A children's charter / The Labour Party.

  • Labour Party
Date:
1937
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A children's charter / The Labour Party. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    assured officially that the other fifty per cent. fail to par- ticipate in the scheme because of parental indifference or distaste for milk, not because of poverty. It is certain that poverty is a much more important cause than the Government is prepared to acknowledge and that a very large number of children prefer to say they don’t like milk than to admit that their mothers can- not give them 243d. every week to pay for it. A head master in Blaina (South Wales) wrote recently in “ The Schoolmaster ”: “At the beginning of this term, out of the 125 boys whose fathers were unemployed, an average of forty-six per day (eighteen get clinic milk free) paid their half-pennies for milk. When I offered (with money from sympathisers all over the country) to pay for milk for any boys who would like milk, I had sixty-one extra. The number jumped up to 107. They all welcomed the milk. ... But some of those boys had previously said, to be loyal to parents whom they knew to be too poor to afford it that they did not like milk.” School Meals—Discretion of Local Authority But milk, though it is a most important food for school children, is not enough. Many children are in need of solid meals as well. We must demand a much more extensive use of the School Meals Clauses of the Educa- tion Act to ensure that all children in need of meals re- ceive them. The original School Meals Act was designed to ensure that every child should be fed before being subjected to mental and physical instruction. There are still Education Authorities which make no provision for school meals. | The Education Authority has a-very wide dis- cretion in this matter. It is not compelled to put the School Meals Clauses into operation: it must decide the basis of selection for free meals, and income scales for this purpose vary tremendously; it is encouraged by re- cent Circulars from the Board of Education to add a medical test to the income test and to provide meals only if malnutrition as well as poverty is proved. Further, the Milk-in-Schools scheme is clearly regarded by some Authorities as an excuse for not providing free meals. While the number of Authorities providing meals in-
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