Take-up of school meals in one Leeds academy has collapsed because the food is so poor, local councillors have been told.
Debra Coupar, Leeds City Council’s deputy leader, criticised the quality of dinners being served in academies by private providers across the city. She said food being offered by some academies was not up to the standards of the council’s own catering arm, which supplies 165 primary schools and two secondary schools.
Speaking at a local authority scrutiny meeting on Monday, Councillor Coupar said 70 per cent of one academy’s pupils were now taking in packed lunches, after the school stopped using the council’s dinner service. The school in question was not named.
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Coun Coupar said: “Our pay and conditions are a lot better than they are in the private sector. We pay the real living wage for instance. All the other competitors in the sector that I’m aware of don’t necessarily pay the real living wage and they all have different pay and conditions to what we do.
“I would question some of the quality of the provision of the private sector in high schools and in some of the primary schools that are in multi-academy trusts. Their quality is absolutely not of the same quality that is in Catering Leeds at all.”
Councillor Coupar, who represents the city’s Temple Newsam ward, said she’d tasted meals provided by both the local authority and by private providers and that parents had the same concerns. She added: “When you hear within your ward, like I do, mums and grandparents telling me about their experience, it’s often that the quality diminishes when the school has changed from our provision to private provision.
“I was speaking to a chair of a local PTA (parent teacher association) only last week and they told me pupils taking packed lunches has gone up to 70 per cent, purely because of the quality of the provision that they’re now getting. It is used to be (council) provision and now it’s changed.”
The meeting had earlier been told that secondary schools gradually turned away from the council’s school meals as they were academised over the last 15 years. Being outside of local authority control, academies can still use council suppliers, but have the freedom to source goods and services from elsewhere if they wish.
Mandy Snaith, head of service for catering within the council’s commercial arm, said: “When I joined the service many years ago we operated in all the high schools across the city.
“We adopted a strategy of putting chefs in high schools so it looked more of a fast-food environment, even though we were adhering to the healthy eating guidelines.
“We started to turn around a surplus for those schools which was heavy – around £30,000 to £40,000 a year. We charged them a management fee for that.
“As academisation came in, schools hired their own business managers in and thought, ‘Why do we need you?’ They felt they could operate this themselves.”
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