Introduction

The education sector has in recent years experienced significant challenges due to rising need from communities, as families have struggled with poverty, including experiencing food insecurity. This chapter outlines this context for our food banks in schools projects by exploring existing research on the relationships between poverty and education, the impact of Covid and austerity, and how hunger affects learning and family stress. We also review the literature on community food banks, and detail the key issues relevant to food banks in schools: the role of stigma, the social role of food and how food banks relate to the withdrawal of the state from responsibility for welfare.

The need to spread the net wide in terms of literature arises from the very limited literature in existence on school food banks in England. Baker and colleagues’ groundbreaking work in this area provides the only detailed studies of how food banks operate in schools and early years (Baker & Bakopoulou, 2022; Baker, 2023), and on the extent of food banks in education (Baker et al, 2024). Beyond this work, the existing literature on school food focuses in the main on school meals and breakfast clubs (Earl & Lalli, 2020; Bogiatzis-Gibbons et al, 2021; Cohen et al, 2021). Baker’s work, using interviews with staff running food banks in schools and early years settings, and with families, provides key insights into the phenomenon of food charity in education. His analysis of the underlying causes focuses on the cost-of-living crisis and a retreating welfare state in England, in a context where charitable food aid is an increasingly socially acceptable response to poverty. Baker concludes that schools are increasingly having to take responsibility in this political context for making sure children’s basic needs are met. We argue in a similar fashion that food banks in schools represent a responsibilisation for welfare needs that requires both funding and recognition if we are to address child poverty. We begin our review of the existing research by focusing on this central issue of poverty and education.

The relationships between poverty and education

Education is often presented as a way of escaping poverty, with a human capital approach suggesting that through investing in education, governments can ensure citizens acquire the skills they need to participate in the workforce and earn adequately (Littler, 2017). At the same time, educational attainment is still heavily impacted by income, and the divide begins in the early years, with children from families living on low incomes leaving Reception classes at the age of 4 or 5 years already 4.6 months behind their peers (EPI, 2024). This gap widens to 10.3 months by the end of primary school and 19.2 at the end of secondary (Francis-Devine et al, 2023; EPI, 2024). The relationships between poverty and educational attainment are complex, but research suggests that poverty is a ‘barrier to learning’ in multiple ways in schools (Mazzoli Smith & Todd, 2019): children from lower-income families struggle with uniform costs, the price of school trips and with clothes for special non-uniform days. This ‘in-school stigmatisation of children living in poverty’ (Mazzoli Smith & Todd, 2019, p 360) has an affective dimension, as children suffer due to negative social and emotional effects of poverty. A number of policies have been introduced to attempt to mitigate the impact of poverty upon educational attainment, including free school meals (FSM) and the Pupil Premium, additional payments made to schools and early years settings to support children from low-income families (Gooseman et al, 2020). However, none of these addresses the challenges that children living in poverty face outside of school. This book considers what schools are doing to help the whole family during this period of multiple crises.

The role of austerity

While in 2010 there were only 35 food banks run by The Trussell Trust across the UK (Sosenko et al, 2019), suggesting that food insecurity was yet to become embedded, through the next decade the term became commonplace (Wells & Caraher, 2014). Austerity measures were introduced by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government when they came into power following the 2010 General Election. Wide-reaching cuts to public spending were launched in response to the 2008 global financial crash. However, as Konzelmann (2019) asserts, austerity is also an active political choice: ‘[Austerity] has also been used for political and ideological reasons (stated or not), as a means of reducing the size and economic role of the state, particularly with respect to social welfare provision’ (p 1). Cuts to public spending amounted to £14.3 billion between 2009–10 and 2012–13 (Merrick, 2017), including cuts to education, police, prisons, welfare spending and local authority budgets (O’Hara, 2015). The need for those living on lower incomes to access more public services and receive welfare payments meant that these cuts were not distributed equally across the population (Berman & Hovland, 2024).

Austerity policies had a greater effect on families with children (Ridge, 2013), with cuts to Sure Start Centres (by two-thirds between 2010 and 2018) (Wise, 2021), and other changes including making the Sure Start Maternity Grant available only for first-born children, scrapping the Health in Pregnancy Grant and a reduction in the Child Care element of the Working Tax Credit. Overall, these cuts to benefits amounted to a loss of £1,735 for families on the lowest incomes before a child’s first birthday (Ridge, 2013). Wider benefit reforms and shifts in employment also affected families, with issues around the administration of benefits being a main contributor to families needing to use food banks (Sosenko et al, 2019). One of the most devastating welfare policy changes was the two-child benefit cap, whereby child tax credit or Universal Credit would be paid for a third or any subsequent children born into a family from April 2017. It is believed that the policy results in affected families losing out on approximately £3,200 per year per child (Try, 2024) and is a leading reason behind the statistic that 46 per cent of families with three or more children are living in poverty (CPAG, 2024).

