Offer a child an unfamiliar vegetable and it’s a safe bet that he or she
won’t let out a joyous shout of: “Oh goodie, kohlrabi, I’ve always wanted to
try that.” But if the child has grown that vegetable, talked about where it
comes from, chopped and cooked it, nothing will stop them having a taste, as
a new school initiative, the Food for Life Partnership, plans to
demonstrate.
With more money invested in ingredients, staff and kitchens, school meals are
healthier and better than they were before Jamie Oliver exposed the
fat-soaked truth. But less than a week into the school year, and with more
nutritional rules in force, figures released by the Liberal Democrats reveal
a disturbing drop in numbers of children eating school meals. In two years
the take-up has fallen 20 per cent in secondary schools and 10 per cent in
primaries.
Children don’t want these healthy meals; the new approach isn’t working,
chorus the Government’s critics and food manufacturers with a vested
interest in going back to the bad old days of chips and fizzy drinks. The
nutritional regulations came in too quickly, they are too strict and not
backed up with education or sufficient funding, they claim. And the
alternative?
Are struggling schools, disaffected caterers and opposition politicians really
suggesting that because it’s difficult to get children to eat better food
they should give up? Already 16 per cent of children aged 2 to 10 are
classed as obese. By 2050, if action isn’t taken, the number could rise to
50 per cent. Poor nutrition is becoming a public health disaster. It lands
schools with the problem of easily distracted, disruptive children. Only
this week a major study in The Lancetmedical journal found a link
between food additives found in drinks, sweets and processed food, and
hyperactive behaviour in children.
Recent research by the School Food Trust, the body set up by the Government to
put the new standards in place, found that packed lunches were nutritionally
worse than school dinners. And if too many children bring in crisps and jam
sandwiches, and too few eat the school meals, the dinner service won’t be
viable.
“We have to make this work,” says Joe Harvey of the Health Education Trust, a
charity that promotes health and wellbeing in children and has been
instrumental in the reforms. Though he is disappointed that the Government
didn’t make cookery lessons compulsory, he and other public health
campaigners are determined that a change in school food culture can be
achieved. “If it isn’t working, what are we going to do about making sure
that it does work?” And despite what the I-told-you-so doom-mongers say, the
schools can buck the trend. Less disheartening survey results from the
School Food Trust last May found that more than 80 per cent of primary
schools reported no change or an increase in take-up.
Children presented with the new menus out of the blue probably will reject
them. Schools that succeed in feeding their children nutritiously realise it
takes a concerted effort. They don’t make excuses. Taking a root-and-branch
approach, they involve pupils and make it a priority for senior managers.
They invest in staff and premises, grow food, cook it in class, talk about
it, make meals a social occasion, and, crucially, convince parents that a
vegetable curry is as tasty as a fatty takeaway.
Millfields Community School in Hackney, East London, looks like a typically
tough nut to crack. Surely the 650 pupils, aged 3 to 11, from families who
speak 40 languages, can’t have greeted the introduction of homemade leek and
lentil pie with knives and forks at the ready? They did. Take-up has gone up
by 40 per cent in the past two years. Fridays have become particularly
popular, with 520 children tucking into school lunches; the rest of the week
about 400 dinners are served. Every day there’s a meat and a veggie meal,
such as lamb fajitas and chickpea curry; a filled jacket potato; vegetables,
including baked tomatoes with basil, carrot sticks and salad; yoghurt and
fresh fruit; or a comforting pudding such as peach cobbler with custard.
Chips appear only every third Friday – with homemade salmon goujons – so that
doesn’t explain the end-of-week surge. There is organic milk on tap, bowls
of salad on every table and the smell of baking bread to entice children to
help themselves to warm organic rolls, bagels or pitta bread. All for £1.48
a day. Almost all the food that comes into the kitchen is unprocessed and as
the catering manager Julie Phatty says: “Working with fresh produce; you
can’t beat it.”
