Sunday Herald
WHEN Jamie Oliver prompted a school meals revolution south of the Border, ministers in Scotland had a right to feel smug. Way before celebrity chefs muscled in on education and even far in advance of the smoking ban, Scotland had been at the helm of another pioneering health initiative: Hungry For Success, an attempt to get our children playing, achieving and living longer by coaxing them off junk food and on to healthy eating at school...
Morgan also supports the introduction of free meals for all as a way to increase uptake, a policy advocated by Scottish Socialist Party MSP Frances Curran. Curran lodged a bill earlier this year for the introduction of universal free school meals in Scotland. The bill is backed by 21 MSPs, although Labour has failed to give it support, and parliament is expected to vote on it in autumn.
Curran said: “Making meals healthy, which Hungry For Success has done, is only half the equation. We have still got 50% of young people of secondary age who are not getting that healthy school meal and, in order to get them eating it, we’ve got to make them free.”
Curran argues that there are 100,000 children in Scotland who are on working family tax credit or whose families don’t take up their free meal entitlement because of stigma, and are consequently missing out on perhaps their only healthy meal of the day. As part of Hungry For Success, the Executive did encourage local authorities to introduce an anonymised system of free school meal receipt – which is now operated in 44% of schools – to tackle the stigma issue, but Curran says this is not enough. “Free school meals take away this stigma and give them the healthy meal, and those are the children in particular we should be targeting.”
To further her case, Curran has consulted researchers from Hull who, in order to tackle poverty, health and educational attainment, made all school meals free in both primary and secondary schools in May 2004. Take-up increased dramatically from 36% to 64%, with researchers reporting an increase in readiness to learn among the children. “The answer is in Hull,” Curran said, “and what is most interesting is that in the schools where the biggest percentage of children were previously entitled to free school meals, there is also a large percentage of children who are working poor [not entitled to free meals], and uptake in those schools has rocketed to 98%.”
Finland and Sweden have had free school meals for more than 50 years and have reported similar successes. The message of eating healthily and as a social activity is built firmly into the curriculum, and teachers sit down to eat alongside the children at lunch time.
