Debate contribution: Holiday Hunger and the High Cost of School Uniforms

Debate contribution by Mr Paul Givan on 12 November 2024.

MLA

Mr Paul Givan

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

12 November 2024

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Holiday Hunger and the High Cost of School Uniforms

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4658761

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I thank colleagues for the opportunity to respond to the motion and thank Mr Butler for moving it. Everyone who spoke demonstrated the real issues that are affecting our constituents. I will disagree with colleagues on very little of what they said, which they expressed with passion. It is about how we address that in the challenging fiscal environment that we have. I recognise that there are ongoing financial pressures on families, especially those with school-age children. The issues of child poverty outside of school term time and the cost of school uniforms were debated in the House when separate private Members' motions were tabled in March 2024. Since those debates, work has progressed well, particularly on the cost of school uniforms. I will come on to that in a few moments. In respect of how many families struggle with food poverty, particularly during school holiday periods, I recognise how difficult it continues to be for those families who are on low incomes and those for whom making ends meet is a daily struggle. As an Executive, we must ensure that we do whatever we can to support those families with the range of pressures that they face. I have spoken on a number of occasions in the House of how the Education budget falls far short of what is needed to deliver on a number of my key priorities. However, my Department still has a range of other policies and interventions in place to support children who may be impacted on by social disadvantage or poverty. We have worked hard to protect those interventions, as far as we could, given the challenging current budget. For example, the targeting social need policy provides £75 million to schools through the common funding formula. That provides for a wide range of interventions to support schools with the additional costs that they face in educating children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. There is also £8·1 million for the extended-schools programme, which supports over 400 schools, 200,000 pupils, 80,000 parents and 30,000 community representatives. The interventions are wide-ranging and include breakfast clubs and after-school activities.

The broader point is how we ensure that funding that is provided for a specific purpose is spent on that specific purpose. I could make that same argument about holiday hunger payments: there is no guarantee that payments that went into a bank account were spent on providing food outside of school term time. I agree with what the Member said. How do we ensure that that additional funding is used for the purposes for which it is designed? That is a valid question. It is one that I will also pose to Members: can we guarantee that holiday hunger payments went into feeding children? We know that, in school settings, that is exactly what it is used for, but we cannot guarantee that that funding was used for that specific purpose. By the way, I have no doubt that, in the vast majority of cases, it was, but we cannot guarantee that. My Department also continues to support school-age children through the provision of free school meals to low-income families that are in receipt of certain benefits. Holiday hunger continues to be an important issue. It is one that many Departments have been seeking to address for a number of years. The pandemic exacerbated food poverty across all society. In recognition of the challenge that many low-income families face during school holiday periods, in 2020, the previous Executive decided to establish a school holiday food grant scheme. That was funded by the Executive to provide payments to cover the cost of food during school holidays for pupils who were entitled to free school meals. While the Department of Education was identified as the interim lead Department, the previous Executive agreed that a wider strategic decision on the way forward to tackle food poverty, including holiday hunger, was required. That included the identification and resourcing of a lead Department. The ring-fenced funding that was previously made available to my Department to undertake those payments on behalf of the Executive ceased in the 2023-24 Budget, which the then Secretary of State set. With no ring-fenced funding in place, the permanent secretary had no practical alternative to discontinuing the scheme in March 2023. We all agree that no child should go hungry. While my Department continues to support school-age children during term time having access to healthy, nutritious meals, initiatives to tackle holiday hunger or support with food outside of term time are more closely aligned to social welfare support for families. Therefore, it is appropriate that the Executive take a wider decision about how they are going to tackle food poverty across society. Holiday hunger for children outside of term time should be an important part of that decision. I want to be part of the solution. I am not passing it on to somebody else; it is a wider issue that the Executive need to address. I met the Minister for Communities about the issue in September. We agreed that child food poverty, including that which is experienced during school holiday periods, would be considered as part of the development of an anti-poverty strategy that the Department for Communities leads on. I welcome his standing up of the cross-departmental working group on the anti-poverty strategy, and I echo the sentiments that the Minister for Communities expressed in a recent debate on child poverty in North Belfast. He said:

"When thinking of child poverty, we cannot separate it from poverty in general. Poverty does not happen in isolation to children; it happens to families" — [Official Report (Hansard), 24 September 2024, p42, col 2].

Mr Durkan used the same commentary when he said that the issue is "fundamentally about poverty". He is right. The Executive should make it a high priority in the anti-poverty strategy to seek to explicitly tackle food poverty across all our society and not seek to isolate child food poverty in particular. To seek to do so solely for school holiday periods is to miss an opportunity to tackle the issue more holistically.

