According to the latest data on national food insecurity levels from The Food Foundation’s Food Insecurity Tracker, the UK’s essential workers are most impacted by food insecurity.
It finds that 21.1 per cent of households in which an education sector worker lives experienced food insecurity in January. Within this group, food insecurity was experienced by households home to the following:
- Teachers – 17.8 per cent
- Teaching assistant – 21 per cent
Niamh Sweeney, deputy general secretary at the National Education Union (NEU), said, ‘Pay is a serious issue across the education sector. It is one of the reasons why teachers and support staff are leaving the profession and why many decide not to enter it. The Government missed its target for recruiting new secondary school teachers by 41 per cent this year.
‘Support staff and special needs support assistants are leaving for jobs with higher pay, less hours and less stress. Some of our most vulnerable pupils are losing out.
‘We need fair pay to recruit more to the profession and for the sake of children and young people’s education.’
Overall, the data shows that 9.3 million adults (17.7 per cent of households) experienced food insecurity in January, with one in four households with children (4 million children) experiencing food insecurity in the same month.
Of all households that were food insecure, 38.6 per cent were in employment, which the Food Foundation says, ‘indicates that being in work is not necessarily sufficient to prevent families from falling into food insecurity.’
The Food Foundation is now calling on the Government to take action to ensure no-one in the UK has to suffer food insecurity by ensuring that minimum wage and benefit levels are set at ‘values that take into account what is required for families to afford a healthy diet’.
Anna Taylor, executive director of The Food Foundation, said, ‘Struggling to afford food is by no means confined to those out of work. Many people doing important jobs are also suffering the stress and indignity of not knowing if their pay cheque will allow them to buy the bare essentials. Businesses must pull out all the stops to help their lower paid staff and the Government needs to seriously scrutinise why their policies are failing to protect struggling families from affording the basics and start setting some targets for reducing food insecurity levels, particularly amongst benefit claimants.’