The Provision of Meals for School Children, which is the subject of the following pages, is still undergoing that process of tentative transformation from a private charity to a public service by which we are accustomed to disguise the assumption of new responsibilities by the State. Begun in the 'sixties of the nineteenth century as a form of philanthropic effort, and denounced from time to time as socialistic and subversive of family life, it first attracted serious public attention when the South African war made the physical defects caused by starvation, which had been regarded with tolerance in citizens, appear intolerable in soldiers, and was canvassed at some length in the well-known reports of the Royal Commission on Physical Training in Scotland and of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. The first disposition of the authorities was, as usual, to recur to that maid-of-all-work, the Poor Law, and in April, 1905, the Relief (School Children) Order empowered the Guardians to grant relief to the child of an able-bodied man without requiring him to enter the workhouse or to perform the outdoor labour test, provided that they took steps to recover the cost. The Guardians, however, perhaps happily, had little sympathy for this deviation from the principle of deterrence, with the result that the new Order was in most places either not applied or applied with insignificant results. The consequence was that the attempt to make the provision of meals for school children part of the Poor Law was abandoned. In 1906 the Education (Provision of Meals) Act was passed empowering Local Education Authorities to provide food, either in co-operation with voluntary agencies or out of public funds, up to the limit of a half-penny rate. In the year 1911-12, out of 322 authorities, 131 were returned as making some provision for the feeding of school children.

The object of Miss Bulkley's monograph is to describe what that provision is, how adequate or inadequate, how systematic or haphazard, and to examine its effect on the welfare both of the children concerned, and of the general community. The present work is, therefore, complementary to Mr. Greenwood's Health and Physique of School Children, which was recently published by the Ratan Tata Foundation, and which gave an exhaustive description of the conditions of school children in respect of health as revealed by the reports of School Medical Officers. That the subject with which Miss Bulkley deals is one of the first importance, few, whatever views may be held as to the Act of 1906, will be found to deny. Almost all the medical authorities who have made a study of the health and physique of school children are unanimous that a capital cause of ill-health among them is lack of the right kind of food. "Defective nutrition," states Sir George Newman, "stands in the forefront as the most important of all physical defects from which school children suffer.... From a purely scientific point of view, if there was one thing he was allowed to do for the six million children if he wanted to rear an imperial race, it would be to feed them.... The great, urgent, pressing need was nutrition. With that they could get better brains and a better race." "Apart from infectious diseases," said Dr. Collie before the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, "malnutrition is accountable for nine-tenths of child sickness." "Food," Dr. Eichholz told the same body, "is at the base of all the evils of child degeneracy." "The sufficient feeding of children," declared Dr. Niven, the Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, "is by far the most important thing to attend to." "To educate underfed children," said Dr. Leslie Mackenzie, "is to promote deterioration of physique by exhausting the nervous system. Education of the underfed is a positive evil." What doctors understand by malnutrition is what the plain man calls starvation; and while it is, of course, due to other causes besides actual inability to procure sufficient food, the experience of those authorities which have undertaken the provision of meals in a thorough and systematic manner suggests that these statements as to the prevalence of malnutrition or starvation are by no means exaggerations. To say, as has recently been said by a writer of repute in the Economic Journal, "already 40,000 children are fed weekly at the schools without appreciably improving the situation," is a ridiculous misstatement of the facts. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in those areas where suitable and sufficient meals have been provided, there has been a marked improvement in the health of the children receiving them. The tentative conclusions on this point given for a single city by Mr. Greenwood (Health and Physique of School Children, pp. 62-67), are substantiated by the fuller evidence which Miss Bulkley sets out in Chapter V. of the present work. "As far as the children are concerned, indeed, whether we consider the improvement in physique, mental capacity or manners, there is no doubt that the provision of school meals has proved of the greatest benefit."