At the same time, schools were subject to funding cuts, with government funding on schools falling in real terms; as a result, more than 2,000 headteachers joined a protest at Parliament calling for greater school funding in 2018, an event that was deemed ‘unprecedented’, with headteachers a group not previously known for such political action (Busby, 2018). With the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme cut in 2010, many schools were now in a state of serious disrepair, with school budgets unable to absorb the cost of repairs (Busby, 2018).

Early years settings saw a similar picture emerge of increased need and funding challenges. Maintained nursery school staff found that they increasingly needed to support families with material goods, including food and clothing (Hoskins et al, 2021), but they were also required to help families with navigating the education system, applying for benefits, accessing healthcare, and signposting parents to training and employment services. In short, early years staff were replacing services, such as Sure Start, that had been stripped away due to austerity, at a time when their own funding had been reduced (Hoskins et al, 2021). Schools, too, took on responsibility for supporting families’ welfare in the absence of other services (Baker, 2023).

The impact of the Covid pandemic

The Covid pandemic would have been devastating at any time, yet its arrival following ten years of austerity highlighted the retrenchment of public services.

When it was announced that schools would be closed to most children on 18 March 2020, the problem arose as to how some families would manage to feed children who usually received a free lunch at school (Gaunt, 2020; Lalli, 2023). Indeed, 20.8 per cent of families with children reported experiencing food insecurity during the first two weeks of lockdown (Food Foundation, 2024). The issue was addressed through the provision of either a supermarket voucher or food parcel worth £15 per child per week to be sent to the homes of children eligible for free school meals (Lalli, 2023). During the first lockdown, most schools provided the vouchers, but difficulties with the voucher system meant that headteachers found it hard to order them and families would sometimes discover the voucher did not work when shopping at supermarkets (Lalli, 2023). This contributed to 49 per cent of children entitled to free school meals being unable to access the programme for the first month of lockdown (Parnham et al, 2020). There were wider problems in procuring food at supermarkets with shortages of key items due to stockpiling and ruptures in the food supply chain.

Controversy around the provision of vouchers raged when the government announced that they would only be available during term time, prompting footballer Marcus Rashford to spearhead a campaign calling for the government to reconsider. With widespread media support, the campaign resulted in a government U-turn (Lalli, 2023), and beyond this, Rashford succeeded in highlighting the plight of children living in poverty. Subsequent lockdowns saw the provision of food parcels through schools’ catering firms, but some families who were issued with them reported inadequate portions. The government was criticised for utilising private catering companies such as Chartwells to provide the food parcels, suggesting a commitment to privatisation at the expense of children living in poverty.

Despite these challenges to food provision through schools, the proportion of families with children experiencing food insecurity had fallen to 9.6 per cent by January 2021, a significant reduction from 20.8 per cent at the beginning of the first lockdown (Food Foundation, 2024). This reduction is largely credited to a £20 a week increase in Universal Credit payments from April 2020 (Timmins, 2021), a shift towards more welfarist social policy in response to the unprecedented crisis of the pandemic. It was estimated that this increase lifted 400,000 children out of poverty for the brief period (18 months) that the policy existed (JRF, 2023), demonstrating the considerable impact a relatively modest rise in income could have on families’ living standards. The support provided by schools and early years settings may also have contributed to this drop in food insecurity experienced by families, as evidence suggests a lack of informal support is one of the three main reasons people use food banks (behind inadequate benefit payments and life events such as unemployment and illness) (Bull et al, 2023).

The hardships that some families encountered during the pandemic changed the work that education settings did, shifting their focus to supporting families with money, food and wellbeing. Unable to see most children in settings, staff would spend time calling families at home. Moss et al (2020) found that, for 72 per cent of school staff, the focus of these conversations was on wellbeing and access to food, compared to only 46 per cent who wanted to discuss whether children were completing school work at home. 52 per cent of headteachers were involved in organising food parcels or a food bank. As Moss and colleagues argue (2020; 2021), education staff support the wider wellbeing of children and families attending their settings due to a sense of moral obligation. They also recognise that children are unlikely to learn if they are hungry. Bradbury et al (2022) argued (using data from the same project) that the Covid pandemic altered how education practitioners regarded government policy and responded to it, resulting in ‘crisis policy enactment’, as discussed in Chapter One. This is highly relevant for our discussion of how food banks in schools were set up.