Millfields Community School is the current holder of the Soil Association’s
Food for Life school of the year award. Food for Life doesn’t just encourage
schools to use organic produce and to visit certified farms to see where
good food comes from; it sees food education as the way to change eating
habits. “Our children look healthy,” beams the head teacher Dame Anna
Hassan. “They’re full of beans and energy.” The pleasure to be had from good
food permeates the whole school. The pumpkins on the rooftop garden should
be ripe now; the potato planting is about to begin. “In this school we’ve
decided what is important for children to help them in their learning,” she
says.
Primary school teachers’ training hardly touches on food and avoids cookery
altogether, making food education a rarity in schools. At Millfields it’s up
there with literacy.
Dame Anna insists on tablecloths, jaunty music and art displays in the dinner
hall. Dishes of the day are displayed on a plate next to the counter to show
what’s available. To keep families up to speed menus are posted on the
school website and sent home at the beginning of each term. As valued
members of staff, the cooks visit classrooms and attend presentations by one
of the classes, which often take food as their subject. Such obvious ideas
are less common than you think. “It’s about engagement and involvement,
about valuing children and citizenship,” says Harvey of similarly successful
schools.
Janet Taylor, Millfields’ deputy head and healthy school co-ordinator, with
responsibility for food, says: “It’s about raising awareness at every
opportunity.” In classrooms and on trips to food producers and farms,
children learn more about food and how to make it. Sushi went down a storm.
“Anything that they cook themselves they’ll eat,” she says. Although
Millfields doesn’t have a curriculum kitchen, the children all have a go at
making food in the classrooms. “It may be luck but we don’t seem to have a
problem with obesity,” says Taylor. Families are another factor. “The
children know what they should be eating; it’s informing the parents that
matters now.”
The school’s mission is to persuade parents not only that their children are
better off eating school meals than a box of junk for packed lunch but also
to feed them nutritiously at home. They are invited for lunch, and parents’
evenings feature tastings of the most popular dishes. Top of the scoffs
every time is sweet potato and lentil korma. Ofsted, the school standards
body, rated Millfields as outstanding in its most recent inspection. As Dame
Anna says: “Good schools don’t have bad kitchens.”
Tackling older kids
Secondary school meal take-up could be as low as 35 per cent, according to the
Local Authority Caterers’ Association. Even so, determined secondaries buck
this trend.
St Aidan’s in Harrogate is showing other schools how on www.catering4schools.com
. In the five years since the 1,900-pupil high school replaced the catering
contractor with a chef, take-up has risen from 20 per cent to 95 per cent.
“It’s all to do with education,” says the deputy head, Steve Hatcher.
Charging £1.40 for a meal, the school employs three chefs, a baker, 25
catering staff, a dietitian and organic gardener.
GCSE results have risen 35 per cent and “there are fewer discipline
problems as a result of what they are eating and drinking”, Hatcher
adds. “And education is not just about feeding the brain, it’s about
looking after their bodies.”
Secondary schools must stick to their guns and make healthier food attractive.
They’ll be ready when food-savvy children move up from
Millfields and other enlightened primaries, bringing better eating habits
with them.
Come on, you can do it . . . Your children could be growing, eating and
cooking delicious food at school by joining the
Food for Life Partnership, funded by the National Lottery and set up by
the Soil Association. Schools will be encouraged to use fresh, local and
organic ingredients to grow their own, to forge links with local farms and
producers, to get children cooking and involve the community. “It’s about
much more than food on a plate,” says Joanna Collins, the Food for Life
policy manager.
Schools that want to make food a top priority can apply to become one of 180 flagship
schools; 12 primary and 8 secondary in every region in England. Over
five years, expert support with organic gardening, cookery, sourcing, menu
planning and nutrition education will help to establish centres of food
excellence that share knowledge with other schools.
For more details, www.foodforlife.org.uk
; if you are interested in becoming a flagship school, click on “filling out
the form”. Enrol on the Food for Life Partnership Mark and aim for a gold,
silver or bronze award according to progress made on all food fronts. The
school, pupils and wider community will reap the benefits.
