Free School Meals are under threat and they are a vital life line for over 500,000 disabled children in the UK. As a mother to two disabled kids I want to tell you why taking free school meals away is a bad idea Theresa May.
So the Conservative Party wants to remove
free school meals from children in the Reception Year and Years 1 & 2. This
move to cut costs will still protect those families on extremely low incomes
but it does nothing to protect families like mine.
If you are a Conservative voter looking in
on my family life, you might see the wife who stays at home, while my husband
goes out to work. In your eyes we are the ‘middle class freeloaders’ who live
in a mortgaged home and are happy to take Child Tax Credit and Free School
meals. But what you won’t see is the wife who can’t go out to work because she
is a full-time Carer to two disabled children. You won’t see my husband as he
really is. Exhausted and over worked, trying to keep a roof over our heads,
where once there were two incomes and now only one.
We barely get by each month. Can you
imagine for a moment having half your income and your ability to work taken
away from you overnight? But this is what happened to us in 2010 when our twins
were born. I had to make the choice between running my own business and caring
24 hours a day for my daughter who has required intravenous feeding and
gastrostomy feeding from birth. Of course there was no real choice; I had to
lose my business and in the process make three members of staff unemployed. This
is the social impact of a childbirth that went wrong. The ripples of its effect
stretched beyond just my husband and myself.
We have spent the last few years treading
water it seems, and at times feeling like we are drowning. I have tried to get
some ground beneath my feet. I survive on Carers Allowance, but it’s not really
surviving and in the last year I have tried to work self-employed as writer and
photographer but progress is slow.
So what does this all have to do with free
school meals? It has everything to do with them. Free school meals are not just
about the free food itself. For disabled children it relieves the financial
burden for families who are already struggling. School meal times provide much
needed social interaction for children with Special Needs. For children like my
daughter who have enteral feeding tubes it is a valuable learning process where
they can learn to eat oral food amongst a group of friends.
Next September my children will no longer
qualify for free school meals and we will have to pay. For us this is a huge
pressure to find £2.20 per day, per child. Before you say ‘Well can’t they just
take sandwiches?’ there is a huge dilemma here in terms of my daughter’s
health.
Have you ever wondered why you can speak?
Those valuable months spent weaning on to solids as a baby enabled the muscles
in your mouth to develop in such a way that eventually your first words came.
Every time you put food in your mouth your senses get used to the sensation of
chewing and swallowing. It might sound straight forward but not if you are a
child who spent much of the first year of your life with a Nasal Gastric Tube
down your throat.
It took my daughter almost two years to try
oral food without gagging and being sick. Two bowel surgeries and other
procedures that followed left her extremely orally averse. We spent months
dabbing one drop of yogurt on her lips to get her to entertain the idea that
food might be ok. It took another year before the idea of a spoon entering her
mouth became acceptable. My daughter could speak very little by aged three and
it was only when her oral food intake increased that her language ability began
to improve.
Ask every specialist involved in my
daughters care and they will tell you that eating with her peer group is an
essential part of her healing process. School meal times are a lifeline. I can
still remember the first day that the school called to say my daughter had
eaten an entire school meal and they didn’t know what to do about her feeding
her through her gastrostomy tube. It was the first time in her life that she
had eaten an entire meal. Of course it’s never quite as simple as they just
start eating, far from it. My daughter has developmental delay, she becomes
emotionally volatile under pressure and meal times are a huge pressure. Now
aged seven nearly, she still doesn’t eat enough to sustain her own life.
I can’t take her school dinner away from
her, I will have to struggle on and find the money for her meals because even
on the days where she might only eat one thing on her plate she is at least
eating. Without that stimulation of school dinner times there is a high
probability that her speech will slow down in its development. Certain textures
of foods are overwhelming and bread is one of them. If my daughter was sent to
school with a traditional packed lunch she would eat nothing and face the next
decade relying on her enteral feed through her gastrostomy feeding tube.
I am one of those families sitting in the
middle of ‘middle class’ a definition that means nothing. I have a degree, I
once ran my own business, both are signs of that upwardly mobile section of
society that politicians and the press talk about as if we are all okay; we are
doing just fine with our lives. But it is an urban myth because these labels
mean absolutely nothing when your life is torn apart by disability. It is
estimated that 84% of mothers of disabled children can’t work compared to 39%
of mothers of non-disabled children. Only 3% of mothers of disabled children
can work fulltime and a further 13% work part-time. I would love to go back to
work and provide extra income for my family but here’s the catch. I would have
to put my kids in a specialist play scheme over the school holidays or take on
a respite worker. My local authority currently doesn’t provide reduced cost
support. Instead my only option would be to buy in care from a local charity
called ‘Take A Break’ and its fee for one to one support and play schemes in
£14.45 per hour per person needing care.
Welcome to the world of the ‘Middle Class’
parent of a disabled child, do I sound like I am freeloading now? I am truly
thankful for everything we have, and the free school meals for these first
three years have helped keep my kids healthy and strong, at a time when our
lives have been in complete emotional turmoil.
School meals have helped to keep my daughter
alive and developing in a way that you perhaps until now could never have
imagined. Free school meals aren’t just about helping the most vulnerable
children who have no food at home, they are also part of a wider system of
health in this country that will become blindsided by a Conservative
government. Free school meals for all children at a critical time in their
growing lives can make a difference to long term health. Let us not take away
from our future generations the ability to make healthy choices in life. It is in education where we can start to make those changes. The school dinner menu
is as much a part of our child’s education as the national curriculum.
NOTE: The statistics in this blog post are from reports by Contact a Family and The Papworth Trust. You can read in more detail about this here: