Top private school holds ‘Austerity Day’ where students eat baked potatoes and beans

A prestigious private school in West London has been heavily criticised after holding an “Austerity Day” where students dined on a lunch of baked potatoes, beans and coleslaw.

St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith tweeted about the buffet accompanying the message with “a picture of a fine-dining waiter displaying a silver plate with three peas on it”, says HuffPost.

The charity fundraiser “saw staff and students eating ‘simple food’ in place of the fare they are normally served”, adds The Independent.

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The school said the money saved on the dinners would go towards the school’s charities.

St Paul’s deleted the original tweet, however it circulated widely on Twitter today after a former pupil Henna Shah shared it having screen-grabbed the original.

Castigating the school’s decision to publicise the event with the name “Austerity Day”, Shah tweeted again: “How offensive do you have to be? This is not austerity. If you want to know what real austerity looks like, speak to one of your bursary students who you seem keen to erase out of existence.”

Using the term “Austerity lunch”, “suggests that the real problem faced by the underprivileged is that their lunch might be a bit bland”, says The New Statesman’s John Elledge. It promotes the idea that austerity “is not really that big a deal”.

“But to many families who aren’t spending £24,000 a year on school fees, plus text books and music lessons, austerity is rather a big deal, actually”, he concludes.

A St Paul’s Girls’ School spokesperson told The Independent: “For many years, along with many schools and places of worship in the country, St Paul’s has arranged regular lunches when simple food is served and the money saved given to local charities.”

“The aim is also to raise the awareness of our students to those less fortunate than themselves. We take our commitment to the wider community very seriously.”

“The choice of the word ‘austerity’ is to draw attention to the fact that others around them are facing significant economic difficulties.”