Text 1: Toast before times tables, by Grace Amoah

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

At a quarter to eight on a Tuesday, the hall at Brookfield Primary smells of toast. Sixty children sit at long tables eating bagels, cereal and, on Fridays, beans. A volunteer called Mo, a retired bus driver in a hairnet, works the toaster with the speed of a man who has done this five hundred times, and knows that the girl in the yellow coat likes hers barely brown.

The breakfast club began four years ago, when the head teacher, Clare Whitby, noticed how many children were arriving with nothing inside them. ‘You could see it by ten o’clock,’ she says. ‘They were pale, they were grumpy, they couldn’t hold a thought. You cannot teach fractions to a child whose stomach is shouting at him.’

The club is free and open to every pupil. That, she insists, is the point. ‘If it were only for the poor children, the children who most need it would never come. Nobody wants to be the kid on the free breakfast. So it’s for everyone. The doctor’s daughter sits next to the boy whose dad has lost his job, and nobody knows who is who.’

Not everyone agrees. A local councillor has argued that feeding children is the job of parents, not schools, and that free breakfasts let some families off the hook. Clare has heard this before. ‘I am not interested in punishing a seven-year-old for what his parents can or can’t do,’ she says.

Attendance is up. Lateness has halved. Teachers report calmer mornings. But the moment that stays with me is smaller. As the bell goes, a boy of about eight wraps two slices of toast in a paper napkin and slides them into his book bag. Mo sees him, and says nothing, and quietly puts two more slices in the toaster.

‘For his sister,’ he tells me afterwards. ‘She’s at the infants’ school. They don’t have one.’

Text 2: Penny dinners at the board school, by A Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This newspaper report was written in 1885, during a hard winter, about cheap dinners provided for children at a board school (a state elementary school).

In the basement of the board school in Tenter Street, between the hours of twelve and one, a remarkable scene may be witnessed daily. Some three hundred children, ragged for the most part and many of them barefoot, file past a long trestle table at which two ladies ladle out bowls of pea soup with a thick slice of bread. The charge is one penny. For those who cannot pay, and they are many, a ticket is given by the master, and nothing is said.

The scheme was begun this winter by the master himself, Mr Vickerman, after a little girl in the second standard fainted at her desk and was found to have eaten nothing for two days. ‘I had been beating the alphabet into children who were starving,’ he told me. ‘I am ashamed to say I did not see it.’ Since the dinners began, he tells me, the children learn better, quarrel less, and are seldom absent.

It must be said that the dinners have their critics, and they are not all hard-hearted men. A gentleman of the School Board told me, with evident sincerity, that to feed children at the public charge is to teach their parents that someone else will always do it, and that the drunken father will only drink the more. There may be something in this. But I watched those children eat, and I did not see a single drunken father among them.

I saw, instead, a boy of seven who ate half his bread and hid the other half inside his jacket, and when I asked him why, said that it was for the baby. I saw a girl of ten lick her bowl until it shone. I saw the master, at the end of the hour, walk among the empty tables, picking up crumbs.

Let the political economists argue. A hungry child cannot learn, and a child who cannot learn will be a burden on the rates for life. The penny dinner is not charity. It is common sense.

Both of these texts are about providing food for children at school.

Compare:

• what the writers say about feeding hungry schoolchildren
• how the writers try to persuade readers of their views

You must use the text to support your comments and make it clear which text you are referring to.