Some educational establishments are famous for their alumni or their prowess on the rugby field, but if Ealdham primary school achieves a mention in the history books it will be as the place where a child threw up in his lunch on national television.
In the battle to change the eating habits of the nation’s schoolchildren, Ealdham is on the front line and the battle against the dreaded Turkey Twizzler has not easily been won.
More than a year after Jamie Oliver powered into Greenwich, southeast London, pledging to improve the quality of school meals in the borough — and thereby creating a blueprint for revolutionising school meals nationwide — Ealdham is still struggling to persuade parents and children that the switch from chips and burgers to slow-cooked balsamic beef with mushrooms, Mexican bean wraps and salads has been a good thing.
“In the early days the children would be in tears and the parents were very angry and upset,” says Sally Castle, Ealdham’s head teacher. “I used to look out of my office and see them meeting their kids at the school gate with McDonald’s Happy Meals.”
It was rapidly apparent there was going to be a huge gulf between those who would willingly adapt to Jamie’s dinners — mainly the schools with a middle-class intake — and those who would not.
“We’re a white, working-class estate school,” explains Castle. “Unlike other urban schools we don’t have a great multicultural mix and this food was alien and challenging because it didn’t come out of the freezer and go into the microwave.”
So great was the resistance to the new food — a typical lunch might be fish in a creamy coconut sauce — that take-up of school dinners plummeted by an astonishing 24% as children switched to packed lunches, replete with sweets and bubble gum. Some children would hide from teachers in an attempt to skip lunch entirely, rather than have to eat strange food.
“The attitude was, ‘You’re not the police, you can’t tell us how to feed our kids — they’re coming home hungry’. People got very emotional,” says Castle. “The children were going home starving hungry, so naturally the parents were upset. They just didn’t want things that weren’t in fried shapes. They liked the fish fingers and smiley potato faces.”
To try to avert a crisis, the school had to abandon the national curriculum for a week, draft in the local MP for extra support and turn the assembly hall into a restaurant where children served their parents the new menu.
Oliver threw his weight behind the attempt — even making a surprise appearance in the school pantomime, in which Snow White mused on how to cook for her dwarfs without a microwave or freezer.
At other schools the dinner revolution also caused a furore. Overworked dinner ladies who found themselves peeling carrots and potatoes rather than opening bags of frozen veg threatened to resign over working extra hours.
At Kidbrooke Park primary in Greenwich, where dinner lady Nora Sands became an unlikely television star, parents pushed burgers through the school railings at lunchtime.
At Thomas Tallis secondary school a fast-food van arrived at the gates and teachers watched helplessly as children raced to buy chips at lunchtime.
“We tried to have it closed down on environmental grounds,” says a Greenwich council spokesperson. “We tried health and safety, but unfortunately he was complying with everything and there was nothing we could do.”
According to the council, Oliver’s initiative — at a total cost of £628,850 across the borough — has been a success. But if so, it appears to be a modest one — the number of children eating school meals has risen during the last year but only by 3%, far fewer than the project’s organisers must have hoped for.
There have been some encouraging signs, however. At Charlton Manor primary school the children appear to be enjoying the food, but its biggest fan is Tim Baker, the headmaster. “I used to have school dinners every day just to fill me up,” he says. “Before, I could never finish everything on the plate, it just wasn’t very nice. Now I look forward to lunch.”
Baker lights up when talking about the effect introducing better meals has had on his 450 pupils. “I would spend all afternoon dealing with problems and disputes between pupils,” he says. “Now the difference when you walk around the school after lunch is palpable. There is a feeling of calm. The children are attending to their lessons and everyone seems less fractious.”
Typical dishes cooked by Chris Hutchins, Charlton Manor’s “incredible” dinner lady, include Mexican wraps, scone-based pizza, tuna arrabiata with penne, and fish pie. There are three choices each day, plus a fresh mixed salad with a balsamic vinegar dressing and — perhaps most radically — a ban on chips. Pudding is either a fruit dish or yoghurt.
Baker says that before the Oliver changes, which were introduced in February, children never mentioned what they had eaten.
“Now they come up to me with smiles on their faces to tell me what they ate and that they finished it all,” he says. “Instead of industrial-sized frozen bags of veg we prepare fresh, seasonal vegetables.
“Chris has said to me that she is at last doing what she was trained to do: cook. She used to just heat things up.”
Ruth Kelly, the secretary of state for education, is to address the issue of school meals at the Labour party conference this week.
