The first day of the autumn term at Walnut Tree Walk Primary School in Lambeth and there are some special people queuing for lunch: the 30 or so new reception year pupils, a wide-eyed, open-mouthed trail of baffled-looking four- and five-year-olds. There’s also the deputy prime minister, his speech writers, handlers and security detail, but they’re used to Nick Clegg and his entourage here at Walnut Tree Walk. When politicians need to visit an educational establishment they cross the river to Lambeth. Clegg was last here for Christmas lunch. I ask him if he’s getting his usual table, and he grins. “The food’s good here,” he says, perkily.
Clegg seems energised today, and with reason. The start of the school year also brings the start of free school meals for all the 1.9 million children in infant classes (the first three years of school) in England, at a cost of £1bn over two years; a policy Clegg announced a year ago at the Lib Dem party conference. What’s more, as of this lunchtime it hasn’t been the total car crash predicted by his political opponents and portions of the schools sector.
According to government figures 98% of the nearly 16,000 primary schools in England were able to offer a hot meal. Those having to make do for now with packed lunches for lack of kitchen facilities were in the low hundreds. “I’m thrilled to bits that something all these naysayers said couldn’t and shouldn’t happen, has happened,” Clegg says.
The original announcement was a surprise, even to those who had proposed the policy. In 2012 Michael Gove, the then education secretary, had commissioned Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, the founders of Leon, to investigate the state of school food. Their report, published in July 2013, contained 16 “actions” for which funding had been found, including mandatory standards for school food and the reintroduction of food education to the curriculum.
There was just one unfunded recommendation, based on a free school meals pilot commissioned by the Labour government in 2009. That had shown a number of benefits – including that pupils involved were on average two months ahead of their peers academically. “Universal free school meal provision was only a recommendation,” Dimbleby says now, “because Gove had told us that it would take too long to secure the money and that would hold up the whole report.” Then all of a sudden there was an announcement. “We only heard about it the day before, when we were called by David Laws, the Lib Dem education minister,” Dimbleby says.
The result of that extra billion pounds of funding – £2.30 for every meal – is lined up on the servery before us. There’s a choice of noodles, lentil bake or lamb sausages with peas and gravy and mash that’s the reassuringly familiar shape of an ice-cream scoop. We both choose the latter. Clegg, the father of three boys aged 12, 10 and five, is comfortable here amid the noise and elbows of the year sixes, as we hunker down at tables a few sizes too small for us.
I suggest to him that at the time of the announcement it looked like a party conference speech in search of a policy that put clear water between the Lib Dems and their coalition partners. He accepts that was how it appeared to some but denies it was the case. “David Cameron said to me that he wanted £600m to spend on what I like to call the unmarried couples tax penalty,” he says of the Tory tax credits for married couples. “I said: ‘Then I want to do something of equal monetary value but of greater benefit to more people.’”
The idea of free school meals was not his, he says, but it was a policy to which he was attracted. “It was something that had been properly researched and properly piloted, plus most schools were already providing hot school meals. We were working with the grain of peoples’ instincts.” And yet critics saw a benefit worth more than £400 per child as wasteful when many parents could afford to pay for it. “Look, we as a society have already made choices about certain things being available as a universal benefit, be it the NHS or education itself.” What matters, he says, is that the children living in poverty benefit from it. “You don’t want children at a tender age being separated out between those who can pay and those who can’t. There is a value in everybody feeling the same.”
What about those headteachers who say they could have made better use of the money if there was a billion going spare? “There is a reasonable debate around priorities. But when I read that the kids who received free school meals [in the pilots] are two months ahead, that is powerful research.” I suggest to him that the problem is a deep-seated suspicion in Britain around the idea of good food being beneficial. Clegg shovels away forkfuls of mash and says he recognises the point, not least because it is something he has experienced. He has talked before about the way his Dutch Calvinist mother treated food functionally, a culture he only learned to break away from when he met his Spanish wife Miriam González Durántez. “I worship the very ground my dear mother treads on,” he says wryly. “But relishing cooking was never a passion. Not only was it the low Calvinist church approach to material aspects of cooking but also as a young girl she was in a [Japanese] prisoner of war camp and almost starved to death and she was scarred by it.”
