Another year and another round of BPI Seedcorn funded projects are nearly complete! This year’s showcase (held on the 26 June 2025) began with a look at what the BPI do and how the BPI supports poverty research by offering a Seedcorn fund, before moving onto the presentations explaining each of the three projects funded in this round (i.e. in the 2024-25 academic year).
Joe Jezewski, the BPI Development Associate, explained in the introduction that the BPI’s overarching goal has not changed – to achieve SDG 1: ‘to end poverty in all its forms everywhere’ – and that the Seedcorn Fund, which offers new research projects small sums of £3000-£6000, is one of the key BPI initiatives that sustains the BPI’s trajectory towards this goal. The money can be seen as ‘kick-starter’, to get great poverty-research projects off the ground and lead towards larger funding bids once the projects are established.
Following Joe’s presentation, we then moved into the project showcase section of the afternoon with Dr. William Baker presenting first on his project entitled ‘Low wage work in the education system: food banks and food insecurity’. Will began by explaining the background and impetus for his project which highlighted that 3+ million children live in food insecure households in the UK and that 20% of schools in England now have a food bank – which is over 4000 schools (which means there are now more foodbanks inside of schools than outside. And for context, in 2010 Trussell Trussell operated 35 food bank centres, but by 2019/20 this had risen dramatically to 1,400. Source). Emerging evidence suggests that school staff on low incomes – from teaching assistants, catering workers, administrative staff, and parenting school staff – are also using school-based food banks.
As such, Will’s project, which is being co-produced with the trade union, UNISON, (and co-investigator Dr Sarah McLaughlin) aimed to examine the experiences of school staff who have reported using school-based food banks. Although data collection is ongoing and the research not complete yet, early indications from the empirical study involving interviewing 20 school staff members show that there are key themes that create food insecurity. Themes Will highlighted were – Covid-19 and the cost-of-living-crisis, low pay, teaching assistants who are typically not paid very well being seen as a flexible part of the workforce, insecure term-time only work (with insecure roles being the last to be recruited and the first to be let go), and challenges with Universal Credit and the 2 child benefit cap. In the discussion that followed Will’s presentation, it was also mentioned that there is no government funded element for food bank work in schools and that school breakfast clubs are only given 75% of the budget they need for this – which puts further strain on school finances.
Dr. Alisha Suhag went next and presented on her project entitled ‘Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) and Health Inequalities: A data-driven approach to understanding socioeconomic disparities in diet’ (project co-investigators: Professor Jeff Brunstrom and Dr Anya Skatova). Alisha began by explaining their plan to collect information on UPF consumption by using Tesco loyalty card data which would give them access to vast amounts of real-world behaviour information; the motivation for the project being to analyse the rising consumption rates of UPFs in the UK, especially within lower-income populations. UPFs are industrially formulated products designed for profitability, convenience, and hyper-palatability, accounting for over 50% of energy intake in the UK. UPF consumption is linked to adverse health outcomes including increased risks of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and a 31% higher mortality rate among the highest consumers – and the project aims to explore these relationships.
Alisha went on to explain that through this scalable, data-driven approach using supermarket loyalty card data, the project will generate insights into the socioeconomic factors driving poor dietary choices and health. The sample size they are working with is 700 UK residents who have been using a Tesco Clubcard for a minimum of 1 year, and the project is just arriving at the survey roll-out and data collection phase now having been through ethics approval. In the discussion there was talk of how one of the key elements of this study is UPF food classification. The team plan to pay particular attention to this to ensure classification is accurate and suitable, and to provide a good basis for running regression analysis which will test associations between UPF spend and health outcomes (e.g. BMI, digestive symptoms and EQ-5D).
The third and final presentation came from Dr Marii Paskov who presented together with Co-Investigator Mrs Katie Cross on their project entitled ‘Poverty and financial wellbeing in the UK: an intersectional approach’ (the project’s 2nd co-investigator is Mr Jamie Evans). They began by explaining that their study focus was to answer this question – ‘Does financial wellbeing vary among individuals living in poverty and if so, why?’. From here they dived into an explanation of what financial wellbeing means and indicated that it can include objective factors, like the individual’s ability to meet needs or pay an unexpected bill, and subjective factors which refer to a feeling of security or its opposite – the experience of financial stress. They also explained that their aim was to establish how specific dimensions of inequality – gender, age, and ethnic-racial background, and health – intersect with poverty to shape experiences of financial wellbeing.
Marii and Katie then presented some initial results having analysed data from the Money and Pensions Service’s Financial Wellbeing Survey. These showed different patterns among different groups, for example, that females experienced less financial satisfaction than males. Disabled people also experienced less financial satisfaction than those non-disabled. Generally, their analysis of households in income poverty showed that such households could experience varying levels of financial wellbeing because of 3 dimension: intersectional inequalities (e.g. having multiple vulnerabilities such as being disabled and a single parent), access to (or lack of access to) support systems (e.g. advice services or family support) and financial literacy (skills to manage finances). In the discussions that followed, Marii explained that further analysis would be needed to understand more deeply why for example, 40% of people on low incomes could meet a bill but 60% couldn’t; and how multidimensional aspects of poverty are significant to a holistic understanding of why some groups obtain help and others don’t. The conversation also covered aspects such as the inadequacy of Universal Credit (UC) to support those in poverty, not just in terms of the amount of money received but also the conditionality aspects to obtaining UC.
Overall, it was a great afternoon of learning and discussion and we wish our three teams all the best in finalising their projects and disseminating their findings – we look forward to reading those reports and journal articles! The slides from the project presentations are also available via our event resources page.