According to Barnardos there are 3.7 million children living in poverty in the UK.<\/p>\n
I grew up on one of the largest council estates in Europe in a low-income household and had free school meals but we didn\u2019t consider ourselves poor therefore I find poverty difficult to define but in my opinion ultimately comes down to opportunities given to you in life.<\/strong> 3 good meals a day, education etc.<\/p>\n Schools have an important part to play so let\u2019s stop the plans to create even more free schools and grammar schools and invest in our existing schools, let\u2019s give our schools the funds and resource to support children from ALL backgrounds and create a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD regardless of family wealth.<\/p>\n We should remove any stigma felt by children and parents due to differing incomes by providing nutritional meals and ensuring school uniforms, school trips are the same for everyone as this is vital in tackling this problem.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not convinced by the governments planned changes to means test school meals, especially as they claim the changes will pocket them \u00a3650 million,<\/p>\n interestingly this is the quote from the Conservative website\u00a0“With Theresa May, free school lunches will remain for those who need them.\u00a0<\/strong>But the most important issue for our children is getting the best Brexit deal”.\u00a0<\/strong>Is there no limit to how many issues the Tory’s will twist to push their Brexit agenda?\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Finally the Minimum wage for working families should also be reviewed as \u00a37.50 is clearly not enough and it should be closer to \u00a38.45.<\/p>\n To add some context I would finally note that\u00a0It\u2019s important to consider where we fit into the global picture. if you earn \u00a320,000 p.a. you’re in the top\u00a010%<\/strong>\u00a0of the worlds earners, earn \u00a340,000 p.a.and you\u2019re in the top 1%<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" According to Barnardos there are 3.7 million children living in poverty in the UK. I grew up on one of the largest council estates in Europe in a low-income household and had free school meals but we didn\u2019t consider ourselves poor therefore I find poverty difficult to define but in my opinion ultimately comes down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","inline_featured_image":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shaunhughes.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}