Campaigning Liverpool kids celebrate free school meals success
A group of campaigning schoolchildren arrived on the steps of No 10 Downing Street earlier to hand over a special thank-you message. Four pupils from Monkstown Primary School in Liverpool had joined the campaign to extend eligibility for free school meals to children of families on Universal Credit.Arthur, Ahmed, Max and Josie, all aged 11 and in year six, were joined for the No Child Left Behind Coalition, a campaign organised by the National Education Union (NEU).The four wanted to thank the government for extending the free school meal entitlement and handed over a card to staff at Downing Street.
Earlier this month Sir Keir Starmer announced an extension of the programme, which will cover the daily cost of school lunches to an additional half a million children from 2026.Year six teacher Anne-Marie Ferrigan runs a project called Pupil Voice at Monkstown, which aims to let the children have a say in what the school does. She told BBC Radio Merseyside: "When they researched it, they decided that actually it wasn't acceptable that we were not getting free school meals for all the children and all the families who couldn't afford it."
Josie, who made the trip to London, said: "Some of our friends in school and in our classes have struggled with that and we wanted to make it fair." Ms Ferrigan said: "We're so, so proud of all the children here at Monkstown, the fact that they can put themselves across and they can put themselves in somebody else's shoes and understand what that might feel like. "And then the fact that they want to do something about it, the fact that they want to give up their time to make change for something that doesn't even affect some of them."
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