Parents and teachers have shared their own frustrations with substandard school meals after a headteacher in Southampton complained about his school’s contract caterers, asking: “How difficult is it to bake a potato?”
Several parents and school staff who got in touch with the Guardian blamed the outsourcing of school catering for what they saw as declining provision. One headteacher in south-west England, who asked not to be named, said she remembered what lunchtime was like before budget constraints forced her to make the school’s cook redundant. “Children at playtime would go out and smell what was cooking for lunch and get excited. We felt it was making a difference to children’s diets”.
It is a far cry from lunch at the school now, which the headteacher described as being “very beige” and carbohydrate heavy. While staff still tried to encourage children to eat a wider variety, “sometimes you just look at it and say: I can’t make them eat it”, she said. “You do wonder how many ministers have children in state schools, and know what meals are like.”
Since 2016, the school has been buying in cooked meals from a local provider, and the quality has deteriorated over time. The headteacher said she believed the company was “trying its best” with what she regarded as insufficient government meal budgets, but noted that the prepared food was not travelling well. Children were increasingly bringing in packed lunches, the headteacher said, but their quality had also declined: “You see a lot more that are just packets.”
These days, Francyne, 36, is having to make two week-night dinners: one for when her nine-year-old daughter gets in at 3.15pm, and another at about 7pm. She said her daughter used to love school lunches, but had regularly come home hungry over the last six months. Meals she enjoyed, such as chicken pie, had been removed from the rotation, while portions of others had shrunk – which, Francyne said, was a particular problem for older pupils.
“[My daughter] said she only got one spoonful of spaghetti bolognese the other day, and when she asked for more, they said no because they were rationing it. She’s coming home telling me she’s been having a jacket potato almost every day now,” she said, accusing the school’s catering contractor of “gradually nibbling away at ingredients” as costs rise. Despite this, the cost of a school meal in her Sheffield primary school rose from £2 to £2.30 in September.
She said she was worried the decline in quality and portions was making things worse for those not getting enough to eat at home. “Free school meals are designed to mitigate against that – but if kids aren’t even being fed [properly] in school, some are going hungry all the time.”
Kate, a secondary school teacher with two children in primary school in south-east London, said her her nine- and seven-year-old were increasingly “begging” her for packed lunches. With free school meals made universal in London primaries this year, combined with rising cost and time pressures, she said she had been reluctant to provide them. “You go to shops and wonder why costs are so high – and I’ve got a third child and full-time nursery fees to pay,” she said.
Rosalind, 74, a retired deputy headteacher from Birmingham, said the meals at her grandchildren’s London state primary were “outstanding”, possibly, she thought, because they were cooked on the premises by a kitchen team of permanent staff.
“They are using fresh, often local ingredients, interesting flavours, and develop fantastic menus with plenty of choice. The chef, who used to work in a restaurant, comes in a 5.30am every day to bake fresh bread for the whole school, 600 pupils. There is a huge take up of school meals,” she said. “My granddaughters really like them.”
Due to her career, Rosalind said she knew how stretched school meal budgets were, and that it probably required a well-trained, imaginative and passionate chef to create decent meals with the available funds.
“In this school, it seems to be the chef’s passion to make everyone’s lives better by providing these great lunches. So, perhaps the answer is for each school to directly employ the chef rather than have a catering firm.”
