Parents must accept some responsibility for feeding their children nutritious meals, a council’s leadership has been told, amid concerns that a lack of nutritious food is linked to poor behaviour in classrooms and a rising number of school exclusions.
North Yorkshire County Council’s deputy leader Councillor Gareth Dadd questioned what the authority was doing to promote parent responsibility as the meeting was told the council was working on a number of fronts to teach both pupils and other residents about providing wholesome meals.
The concerns follow a group of 150 headteachers last week urging Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to increase school breakfast funding by £18m at next month’s budget, saying pupils are disrupting lessons as hunger was getting worse.
The letter warned how the national school breakfast programme would only be available to a quarter of the 10,000 schools across England that experience high levels of disadvantage.
The warning came as the Local Government Association highlighted how 215,000 eligible children were not receiving free school meals.
A meeting of the council’s executive had heard the county had seen almost 2,000 suspensions from schools during this academic year so far, which represented a 29 per cent increase on the previous year.
At the same time, following a drive to promote the take up of free school meals by the council, the number of pupils receiving food had risen, but so had the number of children who were eligible.
Councillor Paul Haslam told the meeting:
“I am quite convinced, anecdotally, that food is a critical, and often children that are disruptive in class is a result of them not having breakfast.”
In response, executive members highlighted a range of of schemes promoted by the council, including breakfast clubs, school programmes, adult education initiatives and projects run by leisure services.
Councillor Dadd said:
“I hear a lot about breakfast clubs, I hear a lot about nutrition within the state provision in schools and the like. What work are we doing as a directorate to promote parent responsibility in terms of nutrition, in terms of feeding children with a balanced and controlled diet?
“Are we putting a similar amount of effort into that, because it seems to me, if I can make a slightly controversial statement, that the focus is always on the state, the council, everybody else to fulfil that obligation, when actually it’s a two-way street is it not?”
Director of children’s services Stuart Carlton said he was certain of links between children’s behaviour and attainment at school and their security at home, whether that be food or family stability.
He added children were taught nutritional values at schools and the council oversaw the provision of healthy school meals and provided advice about packed lunches.
A Department for Education spokesman said its breakfast programme was a lifeline to families.
He added:
“We know this supports attainment, wellbeing and readiness to learn, which is why we’re investing up to £30m in the programme, to help up to 2,500 schools in the most disadvantaged areas.”
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