Why stop at breakfast? We paediatricians think all of England’s primary pupils should have lunch for free

Last year, nearly half of school nurses said they dealt with children suffering due to a lack of healthy food on a daily or weekly basis. One tragic fact that really exposes the parlous state of our children’s health is that removing decayed teeth is the most common operation in the UK for children. The leading cause of tooth decay is poor diet. Meanwhile, the growth of a generation has, quite literally, been stunted after an extended period of austerity: British five-year-olds are shorter compared with their peers in Europe.