Free School Meals: Summer Holidays

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford) on his virtuoso maiden speech, proving that his constituents made an extremely wise choice. I am pleased to be able to speak in today’s debate, and congratulate the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) on securing it. Our children have only one chance at childhood and one chance of getting the education they need. Education, as we Government Members know, is the best way out of poverty. It is the best way of levelling up and sometimes, sadly, it is the best escape from a home that lacks the love and support that we all want for our children but is not always available. That means that teaching is among the most important vocations in society. Teachers are the people we trust to bring up our children, to inspire them, to teach them our shared values of tolerance and respect, and for the environment—

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Andrew Griffith]

I would love to give way to my hon. Friend.

[Miriam Cates]

As a former teacher, I absolutely agree about the value of teachers. Does my hon. Friend also agree that, while the support for free school meals is extremely welcome, the best thing we can do for the long-term futures of our children is to get them back into school in front of teachers—the professionals who know how to educate our children—and we will close that attainment gap?

[Andrew Griffith]

My hon. Friend makes, characteristically, the apposite point. I want to thank all the teachers and heads across West Sussex for their huge efforts made all year round, but particularly during the pandemic. I am pleased to report that all schools in my constituency of Arundel and South Downs are open to at least some year groups. In particular, I want to pay tribute to the parents, pupils and staff at Clapham and Patching school in my constituency, who only yesterday learned the wonderful news that they have saved their 200-year-old village school from closure. I congratulate the excellent South Downs Education Trust, which put forward the successful proposal to maintain the school.

As other Members have said, a hungry child is not a learning child, and is a tragedy that we should not accept in our society. I welcome the Government’s announcement today adding to their very extensive support in this area. I want to highlight the national school breakfast programme, which gives thousands of children in some of the most deprived areas the opportunity to attend a breakfast club. That programme so far reaches 1,800 schools and serves a free nutritious breakfast every school day to 280,000 children.

It is working. A systematic review of the effects of breakfast carried out by the University of Leeds found a positive correlation between breakfast consumption and children’s cognitive function, including improvements in a child’s attention, memory and executive function. In 2016, the Education Endowment Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies carried out a randomised control trial and found that pupils in schools supported by the school breakfast programme made an amazing two months of additional academic progress over the course of a single year. In supporting today’s motion, I congratulate the Government on that valuable scheme, as well as thanking the charities Family Action and Magic Breakfast for all that they do to deliver it.