Are school meals really so bad?

There are strict rules about what and how often something is served.

All our desserts are packed with fruit and veg.

Chocolate is not allowed so they have chocolate beetroot cake. No salt is added or sugar. Chips only once a week. Vegetable option daily.
Salad bar, fruit, water and milk always available.

Pizza is veg packed, pasta is wholemeal. No ketchup is allowed.No additives etc. They have to comply with portion size requirements which is larger as KS progress. Governors are responsible for checking what is being served, sampling food, checking pupil feedback etc and knowing what the legal requirements are

Most schools subsidise meals including FSMs and they need to ensure they are providing healthy food and catering for medical needs even if these meals are double the cost. There is also child specific funding for blended diets in some LAs, some areas do not provide it and some provide it via the NHS.
These are in the region of £8-£10 a meal and can not be provided without funding.

If your meals are poor speak to the Head and ask how governors are monitoring provision and standards.

But are they mass produced crap or are nutritionally balanced home made?

Cakes / puddings often have veg hidden in them if they are home, well school, made.

A fruit yoghurt from a supermarket can have 15g of sugar in it.

What do they have instead of sugar? I had my last straw with the school when I looked at the ingredients for the sugar free jelly in the packed lunch on a Friday (where I live children finish at noon on Fridays so are sent home with a bagged lunch) - fake sugar and chemicals and that was meant to be the ‘fruit’ as far as I could figure out!

DS likes his school dinners. It's a two week rotation of curry, lasagne, Bolognese, fish and chips, pasta and meatballs, roast dinner etc all wide a side of veg. Puddings are a choice of fruits and yoghurts. His school is a small state school.

As a former teaching assistant I think the issue is that the child is asked what they would like on their plate, so for example if it’s a roast dinner a child might choose just the meat and potatoes refuse the veg and gravy. So the meal doesn’t look very appetising.

A typical week would be cheap thin “burgers” with potato tots, roast dinner with suggestible quality “chicken”, pizza, fish fingers, chicken curry and rice.

Yogurt, fruit, crackers for pudding. Once a week would be mini muffins and chocolate brownies.

Not terrible overall but I was surprised how little most children actually eat especially in the younger classes.

Packed lunches were even worse though in my opinion, full of ultra processed crap, biscuits, chocolate, crisps, lunchables etc

But stories like these are not very interesting to some, you see. Both our schools have large kitchens and food is cooked on site (not heated or warmed on site from frozen deliveries of ready meals - to be really specific and clear). They also have sizeable gardens and vegetable plots where children are able to grow a lot of salad and vegetables. My son attends the gardening club after school once a week and we have a strong parent-staff Groundforce day team who work very hard on the vegetable garden. Obviously it does not feed the school but a very good, sizeable connection to the kitchen that the kids are involved in. But things are uneven across the country, and like with anything else - accounts of things going normally largely well are not necessarily of interest.

I work in a primary school kitchen. The meals are on a 3 week rotation. They are ALL cooked from scratch. Fresh veg, etc. desserts (ie jelly) are sugar free. Juniors get larger portions than infants and those portions are perfect. They can always ask for salad on top of the veg/main. Only Fridays is junk day and it’s either always home made pizza or fish of some kind. Only water for drinks and fruit is ALWAYS available. Kids love it!

My children used to like their primary school lunches but this year they're apparently absolutely dire. Recipes have changed and food now inedible so they end up with jacket potatoes almost every day 😏

This isn't because they are fussy children - they really aren't (it's my one parenting win!). Even the teachers have stopped eating the school lunches this year.

Packed lunches aren't an option at our school.

My DD is year 8 secondary school and has been having school dinners since she started but has now decided to switch to packed lunches because by the time she gets to lunch time in her school, she says there's hardly any food left and she spends ages queuing up for food she doesn't particularly like and then doesn't have time to see friends etc.

Yes - should have said above but this is what drives me crazy when I think about it. 30% of our school is on free school meals so are relying on this for nutrition and possibly for their only meal of the day. We are super privileged to be able to just opt out so my son is well nourished, but many don’t. It’s infuriating.

we are in Scotland at a larger primary school. They don’t have a kitchen so everything is brought in and it’s universally pretty awful. My son asked for packed lunches for a year and we finally let him do it this year as he’s old enough to pack them himself (he’s 8 now)

Tiny portions and not delicious. And since we are in Scotland we would get school lunches for free so are choosing to pay for our own anyway. It was okay when he was younger but he’s super active and he was so hungry after school! Since he goes to after school club and various clubs most evenings it wasn’t fair on him to try to make it work any longer.

That is depressing, horrible for the children and for the kitchen staff.

I'm in Finland and everyone has school dinners here (packed lunch isn't an option) and the children serve themselves the food instead of being given a set portion, can choose to take more of what they like (within limit, like no more than 8 spinach pancakes I think, which is one the most popular foods) and less of what they don't like.

I do think a lot of parents are naive about what is actually served. Unless you work in the school or see it yourself, it often looks nothing like the photos on the website or the description on the menu. In a lot of schools, portions are small and most of it is UPF if you actually request to see the ingredients. I often walk through the lunch hall and see the meals. My daughter comes out hungry on school dinner days, not packed lunch days. Obviously this is not applicable to all schools but we have a major well known catering company doing ours.

You are amazed that they exist, and they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why.

Quite. Oh my DC goes to a naice private school and the meals are so naice. No shit. 🙄

Primary school in Kent.
school cooks on site make from scratch but use chartwells so they follow a menu and cook from the menu’s provided (I’ve sampled some on the new menu days and even had a whole cheese and onion pasty from them on a morning I had a meeting at school)
dc don’t complain about the size only about some of the meals they dislike but that’s preference…
often they have the option of two veg (they can get both)

Absolutely! Lovely little village infant school - and separate little junior school with excellent menus. Complemented very well by us at breakfast and dinner times - producing healthy adventurous eaters - no complaints.

DD (8) goes to a small state primary school- they do decent food, the menu is very varied. She really enjoys the meals, today apparently was sausage pasta bake and in her words ‘the tomato sauce was thick and the cheese was stretchy’.
They always have salad sides and have a choice of 3/4 meals a day including jacket potato.
I can’t imagine the portions are very big but she has a decent breakfast, packs a snack in her bag for break time and is never coming out starving.

My DCs’ state primary has nice menus with options that would generally appeal to children. DC1 is in Year 5 and there is regular bickering about portion sizes and quality on the class WhatsApp group. The portion sizes are set by the government, apparently. They are generally smaller than what I’d give at home, and include odd combinations such as a ham roll, a tablespoon of plain cooked pasta and similar of cooked veg.

DC1 sometimes complains about the quality and often about the quantity. DC2 (Reception) never complains about the quantity.

School did change supplier after a marked drop in quality a couple of years ago.