School food: A tiny turning of the tide?

My delight at the announcement that universal free school meals (FSM) will be available to all children under eight in England is only confined by my desire to see them available to all children and young people in education.

School meals have been a curiosity in the last 10 years, swimming against the neo-liberal tide, despite being its early casualty more than 30 years ago. The service reached an all-time low (apologies to service providers who chose to provide excellence) after deregulation, price hikes and take-up crashes, compulsory competitive tendering and the saturation of cheap, junk food into our culture.

A school meals campaign soldiered on from the 1980s, but an army marches on its stomach and there were few crumbs from the political table. Then we had the Jamie Oliver TV series and Feed Me Better campaign and nothing succeeds like success – or celebrity.