The UK's New Free School Meals Scheme Feels a Little Redundant

When I was a young, bouffant-mulleted, non-ironic rainbow-jumper-wearing primary school kid, sometime in the 80s and far, far away in New Zealand, what you ate for lunch was what you or your mum had hastily stashed in your sick-smelling, ancient mismatched tupperware lunchbox.

Poor kids had maybe an apple, a sandwich with butter or last night's fish and chips rewrapped and cold. Or maybe nothing at all. The rich kids had shiny packets of crisps, cartons of juice and slices of plastic-wrapped processed cheese, packed lovingly around a white bread sandwich. You knew where you stood when you opened your lunchbox or unwrapped the brown paper. It was simple, social strata in edible, aromatic form.

My own lunches were peanut butter sandwiches (because no one had allergies in those innocent, dirtier days) and perhaps a mandarin or two. The bread was from the bread-maker, which I thought we owned because we were poor. Brown bread—clearly the preserve of the impoverished. And, as far as I can remember, the government, the school and its teachers took no interest in your lunch whatsoever.

How I scoffed, then, when I first discovered that kids in the UK were fed hot school dinners everyday for lunch. That it was A Thing, that people my age had a collective memory of school dinners, the smells and the oily sludge, the unidentifiable floating bits in unspeakable stews. The smell of soft, over-boiled vegetables infiltrating classrooms and tainting the air, much like a retirement home, only one filled with lively children. It all sounded Dickensian, old-fashioned, and spectacularly uncool. I imagined actual dinner ladies, quite probably wearing hairnets, chanting, "Eat the stew. Eat. The. Stew. EAT THE STEW!" to tiny, tearful stew-phobics.

Plus, you know, before Jamie Oliver fixed everything, wasn't it also all nutritionally void turkey twizzlers and chips? With salt and sugar thrown willy-nilly into everything, sending the kids into some sort of hypoglycaemic meltdown before they got back to maths? I was never fully convinced that school dinners were really any healthier and so I, prejudiced, slightly superior and vaguely hysterical, packed my little kids lunches comprised of boiled eggs, ham sandwiches, two pieces of fruit, one carton of milk and one yoghurt when they started reception and we were all down with that.

But then Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat crew waltzed in this year with a fancy, £1 billion flagship free school meals scheme, which basically means that every child aged four to seven in English state schools will be eligible for a free meal for the first time.

On the surface, the scheme sounds great. Its aims are to make kids healthier, get them to eat together and ultimately improve academic attainment for everyone, not just those children from low income families. Who in their right mind can argue against better-fed, better-focused children? Fish fingers every day surely doesn't make for fertile minds. The move is hugely expensive, though, criticised as over-promised and under-delivered, and famously came under scrutiny recently from a ridiculously articulate nine-year-old detractor who sounded suspiciously like Julie Burchill.

The Independent also revealed in August that local councils were short of £25m to pay for the pledge and were diverting money from elsewhere (like faulty school roofs) to pay for it, while BBC research suggested 2,700 schools were not yet equipped to accommodate the new scheme.

In terms of numbers, there are suddenly 1.9 million kids eligible for school dinners this year, up from 367,000, and schools have to learn to adapt, and quickly. Also, the children who would really benefit from the scheme, who truly need it, are entitled to free school meals already. So, really, what's really the point? And how long will it last? Is some kid going to have their classroom roof fall in just so mine can poke their Braised Beef Steaklets and Honeyed Carrots and Herbs (Thursday) mindlessly around their plates before running off to their well-funded playground equipment?

Probably. Two of my spawn are starting the new school year happily munching through free school meals, sitting with their mates, picking at meals that sound worthy of the most grandiose gastropub delights, and the government is footing the bill. Today, I asked my six-year-old what he ate for lunch.

"The very hardest beef. The hardest beef in the WORLD!"

"You mean beef jerky?"

"Yes! Beef turkey! And it was delicious!"

Actually, according to the school menu kindly printed on the noticeboard, it was Tuesday's Roast Turkey Escalope with Gravy with a side of Cauliflower Cheese. So I guess I thank you, Nick Clegg, for the lovely but entirely unnecessary free school meals that I could afford to, and should, pay for.

I am delighted that all the kids can eat together, and that the old lunchtime class wars might recede a little at the Lib Dem Table Of Healthy Eating Brain Development Awesomeness. I'm just going to wince a little every time it rains.