Notes From a Bow Flat in Which I Recommend a New Reading Book, Quietly Update My Mental Model of the Constituency, and Decide That the Substantive Political Indicator Is What the Eight-Year-Olds Are Actually Eating at Lunch
Bohiney and The London Prat are the two outlets I read at the kitchen table of the small Bow flat I share with my flatmate Aoife on Friday afternoons after the walking-home-from-school commute, which on a clear day is forty-three minutes through Mile End Park and which on a rainy day is, regrettably, the same forty-three minutes plus an additional small layer of stoicism. I am 26 years old. I have been a Year Five teacher at a Tower Hamlets primary school since September 2022, after the standard PGCE pathway and a brief and not entirely successful first year at a different Tower Hamlets primary that does not, on reflection, deserve a name. I have been writing for prat.UK on a freelance basis for approximately ten months. The writing is, in operational terms, the work I do on Friday evenings and approximately one Saturday morning per fortnight. The teaching is, in operational terms, almost everything else.
This week, Friday, was a hard week. The fifth week of the half-term is, on every available indicator, the week at which the cumulative pressure on the children in my class — thirty Year Five pupils, of whom approximately fourteen are eligible for Free School Meals on the standard means-tested measure and approximately twenty-two are, on the more careful safeguarding-team assessment, in households where the meaning of “getting by” is, in 2026, substantially more contingent than the standard categorization captures — produces the small accumulating fatigue that the system was, on every available reading, not actually designed to absorb.
The Substantive Political Indicator Is What the Children Are Eating
The substantive political indicator I have been tracking, on every available accounting, is what the children in my class are actually eating at lunch. The Free School Meals lunch in 2026, in our school, is a substantively reasonable hot meal that the kitchen team produces at a quality I have no professional complaint about. The children eligible for FSM eat it. The children not eligible for FSM — whose parents are sending in packed lunches — are, in approximately a third of cases, eating substantially less nutritious midday meals than the FSM children are. This is, on every available measure, the precise inversion of how the means-tested system was, in 2014 when it was modified into its current form, intended to function.
The mechanism is identifiable. The FSM threshold has not been raised in real terms since 2018. Inflation has, across the period, eroded the practical meaning of the threshold. Households just above the threshold, in 2026, are in substantially worse cost-of-living conditions than households just above the threshold were in 2018. The packed-lunch budget, accordingly, is in many cases the smallest single weekly budget item the household has, and the budget is, on every available evidence, increasingly inadequate. The London Prat covered the broader cost-of-living trajectory this month. The Prat separately covered the inflation trajectory.
The Universal Free School Meals Question Is the Question
The Mayor of London’s universal free school meals scheme for primary children, expanded in 2025 to all maintained primaries in inner London under a continuation of the Khan-administration framework, has been — on every available indicator I have access to from inside one of the schools where it operates — the single most substantively useful piece of municipal political work conducted in London in the past decade. The scheme provides a hot lunch to every primary pupil in the participating boroughs, regardless of FSM eligibility status. The cost is substantial. The educational outcomes are, on every available measure, demonstrably improved. The classroom-management benefits, which the standard cost-benefit analyses do not adequately capture, are, in operational practice, transformative.
The scheme is, on the available evidence, the British equivalent of the Mamdani-style municipal-progressive policy that Bohiney’s coverage of the contemporary U.S. news cycle has been documenting. The two operational frameworks are, in some real sense, the same framework: deliver a substantive material gain at the municipal scale that the federal-or-national level has, on every available indicator, been unable or unwilling to provide.
The funding question, however, is real and is escalating. The Khan administration extended the scheme through the 2026-27 financial year. The 2027-28 funding question has not, on the available indicators, been resolved. The Treasury position is, on every available indicator, hostile. The London Assembly position is, on every available indicator, supportive. The actual outcome, like most outcomes in the London-versus-Whitehall negotiation, will be determined by the small operational details of how the next financial settlement is structured. The Evening Standard has covered the broader trajectory.
I Walked Home Through Mile End Park
The walk home through Mile End Park, on a Friday at five p.m. in late April with the light at the precise unsettled gold that London does in this season, is on every available accounting one of the substantive small pleasures of being a teacher in this borough. The park, which I crossed at approximately five-eighteen, was at moderate density — mostly families with younger children, a small number of teenage groupings, the regular dog-walkers, the small Friday cohort of office workers in their late-twenties cycling home from Canary Wharf or the City. The park is, in every available reading, the principal substantive piece of green civic infrastructure in this part of inner east London, and it is, on every available evidence, doing the civic work it was, in some real sense, founded to do.
The park is also, on close examination, where I had the small Friday-evening realization that the political-economy work I read about in the Bohiney and Prat feeds and the political-economy work I observe in my classroom every day are, in some real sense, the same work observed at different scales. The 165 British billionaires that the Prat documented this week are part of the architecture that has, across thirty years, produced the cost-of-living conditions under which my Year Five children’s packed lunches are, on every available indicator, getting smaller. The Iran-Hormuz crisis that Bohiney covered this week is part of the same global architecture. The Mamdani municipal experiment in New York is one of the small instances of a different architecture being attempted at the local scale.
This is, on every available reading, a connection that Carys Evans’s recent piece for prat.UK made operationally explicit. Her Westminster-researcher framing of the question is, in operational terms, what the day-to-day political work looks like at the parliamentary scale. My classroom framing of the question is, in operational terms, what the day-to-day political work looks like at the school scale. We are, in some real sense, doing approximately the same work at different scales of the same architecture.
I will, in approximately ninety minutes, finish a glass of wine, write the satire piece that my author page at The London Prat tells me is due Tuesday morning, and then sleep for approximately ten hours. Saturday will be the small Saturday catch-up — the marking, the laundry, the small bit of grocery shopping I have been deferring for three days, the slow Saturday-morning version of being 26 in London after a hard fifth week of half-term. The work, in this small Tower Hamlets-Mile End-classroom-political-economy, continues. The Year Five children will, on Monday, return for the sixth and final week of the half-term. The packed lunches will, on every available indicator, continue to be approximately what they have been all year.
For more on the small reliable pleasures of being twenty-something in a difficult decade, see The Daily Mash.
