School meals: Future of scheme during holidays in doubt

A scheme to pay for free school meals during all school holidays until 2025 cannot be guaranteed due to the lack of an executive.

That is according to a senior official from the Department of Education (DE).

The department's finance director Gary Fair also told Stormont's Education Committee that education was "in limbo" without a budget.

The executive collapsed in February after the Democratic Unionist Party withdrew Paul Givan as first minister.

At that time, a three-year budget had not been agreed but was being consulted on in draft form.

At about £2.3bn, the education budget is Stormont's second biggest behind health, and pays for schools, services to schools, youth services and early years.

Mr Fair told MLAs that the draft budget had left the department facing "difficult decisions" as it had "inescapable pressures" of £409m.

He was asked by Sinn Féin deputy chairman of the committee Pat Sheehan about funding for "holiday hunger" outlined in the draft budget.

The draft budget extended the "school holiday food grant" in Northern Ireland until 2025 at a cost of £22m a year.

In November 2020, the executive previously agreed that DE would pay for free school meals for about 98,000 eligible children until Easter 2022, at a cost of about £40m.

Families of eligible children receive payments of £27 every fortnight per child, in lieu of school meals during school holidays.

The footballer Marcus Rashford had led a campaign for similar support to be provided during holiday periods in England.

Mr Fair told MLAs that payments to eligible families over the Easter holidays this year were likely to go ahead as Education Minister Michelle McIlveen could decide to do that in the absence of an executive.

But he said there was "no guarantee beyond that".

"Given it was an executive commitment, and the executive was supportive of that initiative, we'd be hopeful that would be the case moving forward as well but we don't have that certainty that was within the draft budget position," he said.

"While we anticipate that a new executive will probably still be supportive of that, obviously it depends on the raft of decisions that have to be made and how the money coming to the Northern Ireland block will be allocated.

"But no, there's no certainty around that.

"The element that the previous executive had agreed included the Easter payment of £2.8m so again that's something that will be in the mix for the minister's consideration to try and potentially continue to fund that for this school year at least.

"But there's no guarantee beyond that at this stage."

In response to a question from Ulster Unionist Party MLA Robbie Butler, Mr Fair also said that the rising cost of fuel and other items was likely to affect schools.

The department had previously calculated that schools in Northern Ireland would face a £13m rise in energy costs over the next year.

But that calculation was made prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine which is likely to send some energy prices soaring further.

"Obviously the Ukrainian crisis, it's affected everything even more drastically," Mr Fair said.

"It's just something we're going to have to keep under review.

"We'll be looking for additional money to cover this."

Mr Fair said that he hoped that the UK government would provide more money to help with the rising cost of living that Northern Ireland could benefit from through Barnett consequentials.

Sean McNamee, principal of St Paul's Primary School in Beachmount in West Belfast where 77% of the pupils avail of the free school meal, said he was concerned about the question mark over free school meals.

"Whenever I look at the level of poverty there is within the area where my school is situated, it is now impacting low and middle income families as well as those who are unemployed," he told BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.

"For children to be hungry during the summer holidays when that is an entirely avoidable situation is not really good enough as far as I am concerned."

He added that many of his pupils get their main meal of the day at school.

"We do often see, after periods of school closure during holidays, children coming back emaciated because they have not had that range of food," he said.

"Anything that we can do to help to feed the child in order to allow them to concentrate on the day ahead so they can reach their full potential is very important."