Current policy challenges: funding and the cost-of-living crisis

The Covid pandemic was followed immediately by the cost-of-living crisis, a period of sharp inflation with particularly notable increases in the price of energy and food due to a range of factors, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Harari et al, 2023). These price rises began at the end of 2021, coinciding with the removal of the £20 a week Universal Credit increase. The drop in income for families on low incomes combined with high inflation has contributed to an increase in food insecurity, with a staggering 26 per cent of all families with children reporting that they were skipping meals or going hungry because they could not afford to buy food in September 2022 (Food Foundation, 2024).

Schools are still in the position of needing to support families, while facing increased costs themselves due to rising energy prices; 80 per cent of schools reported needing to reduce spending elsewhere in order to pay increased fuel bills, while half said they were making cuts in the school budget so they could provide greater support to children and families (Lucas et al, 2023). In this context, this book details some of the measures that schools are taking to provide help to families. We now turn to the literature that explains why food is so important for schools.

Research on hunger, family stress and learning

Biosocial perspectives

We want to preface our discussion of the research on food and learning with a comment on the complexities of the use of ‘scientific’ research in education. Sociologists of education have a ‘longstanding mistrust of biology, due largely to the perception that biology naturalizes and fixes differences’ (Youdell & Lindley, 2018, p 1). The association of biological understandings of education with ‘fixed ability thinking’ (Drummond & Yarker, 2013) and determinism makes many scholars wary, while recent uses of neuroscientific ideas in education have only served to confirm fears that simplistic associations of poverty with ‘smaller brains’, for example, risk reviving eugenicist ideas (Bradbury, 2021). Despite this mistrust, we engage here with the literature on a less contested area of scholarship focused on hunger and learning, in the spirit of engagement with what Youdell and Lindley call the ‘biosocial’. This involves recognising the biological and social entanglements of learning: accepting that biology has something to tell us about learning, alongside psychosocial explanations that focus on relationships, feelings, identities and subjectivities. Thus, Youdell and Lindley (2018) argue that forces that affect learning might also include what we eat, how much we sleep and how much physical activity we engage in. The biosocial assemblage includes all of these features, and need not produce deterministic accounts of who learns well and who doesn’t, but might instead allow us to question the production of such inequalities. From this perspective, understanding the importance of food in education is a social justice issue, and to ignore the science due to fears associated with previous misuses of science in education would be misguided.

The impact of hunger on learning and participation

Research suggests that food insecurity can hinder the learning and development of children in different ways depending on the age of the child and the duration of reduced food intake (Ke & Ford-Jones, 2015). For children in the early years, especially infants, inadequate nutrition is particularly detrimental as it can impede the rapid brain development seen during this period (United Nations World Food Programme, 2006; Markowitz et al, 2021). Along with the general malaise that can accompany inadequate food intake, lack of nutrients may result in the very young being less likely to play and explore the world around them, which is crucial for their development (United Nations World Food Programme, 2006). Some research suggests a link between food insecurity and reduced physical activity (Gulliford et al, 2006).

The impact on school-aged children has mainly been reported by teachers and children themselves. A study conducted by Chefs in Schools (2022) stated that 88 per cent of teachers who witnessed children coming to school hungry reported that they were tired, with 84 per cent claiming that they were not able to attend to their learning as a result. The National Education Union (NEU, 2023) asked 18,000 of their members about children’s hunger and learning, with 87 per cent responding that they had seen children arrive at school tired or unable to concentrate because of a lack of food. In O’Connell et al’s (2019a) qualitative study of children’s experiences of food insecurity, some reported having to rest their head on their desks at school as they were so tired due to hunger. Research suggests it is long-term lack of food and nutrients that has a lasting impact on children’s ability to learn: children with stunted growth, an indication of inadequate food intake over a long period of time, perform poorly on cognitive functioning tests regardless of how recently they have eaten (Lopez et al, 1993). However, when children who typically ate a balanced adequate diet were tested after skipping breakfast for one day, their cognitive functioning appeared to be unaffected (Kral et al, 2012).