His wife is from a rural community in the Spanish heartlands. “There’s this big Catholic joy and relish for eating together and enjoying food. They would talk in the morning about what they would have for lunch and dinner and that was amazing to me.” It is something they have tried to foster with their own family. “My boys stand next to Miriam in the kitchen and they talk about what’s being cooked. They have a liking for food and a respect for food and a knowledge about where it comes from which I didn’t.”
He thinks the rest of the country could do with a similar change of mindset. “What lies behind the criticism of free school food is this belief that worrying about food is a distraction from real education issues, that somehow it doesn’t count. There’s a sneering disregard for food, that it’s not serious.”
And that’s not so? “No,” he says. He has cleared his plate, leaving only a puddle of gravy and has moved on to the fresh fruit.
“They’re wrong. They’re flatly wrong. It’s a turning of the page that as a country we’re much more comfortable talking about the importance of food.”
Perhaps, I venture, the problem is a target-obsessed educational culture, which has banged on about attainment levels. Along comes a holistic policy like free school meals and people simply don’t know what to make of it. On this Clegg is less willing to play ball. “You can be rigorous on literacy and numeracy and at the same time take action on a commonsense observation that kids do better if they eat well.”
We move on to the nuts and bolts. Shortly after the policy announcement last year the National Association of Head Teachers pointed out that money for the meals alone was simply not enough; that too many schools didn’t have kitchens. A total of £150 million was found for building works, but critics were lining up to say it still wasn’t enough and it was badly targeted. There hadn’t been sufficient time to work out who needed what, so it was simply handed out according to pupil numbers.
Some authorities such as the original pilot areas of Newham and Durham had kitchens in almost every school; others, including Somerset, had almost none. Earlier this year a Local Government Association survey found that 47% of the councils who replied did not have enough cash, 39% of whom said the schools were going to have to find funds from their existing budgets. The LGA calculated the shortfall at more than £25 million. Critics claimed it was endangering core lessons. Clegg puts some of these complaints down to councils that simply didn’t support the policies, out of a culture of political opposition. “That’s up to them. But there are other local authorities who didn’t seem to me to be as good at using the resources we made available, which are considerable, to get the job done.”
There’s also the issue of the pupil premium. Introduced in 2011, it provides schools with around £950 for every child officially classed as in poverty, the payment triggered by eligibility for free school meals at any point within the last six years. However, if school meals are now free to everyone, parents no longer need to register for free ones. One policy seems to scupper another. Clegg disagrees. “You just need to make sure that schools communicate with parents about why registering their eligibility is a good thing.”
The subject does, however, lead him on to a point of principle: that school meals for infants and the pupil premium are examples of policies targeted at the earliest years of life. “The state is intervening intelligently at a point in a child’s life when it makes a difference. Feeding children properly early on at school means in the long term you have better educated children,” he says. “That means lower crime, better health and benefits for society all round. I think people will look back and ask how we managed when hot healthy meals were not available to little children at school.”
Will the Lib Dems make extending free school meals to all primary children a manifesto promise for May 2015? Yes, he says, they will. It will cost the same again as the current policy.
Around us, the year sixes have departed and the dining hall is empty, as of course is Nick Clegg’s plate. Mine is still piled with sausages, mash and peas. I can see from his raised eyebrows where this is going. “This is a healthy meal eaten,” the deputy prime minister says, pointing at his plate. “This is a healthy meal spurned,” he says, pointing at mine. “Why are you so snotty about school food, Jay?”
I howl that I wasn’t passing judgment. “I’ve been taking notes. I didn’t have a spare hand to eat with.” He nods slowly. At which point Walnut Tree Walk’s head teacher, Jeanne Carabine, announces that on their first day they have had much less waste than before. My plate may still be full. I may be guilty of appalling waste, whatever my excuses. But as far as everybody else is concerned – including Nick Clegg – it’s been a good day for school dinners.
