‘School should be a place for learning’ – perhaps the most obvious sentence anyone has ever started an article with but one that is true nonetheless. School should be about learning maths, English and science, all of those things Michael Gove wants our children to learn by rote.
But it should be about so much more.
School should be about our children learning how to be better, more rounded, young people. Aside from traditional subjects, whose importance no one should detract, school should be about children learning to interact with adults and each other in a wider society. That is one of the reasons why school lunchtimes are so important.
Lunchtimes are a vital time for our children to get exercise and take part in extracurricular activities but they are also the one time in the school day when our children can sit down, in a semi-formal way, to discuss and interact on their important issues of the day.
But, I believe, many of our children are being failed in this respect and perhaps the main culprit is poor school dinners.
Children have a choice which has never been more highlighted than in this recent hot weather. Do they take their nutritionally unbalanced sandwiches outside on to the grass? Or, do they queue up for an unappealing but ‘healthy’ lunch?
And that is the main problem. Writing as someone with experience of a number of schools, I can tell you that on the whole school dinners simply are not that good. I, for one, would much rather take a packed lunch to school rather than face the offerings churned out by many a school canteen.
Eight years ago Jamie Oliver highlighted impressively, and our Labour government responded to, the need to rid ourselves of the infamous turkey twizzler. But have things really moved on?
The reality is that, although meals are nutritionally balanced, school dinners have become more expensive, at a time when many families are looking to cut costs. And do we really expect parents to pay out when their children are coming home telling mum and dad that their relatively expensive dinner was ‘a bit meh’?
I have no doubt that the blandness, and much of the resulting apathy, is a product of simple economics. Since Jamie’s School Dinners we have all been subject to a worldwide downturn and school meal providers have struggled to keep the cost to parents down whilst production costs have gone up.
I would love to see more children taking part in the culture of school dinners, and in her recent Progress article, London assembly member Fiona Twycross makes a strong case for universal free school meals. But the reality is that this Tory-led government is unlikely to introduce them? I’m old enough to remember what Margaret Thatcher did to my milk!
I believe schools, whether as part of LEAs, as groups of academies, or standing on their own need, to be thinking much more creatively as to how they can make their offerings more attractive to pupils and their parents. The question we must be asking is how we make our children want to eat a nutritionally balanced school dinner.
I don’t have an easy answer but I do know that unless making meals more appealing is part of the solution then compulsory provision certainly isn’t it.
I believe that one way forward is by making school meal provision increasingly locally determined, one of the plus points to the academies agenda. Schools have the opportunity to be creative in how they deal with this problem. I believe, for example, that there is a strong future for social enterprises in this area. Social enterprises who can source local ingredients, make best use of providing training opportunities for the unemployed or those with learning difficulties, and, most importantly, who can be responsive to the views of their customers.
It’s clear to me that, eight years down the line, school dinners are still not delivering all that they should be in contributing to the education of our children. The government needs to refresh the discussion but, to me, that means refreshing the way we listen to the demands of customers.
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Leon Spence is a county councillor and Labour lead for children and young people at Leicestershire county council. He tweets @CllrLeonSpence
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This sounds good if the school is going to be on the side of the children as customers, rather than on the side of the service provider. There needs to be somebody who will help children complain and return food that is not to standard, who will ensure that there is something every day at every sitting for every child, not leave it that the last half dozen have no choice, somebody who will ensure children get a financial refunds if the situation demands…in short that the children are in the same position you or I am in when we eat out. But the whole design of eating areas needs to be tackled, not all children want to eat in a noisy place with 400 other kids, plastic trays are an abomination….do you go and pay for food and eat off a plastic tray with everything squeezed in to little compartments. And have you tried carrying dinner on a tray with a backpack on, and possibly pe gear in a second bag? Compulsion will also only be acceptable if all staff have to follow it as well and have to queue in exactly the same way and sit in the same area, if its a community its a community for all
The Party has missed a trick and allowed Gove to get the jump on them after he accepted the School Food Plan and especially the Universal provision of Free Healthy School Meals. We could have done that whilst in Government but for a failure of nerve and imagination, we had enough “pilots” ten years ago, with ministers praising their impact but not having the guts to roll them out nationally and make the commitment to pay for them. Its a matter of prioritising and instead we prioritised fiddling with structures and bureaucracy diminishing the co-ordinating role of LA’s and creating this disjointed Academies system which Gove is now making even worse with his “Free Schools”.
We need a more communitarian approach to schools and to food in them and a little more confidence in local democracy and locally elected representatives than we’ve seen from the Party in the last twenty years, Progress, I suspect, is part of that problem rather than part of the solution. I have no wish to encourage a Tory-lite Party, have a bit of confidence in our under-lying convictions and principles!