A mother has complained about the ‘astronomical’ cost of unhealthy school lunches
Joanne Beverley, 48, from Barnsley, Yorkshire, was left shocked after realising her children were spending extortionate amounts of money on unhealthy food at school.
After realising lunches for the three children in secondary school were costing over £80 a week, and included unhealthy items such as pizza slices, brownies, bacon sandwiches and pasta pots, the stay-at-home mum decided to make a change to save money.
After changing to a mix of packed lunches and school dinners for the three, she is now saving £50 a week, with one of her sons priorly even spending £11 in one day.
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Ms Beverley told The i Paper: “It’s a ridiculous amount of money to be spending. Last year when they started school, they didn’t realise how much they were spending because it’s a thumb print.”
Her children’s academy trust school, like many others, uses the cashless biometric thumbprint system in canteens, which allows parents to top-up via an online portal. The school sends out weekly reminders to parents that any pupil with £15 of arrears on their account will not be able to access a meal.
‘Free-for-all’
After realising the thumbprint did not automatically let you set up a daily cap, she asked for one to be installed, and now sends her children to school with a packed lunch thrice a week, and a £5 daily cap for the other two days.
She said: “It’s a bit of a free-for-all, and the teachers are well aware because I remember in a meeting teachers saying it does happen quite a bit when kids first come in, they get a bit silly or crazy with it.”
Ms Beverley also complained about the endless options at school causing long canteen lines, with her children like many others relying on unhealthy meals from the fast snack bar.
The long lunch queues mixed with only a 30-minute lunch break were causing her children to rack up costs at lunchtime.
She said: “The kids are just trying to ram stuff down their throats as fast as they can.”
The impact of free school meals
One teacher at a primary school in Mitcham, London, told The i Paper that the Mayor of London’s free school meal policy has made a difference to pupils.
The Year 4 teacher said: “Now you’re sure that they’ve had something to eat, so that eliminates worries about child poverty and children eating”
“I think for most children who couldn’t afford lunches, you would just find very unhealthy stuff in there packed lunches. Because mums and dads are just throwing stuff in there.”
She added: “You might have kids who are quite lethargic because they’ve not had proper milk, and they’re quite sluggish.”
The primary schoolteacher said a universal free school meal policy would not work in secondary school because teenagers are quite unforgiving and would laugh at students whose parents can’t afford to buy a school meal.
A report by the charity School Food Matters found the average cost of a meal in 2024 to be an estimated £3.27 in England. The study found that at the time, this was 23p higher than the £3.04 Consumer Prices Index adjusted rate.
And the estimated cost was found to be 74p higher per meal than the 2023-24 Free School Meal/Universal Infant Free School Meal (FSM/UIFSM) rate in England. However, the price per meal allocation in Scotland (£3.33) and Wales (£3.20) at the time of the report was closer to the estimated cost of £3.27.
The FSM/UIFSM rate has only risen 23p between 2014 and 2024, despite caterers reporting increasingly higher costs. Food prices have risen 4.5 per cent in December 2025 and are 37 per cent higher than five years ago, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.
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The Department for Education said: “Section 512ZA of the Education Act 1996 gives the power to charge for meals.
“Section 512ZA(1A) states that a local authority must not charge more for a school meal than it costs to provide that meal. Section 512ZA(2) states that the same price must be charged to everyone for the same quantity of the same item.”