Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025.
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
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LearningTranscript
00:00...is a Professor of Food, Families and Society at the Centre of Public Health and Community Care.
00:06I want you to please welcome up here, with applause and love, Rebecca O'Connell.
00:12Thank you. Thank you, Mark, and thank you, Christine, and thank you, everyone, so much for inviting me.
00:31As part of a team based at the Thomas Corham Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Education,
00:38I had the privilege of leading an EU-funded research project about families and food, poverty in three European countries.
00:49It was in the wake of the global financial crisis and the implementation of so-called austerity measures in some countries.
00:57It was a time of rising food prices and harsh cuts to the welfare state and people's expectations of it.
01:05Ring any bells?
01:05We wanted to understand what this meant for children and young people.
01:11In England, we spoke to more than 50 children and their parents in 45 families,
01:18and they were living in inner London and a coastal area,
01:21and both of these places were places of undergoing rapid gentrification.
01:25There were rising housing costs, posh coffee shops opening up,
01:31from which most of these children and families were excluded.
01:33They were very much living in want among plenty.
01:37All of the families that we spoke to were living on a low income,
01:40but they were very different in terms of their size, their type.
01:45They included lone parents, working families, those who were reliant on benefits,
01:50migrants with irregular status.
01:53Many households included those with a disability.
01:55Since we carried out our research, things have got worse for families like these.
02:02Today, in one of the richest countries in the world,
02:05four and a half million children are growing up in poverty.
02:09Shame!
02:10Shame!
02:11Shame!
02:11Shame!
02:12In 2022 to 23, 2.4 million children were living in households that were food insecure.
02:20That means they were going without enough to eat,
02:23or they were worrying about whether they had enough money to buy food.
02:27That's almost a million more than in 2019 to 20.
02:31That's a huge rise.
02:33And the reason isn't that people are feckless or lazy,
02:37and it isn't that they don't know how to cook, quite the opposite.
02:41It's that good food is expensive and time-consuming,
02:44and households don't have enough access to enough resources, money or time or equipment
02:50to feed themselves and their children, and feed their children properly.
02:55In our research, we found that one resource to which families potentially have access
03:00is free school meals.
03:04Nutritious school meals do have the potential to mitigate
03:07some of the effects of poverty on children's diets and their lives.
03:11We shouldn't see them as a cost.
03:14We should see them as an investment in children now and in children in the future.
03:20They ensure that they can benefit from the education that we're providing for them.
03:25But in England, a meal at school is only guaranteed for the youngest children.
03:31For the rest, it's a lottery.
03:33How old you are, where you live, if you meet the criteria for means testing.
03:37And that means testing threshold is so low, it's about £7,500 a year
03:43that you have to earn beneath before benefits to be entitled to a school meal.
03:47Free school meal.
03:49Scandal.
03:49Yeah.
03:51That means that 900,000 children growing up in poverty in this country
03:55don't even qualify for a free school meal.
03:58So for some children that we spoke to, that means taking a packed lunch.
04:01But not everybody had food at home to take a packed lunch.
04:04We spoke to children who told us about filling up on tins of cheap rice pudding
04:09before they went to school so they weren't hungry during the school day.
04:12We spoke to children who told us about hiding in the library
04:15so they didn't have to watch other children eat.
04:19They told us about falling asleep in class and getting into trouble.
04:23And these children weren't short of ambition.
04:26They were short of money and food.
04:27We talked to children who told us about dreading coming into school when it was PE
04:32because they knew they wouldn't have enough energy to get through the day.
04:36And then for those who did qualify, for some of them the food wasn't enough.
04:40The money they were given wasn't enough to buy a proper meal.
04:43Some of them were publicly identified, stigmatised and shamed.
04:47They were told to put back things that they'd selected to eat
04:49because they weren't available to children on free school meals.
04:52They were discriminated against at school.
04:54Schools should be places that challenge the inequalities in our society, not reproduce them.
04:59Hear, hear.
05:03Where schools do use their discretion to provide universal free meals
05:07and for primary schools in London, thanks to Mayor Sadiq Khan,
05:11it saves families money, it saves them time, it improves children's cognition.
05:16It means children, most importantly, foster a sense of belonging
05:20and it improves their happiness when they're at school.
05:23Over 100 years ago, Margaret Macmillan said
05:27that an underfed school child is a disgrace and a danger to the state
05:31and that's true today.
05:34Danny Dorling and, improbably, Michael Gove even
05:37have said that school food should be provided as part of the school day,
05:41as an ordinary part of the school day.
05:43We don't have free school desks.
05:45Why do we have free school meals?
05:46Free school meals can mitigate poverty but they can't solve it.
05:58Households need to meet their basic needs and they need enough money to spend on discretionary things
06:02and so that they can feed their families properly.
06:04It's a basic expectation of parenting.
06:07Not only enough to survive but to thrive, to be able to afford a birthday cake
06:12or friends to tea, to have a portion of chips after school with their peers.
06:17Children who can't do these things, they have ways of getting by.
06:21They moderate their needs.
06:22They make excuses for not being able to join in with their friends.
06:26They share their food with others, with their parents and with their friends
06:30but they feel guilty when they see their mothers going without enough food so that they can eat.
06:36They feel empty when they see their friends socialising
06:39and they feel left out of all of the fun stuff that happens.
06:44That's what they told us.
06:46To deny families adequate resources for food is to deny them participation in ordinary social life,
06:52to deny them dignity and humanity.
06:57Poverty is about lacking the basics but it's also a social status.
07:01It's a relation between people.
07:04Solutions that involve giving wasted food to surplus people, in Graham Richard's words,
07:09only further exclude those who are already marginalised
07:12and corporate philanthropy perpetuates the status quo.
07:17Enough is enough.
07:19It is time for a revolution.
07:22It is time for a revolution.
07:24It is time for a revolution.
07:25It is time for a revolution.
07:26It is time for a revolution.
07:27It is time for a revolution.
07:28It is time for a revolution.
07:29It is time for a revolution.
07:30It is time for a revolution.
07:31It is time for a revolution.
07:32It is time for a revolution.
07:33It is time for a revolution.
07:34It is time for a revolution.
07:35It is time for a revolution.
07:36It is time for a revolution.
07:37It is time for a revolution.
07:38It is time for a revolution.
07:39It is time for a revolution.
07:40It is time for a revolution.
07:41It is time for a revolution.
07:42It is time for a revolution.
07:43It is time for a revolution.
07:44It is time for a revolution.
07:45It is time for a revolution.
07:46It is time for a revolution.