The impact of family stress

Alongside these physiological effects of hunger on cognition is the role of family stress caused by a lack of food. The impact of food insecurity on mental wellbeing and family functioning is well documented (Ward & Lee, 2020). Parents experiencing food insecurity often report feelings of guilt and shame about their inability to feed their children, stress from constant financial worries, frustration over limited food options, stigma associated with using food banks, and overall sadness about their situation (Leung et al, 2022). Parents mentioned coping mechanisms such as excessive sleeping or alcohol misuse to manage the persistent stress. Additionally, concerns about the quality and nutritional value of food they can provide contribute to further feelings of shame and guilt (Lindow et al, 2022). Unsurprisingly, these emotions contribute to mental health issues such as depression, stress and anxiety (Pourmotabbed et al, 2020).

Poor mental health among parents is associated with strained family relationships, harsher punishments and reduced responsiveness (Brown et al, 2020; Ward & Lee, 2020). Consequently, food insecurity can alter family dynamics and impact on children’s own wellbeing. Children experiencing food insecurity are more likely to suffer from anxiety (Weinreb et al, 2002; McLaughlin et al, 2012) and mood disorders, including depression (McLaughlin et al, 2012; Ke & Ford-Jones, 2015); even though they are less likely to miss meals than their parents, who reduce their own consumption to ensure that children can eat (O’Connell et al, 2019a). The correlation between living with food insecurity and mood disorders may be that stress, anxiety and depression from parents ‘trickles down’ to children (Dunifon & Jones, 2003). Depression and stress in parents can lead to more negative parent–child interactions which are less warm and nurturing, and this in turn can promote low mood and anxiety in children (Zaslow et al, 2009). This research is all relevant to our discussion in later chapters of the impact on food banks on both children and the wider family.

Food bank research: the critique of neoliberal solutions to poverty

Although our research is focused on schools, we found in our review of the literature on food banks a number of key insights which helped us to contextualise the growth of food banks in schools. There are distinctive differences between food banks in schools and what we term public food banks, which are largely forms of provision that require a voucher to access. Most public food banks in the UK are run by the Trussell Trust, a network of not-for-profit franchises (Lambie-Mumford, 2017). They provide emergency food parcels for people to take home (in contrast to a ‘soup kitchen’), and have become emblematic of poverty during the 2010s (Wells & Caraher, 2014; Cloke et al, 2017). Food banks differ from food pantries in that the latter usually require a fee and/or membership, and then users can select their food. As we see in later chapters, some schools run their food provision on this basis, but we use the term ‘food bank’ to cover all forms of provision. Many food banks rely on the provision of surplus food through organisations such as FareShare and the Felix Project, which redistribute food which cannot be sold, and thus there is an environmental benefit too (Lambie-Mumford & Loopstra, 2020). This approach is presented by organisations as a ‘dual purpose’ solution, solving two problems at once, but critics fear that this represents giving ‘left over food’ to ‘left over people’, reframing the surplus as ‘edible waste’ and the effect as reducing supermarkets’ disposal costs (Riches, 2020).

A further term which requires definition is food insecurity. This term is sometimes used interchangeably with food poverty, though this then raises questions about the distinction between food poverty and simply poverty (Lambie-Mumford, 2017). We use the term ‘food insecurity’ here in keeping with the widely used definition from Anderson: ‘Food insecurity exists whenever the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or the ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways is limited or uncertain’ (Anderson, 1990, p 1560, cited in Lambie-Mumford, 2017, p 17). This emphasis on social acceptability is important in understanding the complexity of food insecurity; accessing food through a food bank is not a ‘socially acceptable’ way of acquiring groceries. This is one of the key insights from the food banks literature which we use in this book, which we will discuss. The other key points relate to the concept of deservingness, the depoliticisation of poverty through food banks, and the complex relationships between those who work or volunteer in food banks and those who use them.

Social interactions and food

As noted in Anderson’s definition, food has a social dimension; receiving free food from an organisation, even where this is ‘surplus food’, is not the normal way of acquiring food. Despite the normalisation of food banks, acquiring food in this way remains noticeably ‘Other’ and can be highly stigmatising (Purdam et al, 2015; Garthwaite, 2016b). Extensive research has found that visits to food banks can be ‘deeply stigmatising experiences that already have harmful effects on self-esteem’ (Pybus et al, 2021, p 23); Power et al (2020) refer to ‘a corrosive sense of shame’. This means that many food-insecure families do not use one; thus, food bank use in England is a ‘poor proxy’ for food insecurity (Pybus et al, 2021). Pybus et al conclude that ‘most people who are food insecure do not visit food banks’ (2021, p 35). This reflects international findings that families only use food banks in the most extreme circumstances (Loopstra & Tarasuk, 2012, 2015).

