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Ofsted report rouses school meals debate

16th October 2007, 4:35pm

Just as the dust seemed to settle around Jamie Oliver’s healthy school meals campaign, the release of the Ofsted ‘Food in Schools: Encouraging Healthy Eating' report has appeared to rejuvenate the debate.

We've gathered together a mix of reactions to the report from an education journalist, a campaigner and a head teacher.

Mike Baker

Mike has been education correspondent for BBC News since 1989.

"Ever since Jamie Oliver brought the media spotlight to focus on the issue, embarrassing government into action over tougher food standards, school meals have got healthier but the number of children eating them has continued to fall. There is limited value in having healthy school meals if you cannot get the children to eat them.

The need for healthier eating is as great as ever. According to one grass-roots campaigner, children are still turning up with scarily unhealthy packed lunches. She cited the case of a boy whose packed lunch consisted of the previous day's McDonald's burger and a can of Red Bull. He was four years old.

The Rotherham mothers who passed junk food through the school fence, and others who say its better to feed children chips and burgers than to let them go hungry, may be reacting to what they perceive as the 'food police'.

There are others, those who have taken the healthy eating message on board, who now won't eat school meals at all but who have not found a healthy substitute.

So why is it proving so hard to persuade children and parents of the nutritional value of healthy school meals? No head has been forced to resign because their school meals' take-up has fallen.

Schools must make an effort to market their meals and have a whole-school strategy to encourage healthy eating.

After all, there are still schools that allow ice-cream vans onto their premises at break-times. There are still head teachers who insist that pupils get though their lunches in 30 or 40 minutes. And there are still schools where meals are served on plastic plates or tin trays.

Jeanette Orrey, school meals policy adviser for the Soil Association, talks about one primary school which introduced a waiter and waitress service run by pupils, along with table-cloths and proper crockery in the canteen.

This innovation not only encouraged more children to take school meals, it also created a calmer atmosphere and less frenetic children.

School meals campaigners also blame the government for failing to provide the funds needed to produce healthy meals. As they point out, the moment the price of dinners goes up, take-up falls.

I know someone who runs a catering company offering meals to independent schools. Business has boomed since Jamie Oliver's intervention, as more schools want healthy meals. But he says he could not do it for the money that pupils pay in state schools.

The current focus on school meals will, sooner or later, give way to a different area of concern. That is why so many of them are frustrated that, although the meals are now healthier, not enough is being done to get more children to eat them or to get pupils to learn the lifelong skill of cooking for themselves."

Richard Watts

Richard is a campaign co-ordinator for Sustain's Children's Food Campaign and is a local councillor in North London.

"The school food revolution is in its early stages. It was predictable that there would be an initial fall in the number of children eating the new food. This is just what happened to Jamie himself at Kidbrooke School and in most other places where they have been tried. Take up usually rises over time as children get used to the new meals.

Ofsted shows that the schools that are most successful at improving diets are the ones that have a 'whole school' approach to food where meals are linked to lessons in nutrition and cookery.

It is unfair to expect schools to become food marketing experts overnight, so the Schools Food Trust must do far more to help schools to persuade children to eat better.

The Ofsted report says something very profound about our food culture. Reports that schools have to teach pupils how to use a knife and fork show that it is impossible to separate the food culture children face in schools from the food culture that surrounds their lives.

We need to persuade children not to want to eat unhealthy food in the first place."

Sue Dunford

Sue is the Head teacher of Southfield school for girls in Kettering.

"Children are always going to want chips, but they can be persuaded to try new things too. My school, Southfield, is a comprehensive sports college for girls where we make a healthy lifestyle central to what we do. Two years ago, however - though we have 960 students and 112 staff - takings from the Jamie Oliver experiment were down to £100 per day. We knew that we had to do more to engage our pupils. So we enlisted students to help staff interview and select a new catering company. This was to change things.

Now we have our own chef with two AA rosettes, and on-site caterers. All our food complies with government standards for healthy eating. At morning break there are homemade snacks like flapjacks with apple or banana in them. At lunchtime fresh vegetables, sourced locally whenever possible, are hidden so the students do not notice they are eating them - kebabs made of minced lamb also include minced onion, courgette, peppers and carrots. There is a salad bar and a chiller cabinet full of sandwiches, vegetable crudités and dips, bags of fresh fruit, homemade yoghurts and fruit jellies.

We have found, though, that with our new measures in place, more students are keen to take up their free meals - they do not want to miss a tasty lunch. Students are learning - they see food being prepared and they eat it, not because it is good for them, but because it tastes good, is excellent value and there is always a lot of choice.

Daily takings have risen from that dismal £100 to more than £700, and we can be sure the students are eating well. Eating well means learning well, and our challenge is to spread this message."

Words Clare Riley 1 comment

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Andrew Markwell

18 October 2007 at 10:15am

No-one can dispute both the recommendations in Ofsted’s report on school meals and the launch of the joint School Food Trust’s Million Meals campaign to encourage greater uptake of healthier school dinners. A recent survey of our local authority catering customers already showed the depth of thought and plans that many have for marketing the new-look meals to entice children back to the dinner table. Loyalty cards and the introduction of theme days are planned by some, while a quarter of respondents said they hoped to encourage pupil acceptance by involving parents in the marketing process, either through roadshows or sending copies of the menus to them.

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