But while there is little doubt that the authorities which have made determined attempts to use to the full their powers under the Act of 1906 have been rewarded by an improvement in the health of the children attending school, Miss Bulkley's enquiries show that the Act itself is open to criticism, that many local authorities who ought to have welcomed the new powers conferred by the Act have been deterred by a mean and short-sighted parsimony from adopting it, and that in many areas where it has been adopted its administration leaves much to be desired. The limitation to a halfpenny rate of the amount which a local authority may spend, has resulted in more than one authority stopping meals in spite of the existence of urgent need for them. By deciding—contrary, it would appear, to the intention of Parliament—that local authorities cannot legally spend money on providing meals except when the children are actually in school, the Local Government Board has made impossible, except at the risk of a surcharge or at the cost of private charity, the provision of meals during holidays. To those who regard the whole policy of the Act of 1906 as a mistake, these limitations upon it will appear, of course, to be an advantage. But the assumption on which the Act is based is that it is in the public interest that provision should be made for children who would otherwise be underfed, and, granted this premise, the wisdom of intervening to protect ratepayers against their own too logical deductions from it would appear to be as questionable as it is unnecessary. The bad precedent of authorities such as Leicester, which has refused to adopt the Act, and which leaves the feeding of school children to be carried out by a voluntary organisation under whose management the application for meals is in effect discouraged, does not, unfortunately, stand alone. Of more than 200 authorities who have made no use of their statutory powers, how many are justified in their inaction by the absence of distress among the school children in their area? How many have even taken steps to ascertain whether such distress exists or not? If it is the case, as is stated by high medical authorities, that "the education of the underfed is a positive evil," would not the natural corollary appear to be that, now that the experimental stage has been passed, the Act should be made obligatory and the provision of meals should become a normal part of the school curriculum?

Apart from these larger questions of policy, it will be agreed that, if local authorities are to feed children at all, it is desirable that they should do so in the way calculated to produce the beneficial results upon the health of school children which it is the object of the Act to secure. That certain authorities have been strikingly successful in providing good food under humanising conditions appears from the account of the effects of school meals given by Miss Bulkley. But the methods pursued in the selection of the children and in the arrangements made for feeding them vary infinitely from place to place, and the standards of efficiency with which many authorities are content appear to be lamentably low. It is evident that in many places a large number of children who need food are overlooked, either because the conditions are such as to deter parents from applying for meals, or because no attempt is made to use the medical service to discover the needs of children whose parents have not applied, or for both reasons (pp. 59-75). It is evident also that many authorities do not give sufficient attention to the character of the meals provided (pp. 79-83), or to the conditions under which they are served (pp. 83-101), with the result that "most diets ... are probably wanting in value for the children," and that little attempt is made to secure the "directly educational effect ... in respect of manners and conduct," which was emphasised as a desideratum by the Board of Education. London, in particular, where the necessity for the provision of meals is conspicuous, has won a bad pre-eminence by sinning against light. Reluctant, in the first place, to use its powers at all—"the whole question," said the chairman of the Sub-Committee on Underfed Children in 1908, "of deciding which children are underfed, and of making special provision for such children, should really be one for the Poor Law Authority"—the Education Committee of the London County Council has taken little pains to ensure that the food provided should always be suitable, or that the meals should be served under civilising conditions. That these defects can be removed by care and forethought is shown by the example set by such towns as Bradford, and now that eight years have elapsed since the Education (Provision of Meals) Act was passed, they should cease to receive the toleration which may reasonably be extended to new experiments. Miss Bulkley's monograph will have served its purpose if it makes it somewhat easier for the administrator, whether on Education Authorities or Care Committees, in Public Offices or in Parliament itself, to apply the varied experience of the last eight years to a problem whose solution is an indispensable condition of the progress of elementary education.

R. H. Tawney.

Heights and Weights of 366 Children from Secondary Schools and 2,111 from Elementary Schools in Liverpool.

Boys

Girls

Boys

Girls

A is a school where the parents were comparatively well-to-do and the children mostly had comfortable homes.

B is a school where the parents were mostly small shopkeepers or labourers in constant employment.

C is a school where the parents were mostly unemployed or casually employed.