I can. In that meeting, I expressed the view that a particular strand needed to focus on child food poverty. I have talked about whether, in addressing child poverty during the holiday periods, we can access community facilities or open up a school during term time, so that we ensure that the interventions that we want to make are for that specific purpose. I go back to the point that the Chairman of the Committee made: how can we make sure that our intervention achieves what we want it to achieve? I want the Department to be part of the solution. That is why I am positively engaging with the Department for Communities. We can bring options that will help to address the issue of child food poverty, specifically during the holiday periods, as the Member mentioned. As the anti-poverty strategy is developed, it will be for the Executive to agree how food poverty, including child food poverty, is tackled. They will also have to decide which Department should take forward the holistic actions to address food poverty and, importantly, whether they are prepared to fund those actions. Members, I have been there. I have campaigned on issues and often said to Ministers, "It is your responsibility to get the funding. I am bringing the issue to you and advocating for it". Members are right to do that and challenge me on it. Sometimes, we forget that, apart from a few, 90% of us are in the same Executive. I make that argument internally, and Ministers from other Departments push back on some things that I want. That is not often reflected by their colleagues in the Assembly, who then push me for the very thing that I am prioritising and their colleagues may have challenged me about. Mr Gaston made a really important contribution. I do not blame the Finance Minister for not giving me the funding that I need. I did not get what I needed in the monitoring round. That is not the Finance Minister's fault. I made the case, and I argued for it. I have received an allocation, and I will seek to work through that. However, as an Executive, we have been underfunded. It goes back to April 2022, the definition of "need" and the approach that was taken in Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland, not for the first time, was treated as the poor cousin in the United Kingdom. The fact that Northern Ireland has not been treated in the way in which it should be is a poor reflection on the United Kingdom as a whole. We need to get that additional resource. We have made progress on the fiscal framework. The Finance Minister has led on that, and I have supported her, but there is more work that we need to achieve. That will allow all our Departments to do more. I will not stand here and blame the Minister of Justice or the Minister of Health for not being able to do certain things. I understand the pressures that they face, because I face them. I only ask for colleagues to reflect on the financial pressures on me, which are the same as those on their ministerial colleagues, as we seek to take it forward. I will make progress on school uniforms. Between June and September, my Department undertook a 14-week consultation on proposals to reduce the cost of school uniforms. There were just under 7,500 responses to the consultation, and I plan to publish a summary of those findings in the coming weeks. The online element of the consultation received 3,444 responses, the majority of which supported the proposals that were being consulted on. The Education Authority Youth Service engaged with children and young people on my Department's behalf, and a specific survey was done with young people through youth groups, education other than at school (EOTAS) centres and children's individual school C2k accounts. That resulted in responses from just over 4,000 children and young people, with cost and comfort emerging as the key priorities in those responses. The general online survey had seven questions with a free-text response, and that generated over 4,000 comments. My Department will continue to analyse the responses, in addition to the 19 stand-alone reports from interested organisations. The online survey results show strong support for the introduction of the cost-control measures that some Members referred to. It is important that I take into account the view of all stakeholders in considering the most effective methods of cost control before coming to a decision on the best solution on that important issue. It is also clear that there is strong support for school uniform policy guidance to become statutory. Just over 77% of online respondents agreed with the proposal that schools should be legally required to comply with departmental uniform guidance. I can update the House that I therefore plan to bring a paper to the Executive in the coming weeks seeking agreement for my officials to formally instruct the Office of the Legislative Counsel to draft a Bill about school uniforms. It is my intention that the Bill will give statutory effect to the guidance on school uniforms. With the support of my Executive colleagues, I intend to bring the legislation to the Assembly as soon as possible in the coming months. It will then be for the due process to be followed, including scrutiny through the Assembly stages.

I look forward to working with you all in progressing the legislation to make a difference for the families who are in most need of our assistance. In doing that, perhaps, we will extend the schools' mobile phones policy to the Assembly.

That was not in the speech.

We will find a way to seal them. This is something that should bring us together to take action in a collective effort. We want to make that difference for children and young people and their families, and I look forward to each of us playing our part in developing the school uniform legislation and delivering the anti-poverty strategy to provide the best means of tackling poverty, including food poverty. I look forward to support for the work that I can do to bring that legislation through, working with you to do that. I thank Members for the way in which they have engaged in the debate. We are making progress, and I want to be able to make much more progress. Collectively, as an Executive, we will make the case for further funding. I assure Members that I want to make progress on both issues. Colleagues asked about the consultation on the terms of eligibility for free school meals, and they should see that coming out in the coming days. I intend to put that out for consultation so that we can have more engagement around that area.

2,164 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:33 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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