Campaigners fear thousands of the UK’s poorest children are being denied free school meals after their families have been caught up in the immigration system, despite living in the UK for all or much of their lives.
As a parliamentary inquiry publishes a report into the food ‘insecurity’ faced by 4.1 million youngsters living in poverty, activists warn too many households are forgotten as they have no access to state benefits while waiting to hear about their status from the Home Office.
At the extreme, reports have suggested British children have suffered from illnesses linked to malnutrition because they are eating non-food items to stave off hunger, and critics suggest the problems have become worse since austerity and Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy was introduced.
Among those to have suffered at the hands of this bureaucracy are Sarah and her son, James. Like many children, 10-year-old James is hungry by the time he gets home from school. Every day he walks for 25 minutes with Sarah to and from the primary school he has been attending since September. When they get home, James digs out some rice from the fridge to heat up in the microwave.
Sarah sits on the second-hand sofa they rescued for the living room they have slowly been furnishing. She talks about the relief she feels now that they have a roof over their heads and food for James to eat.
Since July, the family have had leave to remain in the UK with access to public funds, which means that James has access to free school meals. But James suffers from flashbacks of his life in North London, where he lived in hostels or slept wearing his school uniform in A&E waiting rooms. While the family were waiting to hear about their immigration status from the Home Office, they became one many with no recourse to public funds.
For James, who was born in the UK a decade ago, this meant that he was not eligible for free school dinners. His mother did her best with packed lunches and his friends shared their food. But sometimes, James felt hungry.
“Do you ever get that feeling when you’re very hungry and you can feel something in your head making a sound?” he says. “And you feel sick, exhausted. Mostly I can’t really focus.”
“One child developed Pica, an eating disorder that involves eating non-food items. The child was regularly eating plasterboard, foam-like materials from his pillow, stuffing from his coat and fibre from socks and jumpers.”
The Home Office does not collect data on how many British children are being denied a hot dinner at school because they are unable to access public funds. In 2012, official statistics estimated that there were 120,000 undocumented children living in the UK – and there may be many thousands more like James who have papers, but no recourse to funding. These children are often the poorest children in the country with no source of income at all. They rely entirely on charity, or they go without food.
A parliamentary inquiry into the future of children’s food, published on Thursday, has recommended that children from families with no recourse to public funds should be eligible to apply for free school meals like other children. Anna Taylor, the executive director of the Food Foundation, called for a series of policies to secure a child’s rights when their family is unable do so independently: “It doesn’t matter where these kids come from, they are not responsible for the situation their parents find themselves in. We need to respect that they have rights.”
But campaigners who work with these families say that this does not go far enough. Nadia Chalabi, a school meals advocate with Hackney Migrant Centre, says free school meals should be available to all children, regardless of their status. “Universal free school meals must be seen as an integral part of free education,” she says. “The only way to ensure the most vulnerable children can rely on a filling a nutritious meal each day is to give free school meals to all children.”
Eve Dickson is a policy officer at Project 17, which works to end destitution among migrant children. She says that winning free school meals for children with no recourse to public funds is a small step towards getting rid of the status altogether.
“The no recourse to public funds policy leaves children and their families at high risk of homelessness, exploitation, and health issues,” she says. “Thousands of children are living in this very extreme form of poverty. Many of the children we work with have lived here their entire lives and most will acquire citizenship eventually, if they haven’t already, but they lack the entitlements of their peers because of their parents’ immigration status, so their standard of living is much poorer.” The policy has a disproportionate effect on black and minority ethnic single mothers and their children.
As well as hunger and associated health problems, children who are denied a hot lunch face social isolation of knowing they are not being treated like others.
HuffPost UK spoke to one mother, a qualified medical doctor, who is unable to work while she is waiting for the outcome of her immigration application. The mother and her son have no recourse to public funds, but receive £35 each per week through Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, which states local authorities have a duty to safeguard the welfare of children in their area who are in need.
The mother tried to provide packed lunches of vegetables or rice. But the child, who has a British passport, brought the food home complaining it was cold and watery by lunchtime. “He was looking malnourished and losing weight,” the mother said. She started paying the school £12.75, half of her son’s financial entitlement for the week, for school lunches. “Whatever it takes to pay for school lunches I will do it.”
Project 17 submitted evidence to the Future Food Inquiry about a child whose mother who had been refused support from her local authority under Section 17. The child developed Pica, an eating disorder that involves eating non-food items. The child was regularly eating plasterboard, foam-like materials from his pillow, stuffing from his coat and fibre from socks and jumpers. He told his mother that the main reason he was eating these items was because he was extremely hungry.
In another case, a parent had accrued £1,000 of debt to the child’s school because she was unable to pay for their school meals, while the child was punished by not being allowed to attend the end of secondary school prom. In practice, many families find they are unable to access support through Section 17, or they are afraid to ask for fear that their child will be taken away or deported.
In 2012, when Theresa May, then Home Secretary, started talking about creating a ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants in Britain, the rules changed to make it harder for families who have limited leave to remain in the country to access public support, including free school meals. At the same time, austerity has reduced local authority funding, putting councils under pressure to shrink support to destitute families.
“Free school meals are not a priority, whereas by law it should be, because this is part of the child’s needs,” says Rockhaya Sylla, a consultant specialising in migrants’ rights. Some schools have used their discretionary budgets to pay for free school meals for children in need. But changes to education budgets means many schools can no longer cover the cost.
A handful of authorities are changing their approach. In 2018, the deputy first minister for Scotland wrote to all local authority directors of education to inform them of “flexibility to provide free school meals where pupils do not meet eligibility criteria such as a family having no income due to their immigration status”. Hackney Council has increased weekly payments to families with no recourse to public funds to pay for school meals. Meanwhile, in November, Haringey Council agreed a motion to oppose the ‘hostile environment’ and work on a welcome strategy.
The decision in Haringey came after pressure from campaign groups including North East London Migrant Action (NELMA) and Haringey Welcome, whose Feed My Friend campaign raised awareness of the need for free school meals for destitute children.
Grace, a campaigner with NELMA, believes the government should introduce universal free school meals to ensure that undocumented children and the children of refused asylum seekers are not left out. Grace says: “It is clear that the current system is not working. Children who need free school meals are being excluded. Universal free school meals doesn’t seem like too much to ask – we can subsidise MP’s lunches at Westminster after all.”
In London, James says every time he comes back from school he feels relieved that the family no longer have to spend their nights homeless in A&E. He looks forwards to sausages and chips at school lunches, though today it was chicken hotpot and lemon cake, and that was good too.
“When I didn’t eat I didn’t do that much work,” he says. “I felt like a visitor who is not allowed to eat. But now I feel that I am part of the school. I work harder. Sometimes I write more than two paragraphs!”
* Some of the names have been changed