Charlotte MacDonald
speaker
1,889 appearances
62 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Apr 2025
Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The problem is that trying to find the evidence for these claims has been quite frustrating.
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No one from Kids' Company or Netmums wants to be interviewed, but their PR company has been carpet bombing me with information which they say supports their numbers.
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Well, the easiest was the last one, the 233% increase in children relying on charity to be fed.
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That turns out to be the increased experience by Kids' Company in London.
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They now feed 2,000 children each week.
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Well, the footnotes are pretty vague, but we think they're basing their claim on a survey carried out for the Prince's Trust.
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Well, you be the judge.
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In a nutshell, one of the things the Prince's Trust did was to count secondary school teachers in England who had seen pupils suffering from malnutrition or showing signs of not eating enough.
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at least once every school term.
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Kids' Company and Netmums seem to have assumed that when they saw pupils, that meant four, and that each of them was starving.
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And they've also extrapolated to the UK as a whole and to primary schools.
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Are you sure that's what they did?
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Well, I can't be completely sure, but it's fair to say they haven't been able to substantiate their claim.
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I think in fairness to Kids' Company and Netmums, they were for perfectly good reasons just trying to call attention to something we should all be concerned about, that there are children who are not getting all the food they need.
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And Kids' Company is a pretty small organisation, which probably can't generate much in the way of its own original research.
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But I also think it's a bit self-defeating to exaggerate, as I'm sure they have done.
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Well, one place to look is the National Child Measurement Programme, which attempts to weigh every pupil in the first and last years of primary school in England.
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Now, if children in Britain are starving in a third world sense, then you would expect there to be lots of underweight children.
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But in fact, fewer than 1.3% of children last year were classed as underweight.
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And a third of the pupils in their final year of primary school are actually overweight or obese.
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Showing 1421–1440 of 1,889 · page 72 of 95
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