She will shortly announce a new set of standards for school meals, including a ban on junk food, and is expected to raise the typical spend on each plate from 37p — which was lambasted by Oliver — to 50p a head for primary pupils and 60p for secondary schools, so that every school can follow the Greenwich example. But even in schools such as Charlton Manor it has not all been plain sailing. There was initial resistance from some parents and pupils to the new menus with one mother complaining they were “grown-up dinners”.
“Before this, the school dinners were quite bland,” explains Baker, who saw a 12% dip in demand initially. “With Jamie we brought in new tastes — spices, herbs and flavours.
“It was almost like coming out of a dark cave into the light — it takes a while to get accustomed to it. Now more children than before are eating the dinners. That is how successful it has been.”
The school is now taking the revolution one step forward, planting a community garden where pupils will grow their own herbs and vegetables for the kitchen.
Chris Roberts, leader of Greenwich council, insists the project has been worth the money. “There are challenges, of course,” he says. “It’s cost a lot of money to upgrade the school kitchens and pay for staff to come in early to prepare vegetables from scratch. What has surprised us is that the food doesn’t cost any more. We now buy in bulk from producers in Kent rather than from frozen food outlets.”
The new menus introduced by Oliver mean that 81 schools out of 88 in Greenwich no longer use packaged food in school meals, other than tinned tomatoes for sauces and the occasional serving of frozen peas.
The question is whether other councils will be able to follow in its footsteps and overcome the entrenched reliance of modern dinner ladies on frozen processed food and chips. The signs are progress will be slow.
Last week Alan Coode, head teacher at Gorringe Park primary school in Mitcham, Surrey, made the headlines when he posted pictures of the junk food routinely served at his school on its website.
One paper described the meals as looking “like leftover prison slops the convicts couldn’t stomach”, with unidentifiable lumps of fried food being dominant. His campaign has shamed the school’s caterers, Initial, into introducing new menus from Oliver’s Feed Me Better recipes.
Kevin McKay, chairman of the Local Authorities Caterers Association, believes the key to bringing in change across the nation is to move slowly. “I think Jamie Oliver taught us how not to do it,” he says. “It was just ‘bang’ — here it is, eat it. There was little consultation. You’ve got to get everyone involved. I’m not surprised the kids and the parents were frightened.”
Gloria Murray, a teaching assistant whose nine-year-old son is a pupil at Charlton Manor, believes most parents — in the end — will welcome the changes. “Jermaine was eating a packed lunch because he didn’t like the school meals,” she says.
“It usually came home untouched, apart from the packet of crisps. When the changes came in he’d come home saying, ‘Mummy, the hot dinners look nice, they smell nice, why can’t I have them?’ “We’re also eating much more healthily at home. There’s no point me serving up stodge if they’re making such an effort at school — it’s educated me as well.”
Back at Ealdham, the revolution is happening — just. In the immediate aftermath of the changes, one parent sent her child to school with a lunch box containing three Mars bars, two packets of crisps and a fizzy drink.
“I spoke to the mother,” says Castle. “He’s still eating packed lunches, but recently I saw he’d brought in a pasta salad. That’s progress.
“It has been a huge task. We still throw away most of the fish pie, but the sausages go down well — and they’ve got proper meat in them now. The real ray of hope is that the four-year-olds have accepted the new menus with far fewer problems.”
And the chip van at the gates of Thomas Tallis? It has gone, perhaps to plunder a seam of gold elsewhere as children in neighbouring boroughs are forced — cold turkey — off chips.
A TALE OF TWO DINNER MENUS
Greenwich council spent £628,850 bringing in the new Jamie Oliver style recipes last year. Eighty one out of 88 schools in the area now no longer use packaged foods. The council has reported a modest 3% increase overall in the number of children eating school meals.
In some local schools the take-up among children has plummeted by as much as 24% as parents prepare packed lunches, often full of familiar junk foods.
Here we compare two typical menus before and after the school meals experiment was introduced.
TRADITIONAL MENU
Main course
Fish fingers and smiley potato faces
Turkey Twizzlers and chips
Sausage roll and potato waffles
or
Vegetarian option
Jacket potatoes with grated cheese
Dessert
Traditional puddings such as jam roly poly
Chocolate sponge
Sticky toffee pudding
JAMIE OLIVER FEED ME BETTER MENU
Main course
Balsamic beef with mushrooms
Herb-crusted fish with salad
Super cottage pie with creamy mash
or
Vegetarian option
Mexican bean wrap
Dessert
Iced chocolate sponge
Fruit and a biscuit
Yoghurt
