North East MP urges Chancellor to maintain funding for free school meals for infants
The Government is under pressure to continue to fund free meals for infant school pupils.
Sharon Hodgson MP, new Shadow Minister for Children and Families and MP for Washington and Sunderland West, has written to Chancellor George Osborne urging him to continue with the free infant school meals policy first introduced by former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in 2014.
Ms Hodgson told SCHOOLS NorthEast that the possibility of the Government scrapping this policy is “dismaying”. She added:
“In areas like the North-East where we see high levels of deprivation and poverty, including pronounced health and educational inequalities, the introduction of universal infant free school meals is a positive intervention that will give children the best start in life.
“This is especially true for those children who rely on these free meals as the only source of nutritional food during term-time and if this spending cut goes ahead, more than 35,000 children here in the North-East will lose out on a free school meal.”
Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, when questioned by the Express & Star during a visit to a Manchester school, said: “We have a spending review which the Chancellor will announce in November and in my department I have a protected budget and an unprotected budget.
“Across Whitehall we’re looking in every department and every line of the Government at budgets that aren’t protected.”
While the Department for Education has the majority of its spending protected, Early Years education is unprotected and may be subject to cuts, including the Universal Infant Free School Meals programme which is estimated to cost between £600m and £800m per year.
The decision will be revealed in George Osborne’s Spending Review due in November.