Food insecurity cannot be separated from wider poverty, but has particular consequences. A key point is that within family finances, food costs are more flexible than many other costs such as rent and bills, and thus families may adapt what and how much they eat based on how much money they have left (Graham & Fenwick, 2022). Access to cheap food is also variable, as some areas do not have large supermarkets, and these may also be areas with higher housing and transport costs (Pybus et al, 2021). Food is a particularly sensitive issue, and not having enough has social and emotional consequences, including for children. Purdham et al (2015) note that for their research participants a food bank visit ‘involved overcoming considerable embarrassment about being seen as not being able to provide for themselves and their family’. Social research has emphasised the importance of food within families as a source of bonding and the particularities of food insecurity in social as well as health terms (Knight et al, 2018; O’Connell et al, 2019b). Food has a role in defining people’s identities; it has cultural and sometimes religious significance, as well as being seen as a basic need which parents need to provide for their children. As Strong comments: ‘What we eat signifies more than just a fuel, just as bodies are more than machines’ (2019, p 2).

The impact on people’s self-worth is linked in some research to the lack of choice available at a food bank (Purdam et al, 2015). There is an expectation, including among food bank workers and volunteers, that users should be grateful for what they are given, as though choosing what you eat is a luxury only afforded to the affluent (Garthwaite, 2017). This negative discourse about lack of gratitude is linked to discourses of deservingness.

The deserving/undeserving poor trope

Within the research on food banks, a common finding is the prevalence of the trope of a division between the deserving and undeserving poor. Within this framing, some of those in need of a food bank are worthy of help, while others are not, often because they have failed to help themselves. Tarkiainen (2022), in her discussion of representations of ‘deservingness’, points out the long history of discourses of division between those who deserve help and assistance and those who do not, and the continued significance of these in contemporary policy making: ‘[T]hroughout modern British history, undeservingness has re-emerged repeatedly in different political circumstances but with basic structure unchanged, that is, associating undeservingness with a mixture of physical and mental laziness, irresponsible childbearing, substance abuse and with the inability to defer gratification’ (Tarkiainen, 2022, pp 2–3). Importantly, the idea of deservingness ‘deals with the obligations and norms related to generosity and conditionality’ (Tarkiainen, 2022, p 102). The current norm is that food banks are usually something that you need to be eligible for, as evidenced by production of a voucher (Garthwaite, 2016a). This conditionality does not apply at school food banks, as we see in later chapters, but this does not mean that the idea of a divide between those who deserve help and those who do not disappears. What Tarkiainen (2022) refers to as a continuous performance of the discourse of deservingness rhetorically positions some families as failing to make the most of what they are offered in terms of free food. Those who complain about the choice or amount of food given are regarded as ungrateful and undeserving.

The construction of deservingness currently in play is based on neoliberal processes of individualisation, where each person is responsible for themselves. Use of this deficit framing is exacerbated by the statements from some politicians suggesting the growth of food banks is simply due to greater availability (Garthwaite, 2017), despite the evidence that most food bank use is a last resort. This political argument about what drives the growth of food banks as a solution to food poverty is the next key point from this literature.

The withdrawal of the state and rise in governmentality

As noted in the introductory chapter, there is a range of scholarship internationally on food banks which focuses on their role in depoliticising the problem of poverty, through the removal of this burden from the purview of the state. The US and Canada, where food banks have a longer history, provide evidence of how food banks undermine ‘the state’s obligation, as ratified in international conventions, to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to food’ (Riches, 2002, p 648). As the state withdraws from social welfare obligations, charitable groups and civic society step in to provide food, and the responsibility for hunger shifts to this sector rather than government. Thus, food banks in various forms produce state ‘detachment and deniability of responsibility in relation to social welfare and food provision’ (Livingstone, 2017, p 2).

This argument has been applied to the UK context, where the growth of food banks in the 2010s is seen similarly as evidence of a denuded welfare state, where reductions in welfare benefits have allowed poverty to grow to a level where people need to access free food (Lambie-Mumford & Dowler, 2014; Dowler & Lambie-Mumford, 2015; Lambie-Mumford & Loopstra, 2020). This is considered by some through the lens of the human right to food, as defined by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in order to question the ‘roles and responsibilities of the state and charitable sector when it comes to preventing and protecting people from poverty and food insecurity’ (Lambie-Mumford, 2017, p 4).

