Food poverty has moved up the policy agenda, but the focus has been on school-aged children, with free school meals and breakfast clubs. Yet it is children under five who face higher risks of food poverty.
Almost a quarter (24 per cent) of households with a child under four experienced food poverty in January 2024, compared to 19 per cent of households with older children.
If we want to address inequalities in early years and later outcomes, we need to start giving the same consideration to early years nutrition as we do for school children.
An overlooked cohort
We know that the early years are a significant period for development and that food poverty is detrimental to early development.
Children under five who experience food poverty are more likely to have worse physical health – both as young children and as adults – worse mental health and behavioural outcomes, and worse cognitive development, including maths and vocabulary skills.
This is not surprising – it is intuitive that children cannot learn and thrive when they are hungry and under-nourished.
But despite clear evidence that food poverty is a particular problem in the early years, pre-school children are currently overlooked in existing free meal policies.
All primary school children from reception to year two are entitled to free school meals. Universal infant free school meals (UIFSM) were introduced in 2014, in recognition that “teaching healthy habits young, and boosting attainment early, will bring the biggest benefits”.
Yet there is a clear disconnect between this welcome prioritisation of young learners in schools and the lack of free meal provision for our youngest learners who have not yet started school.
Patchy provision
Only maintained settings (maintained stand-alone nurseries and school-based nurseries) are required to provide free school meals to children meeting certain eligibility criteria.
Yet 77 per cent of all early childhood education and care takes place in other types of settings that do not have an obligation to provide free meals. This means many children from low-income households attend settings where free meals are not available to them.
Even in maintained settings that do have a responsibility to provide free meals to low-income children, the policy is implemented in a way that makes it potentially difficult for children to access and difficult for settings to provide.
The criteria includes that the child attends the setting both before and after lunch, but not all maintained settings are open for both sessions. Where they are, low-income parents may need to spread their ‘free entitlement’ hours in a way that their child is not able to attend both.
Additionally, there is no set per-meal funding rate (as there is in schools), which undermines settings’ abilities to provide meals, particularly in the wider context of the funding and staffing crisis facing the sector.
To cope with the cost of living, settings have reported buying cheaper ingredients, as well as charging families more for food and cutting portion sizes.
Missing incentives
Schools are incentivised to sign up eligible children for free school meals via the pupil premium payments they receive. But the early years pupil premium (EYPP) is not connected to registration for free meals.
Even if it was, it is paid at a much lower rate: £353 per child in early years settings compared to £1,455 per child in primary schools.
Making free meals available for pre-school-age children (and funding them adequately) would improve children’s outcomes and redress the imbalance between schools and early years settings.
We need to address food poverty in the early years and one of the levers for this is free meals. As a first step, free meals should be made available to all low-income children in all settings. Then, we should work towards making free meals universal in early years, as they already are in reception to year two, while supporting the sector to deliver this.
We know this investment would pay off: early interventions are cost-effective, and free meals have been found to have a significant positive impact on children’s outcomes.
This not only makes sense from an economic perspective; alleviating food poverty and ensuring equality in access and provision is a matter of justice and equity.
Read the full report, ‘How can we reduce food poverty for under-fives?‘ here
