Starting last Monday, tampons, sanitary pads and other period products have been made freely available to all state-funded schools and colleges in England.
This huge change follows a promise made by the Government in April 2019 that they would be paying for sanitary products to be provided for students in secondary schools, a pledge then later extended to primary schools.
It is part of an effort to tackle ‘period poverty’, where people who get periods cannot afford or do not have adequate access to necessary sanitary protection and are disadvantaged as a result. In an educational setting, those students from low income families may be forced to miss school due to the fact they do not have access to the products they need.
The Government scheme by the Department for Education aims to prevent this disadvantage and hopes to help ‘break down stigmas and ensure no young person’s education is disrupted by their period’. Talking about the project, Children and Families Minister Michelle Donelan said, ‘Periods are a normal part of everryday life … We know that it is not easy for everyone to access period products where and when they need them. This scheme will deal with those problems so young people can go about their daily lives without getting caught out unexpectedly … or if they can’t afford the products they need’
The products will be supplied by phs Group, and will include a variety of options for schools to choose from, including applicator and non-applicator tampons, single-use and more environmentally friendly resuable pads, and menstrual cups. The Government will assign each institution that opts in an annual budget to spend based on the prediction that 35% of menstruating pupils will use them. The products will be priced differently and so each school will have to decide how to spend their given budget.
The scheme will cost around £20 million a year and will benefit approximately 1.7 million pupils. In enacting this measure, England follow in the footsteps of Scotland, who in August 2018 became the first country in the world to offer frree sanitary products to students in its schools, colleges and universities. Wales did the same in April 2019.
The positive impact of the scheme, though not yet officially recorded, is likely to be huge: a survey conducted by the girls’ rights charity Plan International UK in 2018 found that 42% of girls aged between 14 and 21 had used makeshift sanitary protection because they had struggled to access products that they needed. A portion of those girls had also used socks, other available fabric or even newspaper as an emergency substitute. The same study also found that 1 in 5 girls and young women had been bullied about their period and 66% said they had missed lessons because of their period.
The new Government project is hoped to alleviate some of these issues by ensuring that young people and their educations are not negatively impacted by periods. Having it implemented in schools will also hopefully start conversations about periods to make them become less of an unnecessary taboo – a period is, after all, just a simple biological process experienced by around half the population!
For campaigners seeking to eliminate period poverty, this is a fantastic achievement. Amika George, founder of the #FreePeriods movement, has been fighting to get a variety of free period products into schoools for several years.
However, one potential issue that may arise around the scheme is that it is not compulsory, requiring schools to opt in. Campaigners have warned schools of the disadvantages their pupils will face if they do not engage with the scheme. This is a very real possibility considering that period poverty among students has tended to be overlooked by schools, a result of a general ignorance towards the fact that periods can be expensive, and a wider reluctancy in society to talk about menstruation in order to discover this.
Amika has asked for schools to have ‘open conversations with students about what they need’ and to opt in so no child goes without. Her movement has joined forces with the Red Box Project (a group also devoted to eliminating student period poverty) to urge schools to sign up.
David Taylor-Smith, CEO of the company that will be supplying the products to schools across the UK, has said that ‘period products are a necessity, not a luxury, and we believe providing free products for young people will be the catalyst for change in creating period equality’
While it is obviously still very much in its infancy, it is clear that this move will have a profound impact on preserving the educational opportunity of students, tackling the wide-spread stigma surrounding periods. The scheme is a monumentous occasion for campaigners and young people, and a well-needed step in the right direction in the quest to eradicate period poverty in the UK.