A further area of discussion is the way that food banks represent a shift in values, as well as practical solutions, when it comes to managing the problem of poverty. As Cloke et al comment, some scholarship from a political economy perspective argues that ‘food banks can be seen as inextricably entwined within a multiplicity of largely aggressive political forces deployed to replace established models of welfare provision and state regulation with a free-market fundamentalism that normalizes individualistic self-interest, entrepreneurial values and consumerism’ (2017, p 706). For some, this represents neoliberal governmentality; Power argues that state withdrawal cannot be ignored, but that there should be a greater emphasis on ‘the transformation of public, social and cultural life according to the principles of the market: competition, entrepreneurship, audit and regulation’ (Power, 2022, p 33). This relation to values is important in that the idea of the individual as solely responsible for themselves underpins the withdrawal of the state from responsibility for feeding families, but fails to account for the caring nature of those who respond. Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of biopower, Strong argues that food banks reveal a ‘state that is not only retreating financially from provisioning, but also from the responsibilities for the vital politics that accompany acts of provisioning’, that is, from responsibility for ensuring people live (2019, p 1). These analyses align closely with our argument in relation to the responsibilisation of schools, in terms of the withdrawal of the state; however, in our analysis, the individual responsibility reinforced by food banks is alleviated by the school, who step in to solve the immediate problem of family hunger. This represents something distinctive about food banks in schools as opposed to in the community. We return to this discussion in later chapters.

Critiques of the ‘Good Samaritan’ narrative

Just as the literature on food banks suggests a complex impact on users, the research on those who work or volunteer in food banks is also ambivalent. In particular, there is a critique of a narrative of the ‘Good Samaritan’ who feeds the poor, as this is seen as an over-simplification of the role of food banks within a neoliberal state. Power argues that food bank organisations’ presentations of their work ‘do not admit the role which food aid may play in creating stigma, upholding inequalities, and maintaining the very status quo which food charities claim, in public statements and campaigns, to reject’ (2022, p 1). While it may benefit organisations to present themselves as helping the needy in terms of donations, this fails to recognise the more negative consequences of food banks and the depoliticisation of hunger as an issue.

At a more local level, ethnographic work in food banks has provided evidence of how workers pathologise the ‘food poor’, and there are divisions within the food bank users based on who is stigmatised as struggling due to personal failings (Power et al, 2020). Garthwaite (2016b) found some food bank users were seen as engaging in ‘faulty behavioural practices’ such as spending their money on alcohol or cigarettes rather than food. Because of these relations, there is limited potential for food banks to be spaces of emancipation where new political narratives can be constructed; this is precluded by ‘institutionalised classism and the, related, neoliberal narratives of deserving/undeserving poor’ (Power et al, 2020, p 919).

However, there is an alternative viewpoint arising from social geography which questions the dominance of the argument that food banks ‘depoliticize issues of poverty by institutionalizing food poverty as deserving of charitable emergency aid rather than collectivist welfare entitlements’ (Cloke et al, 2017, p 704). While they have sympathy with this view, Cloke et al point out that this focus might obscure more progressive possibilities, and instead suggest alternative ways of ‘conceptualizing food banks as spaces of care … introducing values other than neoliberal capitalism’ (p 704). The food bank may be a space for ‘meaningful encounters between people of different social positions’ (p 708). This more hopeful analysis suggests that, particularly where there are no conditions attached to attendance, food banks can be ‘investments in compassion that dissolves boundaries’ (p 710). Similarly, other scholarship emphasises the possibility of food banks as places of morality, sociality and care, including the work of Williams et al (2016) and Lambie-Mumford (2017), who discuss the moral imperatives for food banks. We return to these perspectives in our final chapter.

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to set out the key insights from our review of the literature on poverty and education; the impacts of austerity and Covid (following our discussion of the cost-of-living crisis in Chapter One); hunger, family stress and learning; and on food banks more widely. While the research reviewed is expansive due to the range of topics covered, we have focused on the key topics which were necessary to contextualise our analysis of the case studies, and particularly those areas which are less familiar to our field of the sociology of education, which has a long history of exploring the relationship between social status and schooling. The key concepts examined here – namely that hunger has complex impacts, that the last decade has had considerable impacts on families and that food banks represent the withdrawal of the state – are areas we return to in the following chapters.