, expenditure restraint, selective services, managerialism, and an increased role for the private sector. Broadly speaking, this has held whichever main party has been in power, although under New Labour between 1997 and 2010 serious, and successful, attempts were made to alleviate child poverty. Again illustrating the complexities of school feeding, though, at the creation of the Coalition government in 2010 the Conservatives apparently accepted a Liberal Democrat proposal for some form of free school meals provision. This rumbled on inconclusively throughout the Coalition’s lifetime, with The Times reporting in 2014 that the Liberal Democrat ambition for a hot lunch had been downgraded to a nutritious meal, a definition which might include sandwiches; and that a dissenting Liberal Democrat described the current policy as apparently ‘dreamt up overnight and sketched out on the back of a fag packet’. This sorry episode illustrates how intractable implementing an apparently simple policy such as school meals can be; how the absence of systematic forethought might in fact be explained by the issue’s relatively low status on the policy agenda; and how, notwithstanding the undoubted rigours of ‘austerity’, some form of provision persisted.
The growth over recent decades, and especially since the 2008 financial crisis, of non-state feeding initiatives can be seen as a response to the complex, unstable, and limited situation in the public sector, unwittingly highlighting the notion that there has always been a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ wherein the balance between state and non-state provision shifts over time. It is hardly a coincidence, meanwhile, that this development parallels the growth of voluntary food banks.
In October 2023 the future Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, told Labour Party conference that government’s role was to ‘extend opportunity – fundamentally to extend freedoms’ to everyone. These included freedom from ignorance, illness, injustice, and poverty alongside freedom to achieve, succeed, learn and enjoy, take part and speak out. These had been stripped back by Conservative administrations but were the ‘freedoms our children deserve, and it is the future which once again a Labour government will give them’. One means of achieving this was ‘as children start at primary school, we’ll deliver breakfast clubs to start each day’. There are echoes here of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ and Beveridge’s ‘Five Giants’, well-established historical allusions for social democratic proponents of state welfare. Phillipson’s speech made clear her party’s ambition to improve all children’s welfare and prospects, with school feeding playing an important part. Much of this is addressed in the recently-announced Children’s Wellbeing Bill while the newly-created Child Poverty Taskforce seeks, again quoting Phillipson, to address the deprivation which ‘not only harms children’s lives now’ but ‘damages their future prospects and holds back our economic potential as a country.
Showing how quickly things can change, though, Labour’s 2019 election manifesto had promised to ‘poverty proof’ schools by, for instance, not only encouraging breakfast clubs but also providing free meals to all primary school children. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) notes, the latter, more expensive, policy has apparently been dropped. Breakfast clubs do, though, have the advantage of acting as pre-school childcare, so potentially reducing costs for parents and allowing their easier participation in the labour market (although the evidence for this is unclear), as well as (presumably) enhancing their children’s nutritional intake.
That action might be necessary was highlighted by a 2022 BBC survey which recorded the byzantine complexities regarding access to school meals in England (for example, that parents/parent had to be receiving income-related benefits, but not in employment); and that different eligibility criteria operated elsewhere in the UK. Some 1.25mn infant pupils attending English schools received free meals as of right, while 1.9mn others were eligible under the terms of the scheme, a 9% increase over the previous year. The proportion of children entitled to such provision varied considerably across the country, but ‘generally matches regional data about deprivation and wealth'.
Campaigning organisations fleshed out this murky picture. Also in 2022, CPAG reported that 800,000 children, despite living in poverty, were denied free school meals (the organisation now estimates this as 900,000). This was because from school year 3 such provision was means-tested. England was thus, at that point, lagging ‘far behind’ other UK nations aiming for universal models of school feeding.
In 2024, meanwhile, The Sutton Trust outlined the problems facing education. The causes of these were complex but linking them was ‘the recurring theme of poverty and hunger’. Particular concerns, some of which had been in play for over 100 years as had some of the proposed solutions and benefits, were that hungry children struggled to concentrate, had low energy levels, and were more likely to be involved in disruptive behaviour. Consequently, pupils’ development and academic achievement suffered. The Trust therefore advocated both an expanded school meal scheme and increased breakfast club provision ‘beyond the patchy cover currently on offer’. Breakfast clubs had been shown to ‘tackle hunger’ and to ‘help poorer families with the cost of ensuring better nutrition for their children’. Such support could improve children’s concentration and readiness for their actual schooling while giving them ‘valuable social engagement before class’. All this in turn might result in ‘better class behaviour and attendance, ultimately leading to higher attainment’.
