What’s in the box? Some thoughts on Free School Meals

There has been a lot said this week about Free School Meals (FSMs). Chartwells, a leading supplier of education catering, have borne the brunt of public outrage after photos were published suggesting that their FSM food parcels were short-changing poorer families. The resultant indignation is arguably understandable. Critics were quick to suggest that the all-encompassing failure of privatisation was to blame, but is that fair?

Schools are under an obligation provide a weekly lunch parcel or a ￡15 weekly food voucher per eligible child. The “or” is important here, as these two options are not the same thing; an entitlement to a meal is not the same as an entitlement to money to buy a meal. If I am entitled to a free lunch then I should feel satisfied that I have been appropriately fed, regardless of the cost of the meal. If I am entitled to ￡15 then I should indeed receive ￡15, no more and no less.

I flag this as the media debate offers little clarity on the payment model which the likes of Chartwells and others may be working to. Is it, for example, a form of cost-plus model? In other words, are suppliers paid a fee of ￡15 to buy the food, and an additional fee to cover the cost of sourcing, packaging, and distributing it, as well as any component of profit? If so, then parents should rightly expect to receive a parcel with contents that they would fairly consider, more-or-less, to be worth ￡15. Any shortfall of food content under such a model should rightly be exposed.

Alternatively, is it an inclusive unit fee where the supplier is paid ￡15 per head which must include the sourcing, packaging, and distribution as well as any component of profit? If so, the value of the content of the food parcel itself must always be less than ￡15. This does not, however, mean that the content of the food parcel is necessarily insufficient to provide a weeks’ worth of lunches. Parents may, nevertheless, feel shortchanged if they perceive they should be “entitled” to at least ￡15 worth of food.

Government guidance trips itself up here, as the guideline list of items which a food parcel should include as a minimum is clearly less than ￡15 worth of food. But if this is the contractual standard for education caterers, then it is hard to criticise them; they are delivering exactly what they have been contracted to deliver. Some schools claim that they can provide better value where their own staff go out and purchase the parcels. That may be true in some cases, but have all the costs been accounted for, such as the cost of the time of school staff to do this?

And let us not treat profit as a taboo subject. Like it or not, suppliers like Chartwells only operate if they can make a profitable return, and the same is true for the thousands of companies who supply to the UK public sector. No matter how you cut it, someone somewhere is making a profit on FSMs. In the case of vouchers, it will be the supermarkets. Indeed, it is not implausible that some supermarkets may make more profit from vouchers than education caterers may from food parcels. Either way, it is a privatised service!

To be clear, I am not suggesting we defend suppliers who offer poor value, and I am certainly not belittling those families in hardship for whom FSMs are a necessity. I share these thoughts to simply illustrate that, as with most things, the issues are a little more complex than the media would necessarily have us believe.