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Education and Inspections Bill

moved Amendment No. 214A: "Page 62, line 40, after ““authority,”” insert ““or academy, city technology college or city college for the technology of the arts,””" The noble Baroness said: We have tabled a series of amendments relating to school food because we felt that Clause 79 needed some debate. AmendmentNo. 214A is a minor amendment and carries forward our wish to see academies, city technology colleges and city colleges of arts and technology included within the general provisions that relate to other maintained schools. We have spoken at length to such amendments, and I do not wish to speak to them again at any length. Amendment No. 214B is the substantive amendment in this group. It would reinstate school milk for all primary schools and ensure that schools provide sufficient refrigerated storage capacity to keep it fresh for the period required. That is because last time this was tried, the objection was that these schools no longer had refrigeration facilities to keep the milk, although many of us who had school milk in the 1950s and 1960s will remember that there seemed to be fewer refrigeration facilities in those days. Back in the 1970s, the right to school milk was withdrawn. I cut my political teeth marching down Whitehall with a pushchair that had two little girls in it and carrying a placard that said, ““Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher””. We have come a long way since then. There is a scheme which subsidises milk for young children in schools, but it can be taken up only by those under five, at nursery school. It is not generally taken up by primary schools. The scheme is funded through the European Union; it provides a fairly substantial subsidy for providing roughly half a pint of milk for each child every day. It aims to provide either free or highly subsidised milk for all primary school children. Section 512ZB of the Education Act 2002 contains a provision whereby children eligible for free school meals are also eligible for daily free milk. But it is not mandatory—indeed, the wording is fairly loose, stating: "““Where a local education authority exercise their power under subsection (1) of section 512 to provide a person within paragraph (a) or (c) of that subsection with milk, the authority shall provide the milk free of charge if…the person is within subsection (4), and…a request that the milk be provided free of charge has been made by him or on his behalf to the authority””." The problem is that the LEA does not have to provide free milk; it has to be requested, and many parents do not know that they have the right to request it. If the school does not provide milk to any of the children, it does not have to provide it to any of those eligible for free school meals. So there is a many a slip ’twixt cup and lip, one might say, on this issue. Those schools that provide milk often do so only as an option at lunchtime and do not provide enough milk for all children to benefit from it. On those occasions, they often provide only to those eligible for free school meals, and many of those do not take up the option. If children are not urged to drink it, they often do not drink it. We are not arguing for full cream milk to be provided. Indeed, the guidelines that have now been issued about school food lay down that it should be either semi-skimmed or skimmed milk. If it is to be drunk as milk alone, semi-skimmed is probably more acceptable for children to drink. The European Union scheme also provides a subsidy for cheese to be provided in schools, but Britain has never made use of that, although in 1997 the Labour manifesto made promises to bring back both the free school milk and the cheese. French children benefit from the cheese subsidy and eat a great deal of cheese that is provided and subsidised very extensively by the European Union. There is a strong case for the school milk provision to be applicable also to secondary school children. Some 25 per cent of teenage girls have such a calcium deficiency already that they will not achieve peak bone mass without some sort of intervention. This increases the risk of bone deterioration in old age. We should be aware, too, that it is estimated that some 50 children in every secondary school, which equates to 5 per cent of the secondary school population, have nothing to eat all day. They arrive at school, having had no breakfast at home, with no money and no free school meal entitlement. Save the Children did a report a couple of years back called Bread is Free, and many years ago the British Nutrition Foundation researched the issue. Some schools make free bread available for hungry children, and some make loans available to children so that they can buy school meals. But that does not help very much, in fact, because those children often come from homes where they are worried about telling their parents that they have taken the loan, because they feel that their parents simply cannot repay it, which really just makes things worse at home. Most schools simply turn a blind eye to the fact that children come to school without breakfast and go without any food all day long. They ignore the plight of these children—and then they wonder why the children behave badly. The issue of children turning up at school without any sort of breakfast is a very big one. I know that the Government, in the extended schools programme that they are introducing, have extended the number of schools where breakfast is provided—particularly to children without free school meals. This is a big issue. Using the subsidy that we can get from the European Union to provide them with free school milk is something that it seems madness not to take up and use, yet we make it as difficult as we can for schools to do so. I urge the Government to make it much easier for schools. We would like to see the right for all primary school children to have school milk again. Amendments Nos. 214C and 214D raise a different issue. Amendment No. 214C is purely probing. We suggested leaving out these lines because we were uncertain as to precisely what sorts of foods were being prohibited. I have to say that since beginning work on this amendment, I have been inundatedwith vast amounts of material about all kinds of regulations on school foods. What sorts of foods are to be banned from school is more explicit. Generally the regulations seem quite sensible, but a number of nutritionists have expressed doubts about the Food Standards Agency’s traffic light system. They have criticised it for sometimes being too hard on thesugar and neglecting the salt, or vice versa. Tosome extent we are anxious to raise this issue and probe the Government a little about how they have derived these standards and what the thinking is behind them. The final issue is the sort of food that can be brought on to school premises. Discussion in the Commons on the issue of school food raised the bogeyman of schools being unable to hold cake stalls or tombolas at school fairs because that would mean bringing forbidden foods on to school premises. Again, in the draft regulations that have been issued there is a generous list of exceptions, which excludes celebrations, fundraising fairs and a number of other such occasions—staff parties, for example—but we received a letter from a school governor who was clearly worried by the sorts of regulations being introduced. I shall read from it, because it illustrates the concerns about having to implement these regulations: "““Some of the supporting material gives the impression of having been put together without anyone having read through the final documents for consistency—thus baked potatoes with various fillings are cited as an example of an acceptable lunch main course for secondary schools, but not primary schools. As the main regulations will be entirely incomprehensible to governing bodies and parents without guidance, this sort of discrepancy is somewhat worrying…These regulations are going to take up a lot of time””," as school meals are a regular issue for governing bodies. It continues: "““Making the regulations subject to parliamentary scrutiny would undoubtedly reduce the chance of mistakes, and would encourage careful thought about how regulations would be explained before they were made””." I shall not suggest that we have detailed parliamentary scrutiny of school meal regulations—that would not be a useful use of parliamentary time—but this suggests that the regulations that are being issued are something of a worry to governing bodies, and create some problems out there. I beg to move.