If breakfast clubs are indeed the new government’s preferred option, can more be said about their benefits and drawbacks? An IFS analysis, like the Sutton Trust’s inadvertently highlighting historically long-established issues, noted Labour’s argument that breakfast clubs would improve learning, address high absenteeism rates, support families during a cost-of-living crisis, and further help parents by effectively offering childcare prior to actual schooling. Whether any of this was achievable, and at what cost, ‘really depends on the details’. There was more than one model of a ‘breakfast club’ – for instance, whether breakfasts were consumed in classrooms or, more ‘traditionally’, in school canteens. The latter allowed for greater social interaction, possibly benefitting individual attainment. Less positively, breakfast clubs appeared to be part of a broader child welfare strategy which would place greater burdens on schools, already under budgetary and staffing pressures. As to overall costs, a programme based on food in the classroom (the cheapest option), and with take-up rates well below 50% (the experience of existing schemes and one with a long historical pedigree), would probably be achievable within proposed budgetary level.
Labour’s current proposals for breakfast clubs are the most recent stage in a history stretching back more than a century. Then, compulsory education vividly illustrated many children’s poor physical condition, raising questions about what impact this might have on both individual attainment and on their future contribution to society and economy. The Education Secretary’s emphasis on restoring and realising children’s ‘freedoms’, alongside her administration’s prioritising of economic growth and enhancing human capital, already suggest strong historical continuities around the state-feeding of schoolchildren.
What lessons, then, might be drawn from this complicated history? First, those children who have received some form of state-supported feeding will have benefitted, however slightly and with whatever qualifications. Children’s morbidity and mortality rates have declined sharply since the late nineteenth century and while it would be absurd to attribute this simply to school-feeding, it is less so to see such measures as part of broader state welfare package which has delivered positive outcomes.
Second, it is nonetheless undeniable that provision has always been patchy geographically, socially, and in terms of eligibility and uptake. Addressing such anomalies is a major challenge for any administration seeking to maximise and universalise a measure such as breakfast clubs so that all recipients derive equal benefit from them, perhaps even leading to a reduction in the inequalities characteristic of modern British society. The ambition that school feeding promote ‘social education’ is more opaque, and difficult to measure, but has been there from the outset. It deserves more attention, as do the tangentially-related issues of ‘stigma’ and why some parents choose not to avail themselves of any services on offer.
Third, another recurring theme has been costs and, thereby, what benefits might accrue – especially if these might not be obvious in the short-term. In turn, this feeds into the issue of welfare priorities and the extent to which governments are committed to pursuing measures of school-feeding, and with what level of public support. The circumstances of two key pieces of twentieth century legislation – the Acts of 1906 and of 1944 – are instructive. Both were passed in eras when social reform featured prominently on the political agenda, and were hence part of broader welfare programmes enjoying widespread support. Equally, though, school-feeding schemes are vulnerable – indeed an easy target – in periods when the aims and scope of state-funded social provision are challenged. Context, and especially prevailing attitudes to state welfare, is thus crucial.
Fourth, any government department whose remit only includes England has to be aware of developments in other UK nations. There was limited potential for ‘policy divergence’ prior to the late 1990s. But this has become a significant characteristic of twenty-first century social policy, including in school-feeding, a rather different situation from that of the preceding century. If nothing else, this raises questions of equity (should, for instance, a child in Wales be treated differently from a child in England and, if so, why?).
Finally, the impact and implications of school-feeding, however operationalised, are not confined to its recipients – parents and schools, for example, are among those directly or indirectly affected. Historically, child welfare policies have rarely been just about children, so school-feeding raises, as it always has, questions such as that of parental responsibility. Likewise, should it be used to address pressures on family finance or to provide childcare? Ultimately, though, there is a more fundamental question – why is school-feeding necessary at all? The short answer, and applicable across the period discussed here, is the persistence of child poverty. Measures such as breakfast clubs can undoubtedly provide much-needed and welcome relief and support for many children and their families (and, more pragmatically, may be cheaper than, say, removing the two-child benefit cap). But society needs to confront the challenge that, ultimately, such policies cannot in themselves fully address a deep-rooted, longstanding structural problem.
Atkins, P. ‘Fattening Children or Fattening Farmers? School Milk in Britain, 1921-1941’, Economic History Review, 58, 1, 2005
British Medical Journal, ‘Malnutrition among School Children’, II, 10th September 1938
Harris, B., The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995)
Hendrick, H. Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debate (Bristol: Policy Press, 2003)
Lambie-Mumford, H., and Sims, L., ‘”Feeding Hungry Children”: The Growth of Charitable Breakfast Clubs and Holiday Hunger Projects in the UK’, Children and Society, 32, 2018
Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration: Vol I, Report and Appendix, London, HMSO, 1904
Thane, P. and Davidson, R., The Child Poverty Action Group, 1965 to 2015 (London: CPAG, 2016)
Titmuss, R., Problems of Social Policy (London: HMSO, 1950)
Vernon, J. ‘The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain’, American Historical Review, 110, 3, 2005
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