Tag Archives: exclusion

Kirsten Johnson

Hungry children are suffering, here in the UK

By Kirsten Johnson | Wed 3rd April 2019 - 12:27 pm

I’ve been doing a bit of work in my constituency about the effects of Universal Credit on local people, the rising use of Food Banks, and the inadequate funding given to rural schools in North Devon.

With that perspective, I was dismayed but not surprised to read a recent article highlighting the social exclusion experienced by children living in poverty.

This is personal for me – I grew up in a military household, having enough to live on but not a lot, and when my father left the forces, we were poor for a couple of years until he retrained and got another job. For those years, I felt excluded. I wore hand-me-downs and home-made clothes. I didn’t fit in as we had moved into a rural community from outside the country. My accent was funny, my safety net of having friends from military families on base was gone, and I was bullied. Things settled down, but I will never forget that first year of leaving the ‘family’ of military life and entering civilian life as an 11-year-old child. But I was never hungry.

The new study by University College London, Living Hand to Mouth, published yesterday, looks at the impact hunger has on children’s lives. As readers will know, free school meals have been cut back by the Conservative Government. It is Lib Dem policy, however, to reinstate free school meals for all those on Universal Credit and, further, that all primary school children regardless of their income level should have a free school meal. Nutrition is ever so important for learning. A healthy child is one who can flourish and absorb knowledge. A hungry one can not.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 6 Comments
Alex Feakes

Opinion: Answers on no more than 2 sides of A4 (part 1)

By Alex Feakes | Wed 29th December 2010 - 12:30 pm

In the first of a series of three, school governor Alex Feakes looks at elements of the recent education white paper.

The Importance of Teaching schools White Paper published by the government last month has lots going for it and has attracted the qualified support of many in the teaching profession. As a discussion paper, however, there are still quite a few wrinkles to be ironed out. Here’s one:

Exclusions

Like many secondary school governors who have been on disciplinary panels, I occasionally have had to confirm the headteacher’s decision to permanently exclude a student from the school. If the …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 1 Comment
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Recent Comments

  • Katharine Pindar
    David, as our party policy is now for a Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) to be brought in gradually by increases in welfare benefits to end deep poverty, and no lo...
  • David Raw
    @ Mike Peters. I would have thought that a universal basic income scheme would increase rather than reduce the problem you refer to, and I don’t see why folk ...
  • David Raw
    @ David Warren. You refer to the 1931 so called National Government but fail to add that the then Liberal Party took part in this, though shortly afterwards it ...
  • David Raw
    @ Steve Trevethan. You state delegating certain powers to the Bank of England creates a plutocracy. It might have escaped you that this was Liberal Democrat pol...
  • Mike Peters
    Interesting article but it fails to discuss an important concept - the idea of ‘the deserving poor’ and the ‘undeserving poor’. Put simply, most people ...