With more than a third of Bolton’s children living in poverty and cost-of-living pressures mounting, our special report gets to the heart of the crisis facing our borough’s youngsters. Here we see how a record number of children in the borough are now eligible for free school meals.  

A record number of children in Bolton are now on free school meals, with nearly one in four pupils depending on schools to feed them.

This comes amid mounting desperation across the borough in the face of the cost-of-living crisis which has pushed more and more families into poverty.

Now 13,202 children have been found to be eligible for free schools in Bolton according to Department of Education figures, the most since records began.

National Education Union Bolton branch secretary Carla Hazlehurst said: “Obviously the society that we live in should not see this number of children needing to be looked after by the system and its only going to get worse with the cost-of-living crisis.”

She added: “It’s not a new thing to be honest, it’s been going on for a long period of time we’ve seen children come in without appropriate lunches or with only a packet of crisps and its right that they should have proper meals.

“But what we’re also seeing increasingly is educators who are choosing to feed their own children before themselves, so we’re now seeing schools having to provide hot meals for their own staff!”

Ms Hazlehurst added one of the best ways to tackle this would be to address low wages across all sectors and make sure parents are properly paid.

The children eligible for free school meals in Bolton came to just under a quarter of all state school pupils in the area with more than 40 per cent of pupils eligible in state run special schools.

Bolton South East MP Yasmin Qureshi, whose constituency contains some of the borough’s most deprived communities said she was deeply worried by the findings.

She said: “This speaks to a wider issue of managed decline under the Conservative council locally and the Conservative council nationally.

“Rather than provide growth, opportunity and wealth, the Conservative Party are entrenching inequality with their decisions and it is my residents who are suffering.”

But a government spokesperson has said that they are providing more than £37billion to help families with rising costs, and will continue to keep eligibility under review.