Schools charging parents up to £1.80 a day for children to eat a packed lunch

Parents are being forced to pay up to £1.80 a day for their children to eat their own packed lunches at state schools.

An investigation by teachers’ union NASUWT found schools were charging parents to cover the cost of cleaning and supervising lunch areas as their budgets became increasingly squeezed.

The charges were found in both primary and secondary schools.

The survey said 14 parents reported being typically charged between 10p and 60p a day for their children to eat food from home.

One secondary school in the South East charged £1.80 a day, while a primary school in Yorkshire charged £1.

Patrick Roach, the NASUWT's deputy general secretary, told the Times Education Supplement he thought the charges were “disgraceful”.

He said: “Now just sitting in a dining hall and unwrapping your sandwiches is considered to be an optional extra, it’s disgraceful, it’s shocking.

“Parents should be appalled in just the same way that we’re appalled.”

The union said it believed more schools may start charging parents as budgets became increasingly strained.

Last year, the Association of School and College Leaders reported 90 per cent of school heads believed their institution's financial situation would have a detrimental effect on the quality of the education they provided.

It comes after Education Secretary Nicky Morgan was booed and ridiculed during a speech at the NASUWT conference in Birmingham last week after she spoke about the Conservative’s plans to turn every school in England into an academy.

She admonished the crowd for being too "negative" about the Government’s reforms and said their rhetoric was putting graduates off joining the profession.

She said: "The teaching unions have a choice - spend the next four years doing battle with us and doing down the profession they represent in the process, or stepping up, seizing the opportunities and promise offered by the White Paper and helping us to shape the future of the education system."

Lucy Powell, Labour’s shadow Education Secretary, said Ms Morgan’s speech displayed "how out of touch she is with what’s going on in education today".

She said: "Parents are just as angry with her costly, unnecessary reorganisation of our schools, which has nothing to do with raising standards and everything to do with ideology."