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During the cost-of-living crisis, schools and nurseries have had to step beyond their educational purpose to offer free food to families through food banks. This book explores how these food banks operate, why families use them and how they affect children’s participation and wellbeing. Drawing on case studies of 12 primary schools and early years settings across England, it examines the impact on family wellbeing, home-school relationships and staff.
The authors argue that the situation will remain unsustainable if this welfare work continues to be unfunded and unrecognised, raising a significant question of who should and who can be responsible for alleviating child poverty.
This chapter is the first of three chapters which focus on research data based on interviews with staff working in schools and early years settings with food banks. The chapter explores how schools supply food to families, including where food comes from and how it is distributed to families. It is argued that schools use their knowledge of the local community to decide how food is given out, and the role of choice in affording families dignity. The ‘origin stories’ of the food banks are also explained, in order to consider in more depth why schools have decided to offer this provision. Central to this chapter is the concept of policy enactment which emphasises the importance of context. We discuss how context guides the operation of a school’s food bank, even though a policy is not being enacted in the strictest sense. Schools and early years settings can be vastly different, and this necessitates food bank provision on different scales and of different types.
The education sector has in recent years experienced significant challenges due to rising levels of need among communities, as families have struggled with poverty, including experiencing food insecurity during the cost-of-living crisis. This chapter outlines this context for the food banks in schools and early years 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. The literature on community food banks is also explored, including 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.
This second chapter of findings explores the impact of having a food bank from the perspective of those who work in a school or early years setting. The impact is significant for many of the participants, but diverse, and goes far beyond an impact on children’s learning. This chapter explores how adults perceive the effect of families having regular access to free food on children’s learning, participation and motivation. The wider social impacts of receiving food and other goods, including how children are able to experience and enjoy ordinary childhood activities, are then examined. These are important in understanding the impact of food banks in schools, and can be seen as part of a school’s practices of inclusion. A third section of the chapter focuses on the impact of families, which is seen by teachers to be far more diverse than simply reducing hunger. School staff’s perceptions of families include some deficit discourses, and it is argued that these form part of a continued deserving/undeserving poor narrative that persists. This points to the complexity of food banks as a social practice, but it is argued that schools are well placed to understand and cater for these needs.
In this concluding chapter, the wider policy implications of food banks in schools are discussed. Returning to the central argument relating to the responsibilisation of schools to address the problem of child poverty, the chapter begins an exploration of staff views of food banks as a phenomenon. The impact on budgets and staff, and the lack of recognition for this work within accountability systems are also discussed. The lack of policy in this area for schools is a key point in this chapter. Tools from policy sociology relating to policy enactment are insufficient to understand this topic, and require some evolution to consider how schools act when faced with a policy vacuum. The issue of responsibility is then considered in more depth, as the focus shifts to whether the argument made in relation to public food banks and the withdrawal of the state applies to school food banks. This leads to an argument for a more nuanced understanding of how responsibilisation is operating within the neoliberal state. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how we might conceptualise educational responses to the cost-of-living crisis, and why this research matters in terms of how we view schools and welfare state.
This third chapter of research findings explores how leaders balance the advantages of operating a food bank with the additional costs, beginning with a discussion of the impact on home–school relationships. This includes discussion of how difficulties can arise in relationships. Justifications for the food banks are examined here, drawing on both moral and practical reasons. Schools offer a practical solution, in that parents attend the site regularly and there is reduced stigma. School leaders are pragmatic about their unique position as the service which sees children regularly, arguing that if they did not provide food, no one would. This chapter examines the ambiguity of feeling about stepping beyond education into welfare-related work, and the complexities of decision-making around what can and should be done by schools.
This book is about how growing levels of child poverty have resulted in schools and early years/early childhood settings stepping beyond their educational purpose to feed hungry families during the cost-of-living crisis. Schools, nurseries, nursery schools and pre-schools offer free food to families experiencing food insecurity through food banks which operate on-site, in various forms. This chapter sets out our rationale for the research, which relates to the cost-of-living crisis in the early 2020s, and some background on the primary and early years education sectors. The chapter then sets out the theoretical framework for our analysis, and discusses the key concepts of enactment and responsibilisation. The research design and methods are then outlined. A final part of the chapter sets out the structure of the remaining chapters.
This chapter maps the higher education (HE) arena three years after the 2021 military takeover. Inside the country, the State Administration Council (the new guise of the Tatmadaw) has not only halted the country’s HE reform but is also creating new conflicts and a politics of fear inside universities, reshaping HE access so it is once again only available to a select few (including students who can afford private colleges). Against this backdrop, various Spring Revolution actors are creating new HE opportunities for themselves and the young people trapped in Myanmar. New, alternative (in relation to the military-controlled universities) education providers are created with two aims. On one side, they are supporting the new Myanmar generations in continuing their studies and Myanmar teachers in maintaining their profession. On the other side, they seek to discredit the junta by proving that the military will not be able to effectively reinstate its old methods of control and fear-based repression. Creating new HE pathways is seen as a way to directly and effectively support the revolution.
This chapter shows how various actors cooperated and competed to shape the 2011–21 higher education (HE) reform during the Union Solidarity and Development Party (President Thein Sein’s party, which won the 2010 elections) and National League for Democracy (State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, which won the 2015 elections) governments. In doing so, it analyses the policy and legislative work leading up to the 2014 ‘New Education Law’ (NEL) and subsequent ‘National education strategic plan – 2016/21’. This chapter demonstrates that President Thein Sein advanced a vision of HE that was more transformative for society at large than the one advanced by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. Her approach coupled an elitist vision of education with a very carefully crafted policy meant to deter possible mass, collective action. What reform progress universities were able to make was thus due mainly to the space for agency opened by President Thein Sein and the resilient work of teachers and student activists. The chapter analyses occasions in which the views of student politics clashed with state authority, mainly the 2014/15 protest against the NEL and the 2019/20 protests against the University of Yangon centenary celebrations.
After having showcased the lived experiences of the actors who have built and contested higher education (HE) in Myanmar, the conclusion draws out the key considerations and patterns emerging from the book to fulfil its two main aims. On one side, the book has illustrated the historical and contemporary role of HE institutions in Myanmar, underlining that they represent some of most important and dynamic institutions in the country and a space of resistance against authoritarianism. On the other side, the example of the Myanmar HE arena shows how and why the global neoliberalist trends prevailing in HE are particularly dangerous when it comes to authoritarian contexts and conflict-prone countries: in these settings in particular, it is crucial that HE be left unhindered to make its social contribution of offering active spaces of resistance.
