School Dinners

It’s the start of National School meals week today and rarely since the first  NSMW in 1993 has there been a more important time for this event. Two hugely influential documents have been published recently – last month Jamie Oliver’s manifesto for school meals, and today the much awaited School meals research from LACA & Parent Pay that surveyed over 10,000 respondents.

I would encourage anyone with any interest in School meals to have a look at these documents. NSMW is about raising awareness and promoting the fantastic work that caterers do day in day out in our children’s schools.

Personally I have been involved in the School meal industry for over 10 years. As a Contract Caterer I was responsible for operations in several secondary Schools and played a part in designing and implementing the catering service from scratch in a new build Academy near Doncaster. Over the last four years at FDH we have provided the Nutritional analysis and Management Information solutions to over 100 local authorities and dozens of Education contractors and individual self operating schools. Most importantly though my involvement in School meals is as a customer with one child at primary and one at secondary that have a school lunch more or less every single day.

Everybody can remember the blaze of publicity that surrounded Jamie Oliver’s first experiences in  school meals in the series’ ‘Jamie’s School Dinners’ in 2005. The whole school meal industry was completely blown apart and National perceptions were that we were serving our nations school children poor quality processed food and putting profit and cost saving before our children’s health.

 This period led to a complete revaluation of how School meals work. Food based and Nutrition based standards were born and the mammoth task of rebuilding the reputation of The British School Dinner began in earnest.

In the early days you did feel the frustration of school meal caterers, they were taking on a huge task in terms of redesigning menus, sourcing new ingredients, nutritionally analyzing menus, then balancing them to meet legislation. All this in the context of still having to have a thousand lunches ready for midday. To add insult to injury one of the initial effects of healthy school meals was falling uptake. We even saw on the news parents passing bags of chips through the railings of schools at lunchtime.

It did seem that the school meal industry was caught in a damned if you do and damned if you don’t vicious circle. Despite the size of the challenge the dedication and hard work of school meal providers around the UK started to pay off. Uptakes are rising in many areas the feedback from the LACA Parent pay survey shows around 90% of pupils rate their school lunch as Good or Ok.

Jamie Oliver’s  recently published Manifesto looks to set the scene for the future of school meals and notes the hard work to implement nutritional standards that are now being accepted even embraced by the pupil community – it does however go on to highlight that the government has recently removed the requirement for new academies to meet nutritional standards.

As well as Jamie I know many in the industry are lobbying the Government to reverse this decision as it could potentially undermine 5 years of hard work.

How can a two tier system be maintained?  LACA Chair Lynda Mitchell recently reported in her Blog that a group of school meal providers had all been asked by new Academies to provide food not permitted under the nutritional standards. Michael Grove maintained when questioned on this recently on Sky news that he believed the Head Teachers of new Academies could be trusted to provide good food.

The school meal survey published today reports 47% of parents in secondary schools want more information about the school lunch, of these 89% highlighted Nutritional Analysis as one of the areas they want information. I would imagine further questions will be coming Michael Gove’s way about meeting this clear requirement from parents.

That’s all from me for now if you get chance to support an event taking place as part of NSMW make sure you do, it’s a great way of raising awareness.


www.fdhospitality.com/education