Why is food in schools so bad the U.K.?

[workwoes123]

This may count as a TAAT but it’s more a thread inspired by a thread .

I’m British, I remember fairly crap school dinners in the 1980s. fizzy juice on tap, chips most days. But that was 30 years and an obesity crisis ago.

I live in France now and my kids are in french schools. There are no snacks, no breakfasts, no vending machines, no play pieces. School dinner is a salad starter, a main course with meat / fish / chicken plus veg and carbs, followed by cheese / yoghurt and fruit / occasional dessert. That’s it, for a school day that starts at 8am and finishes at 4:30pm. Today the menu was:

Green salad / tomato pasta salad / beetroot salad
Beef stew / cod in curry sauce with mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables
Cheese or yoghurt
Fruit or isles flottantes (meringue on custard).

I’ve just been on a thread where children in a U.K. secondary school are being offered chocolate croissants for breakfast, bacon / sausage sarnies as a snack (a snack!), iced buns as an afternoon snack. Is this normal? All of this is in addition to a the actual school lunch? Why are the children so hungry that they need snacks as well as a meal?

Did Jamie Oliver not sort all this out? I had this vague idea that school food in the U.K. had improved since I were a lass - has it?

I serve her healthy food but her palate has changed. She wants pizza etc. It's a battle now and never was before.

I think a big part of the problem is the cultural attitude of the parents as well as lack of funding. This attitude is being passed down through each generation & it's going to be hard to tackle.

I'm not ethnically English but British, we eat a lot of our home cooked cultural foods which is healthier. The commercial version isn't healthy but the home cooked version is so that's what my kids are used to.

However, as soon as they started school the parents would be horrified to hear that my kids ate these foods. Usually the conversation would be about what to feed kids for tea and they were surprised that not all kids eat beige oven food. My kids do eat oven food but on days when I've not had time to cook. One day, I had chopped mangoes for after school snacks & I offered on to my dd's friend as she expressed interest. Her mum refused on her behalf saying that they don't eat food like that what is classed as food like that? It's fruit ffs The girl had a small piece anyway and really liked it so her mum's narrow minded attitude towards food was restricting what her child ate. Anyway, it's attitudes like that as well as other factors which is fueling an obsession with junk food.

@BreakingGood45
Whilst the meals you mention sound better than average, I'm not sure bread with baked potatoes is entirely appropriate.
You also refer to everything being cooked from scratch and chicken kievs. So these were fresh chicken, hand made, crumbed and deep fried then? Or were they processed, reformed chicken from a packet?

I wouldn’t serve the latter at home. Sometimes we have a chicken breadt made fresh Kiev. They are expensive.

We eat good food at home (I read Why French Children don't Throw Food when mine were very small) and we sit at the table and eat with nice crockery/cutlery. My dc have never liked the cooked options in school canteen because there is no seasoning, to them it just tastes bland. They either eat fruit pots and a bread roll or a panini (although the tuna has no seasoning either apparently). I'm not concerned as they eat their main meal at home. They run to get the chicken goujons and chips on a Friday though as we don't eat biege food very often at home.

What's the alternative to sitting at the table with nice crockery and cutlery? That's what I did as a child, my parents and grandparents before me. I fail to understand why anyone would need to get that tip about a basic life skill from a book.

@RosesAndHellebores

What's the alternative to sitting at the table with nice crockery and cutlery? That's what I did as a child, my parents and grandparents before me. I fail to understand why anyone would need to get that tip about a basic life skill from a book.

you would think. But there was an eye opening thread I read on MN not too long ago, where many, many posters said they never eat at the table, or that many of them don't even have a table. Everybody eats from trays in front of their sofa or takes meals up to their room.

And in school Roses they sit on benches and eat with plastic cutlery and polysterene 'dishes'. There aren't enough benches so a lot of the time they just have to stand and eat.

We don't have a table shock horror, we don't have space due to our tiny weeny flat. Also my ASD daughter will only eat 'beige food' shall I pass the smelling salts to you ??

Do whatever works for you and yours Lolli. My dc3 has ASD too and I know how hard it can be [hugs]

@seekinglondonlife

I want to clarify that the table/crockery was mentioned within the context of their home vs school habits. It certainly isn't a dig at anyone who doesn't have a table at home.

When I was at primary school in the 90s the school dinners were terrible. Lucklily I only had them once or twice a week, but it was usually some sort of highly processed slice of chicken/turkey (perfectly circuler and had air bubbles in it), bullet roast potatoes/smash and mushy veg. Pudding was sponge with pink icing. My class was also last in the sitting, so there would be nothing left. Hated it and even as a kid I knew it was very low quality.

Secondary school was chips, burgers, sausage rolls and vending machines. They used to serve burgers, chips etc at break time! A burger was £1. Obviously all the kids bought them and I put on a lot of weight! I had to go on a diet in year 8 to get back to a healthy weight.

When Jamie Oliver did his campaign the school went the completely polar opposite direction. Vending machines were replaced with just bottled water dispensers. Not a chip or burger in sight. It wasn't popular. It didn't particularly bother me, but on the odd occassion I did miss having access to a veending machine which dispensed ssomething more than evian.

I understood that the thread is about children who don't have special dietary or other needs, obviously nobody will be expecting allergic or intolerant children to eat the meal that would make them sick.

I've taken this thread to be about mainstream children without SEND and special dietary requirements. So my post wasn't directed at anyone whose child fell into those categories.

My DD is in year 7. I have had to revert to packed lunch as since covid they have a half hour lunch break and she literally spent 20 mins queueing and then didn't have time to eat. My older boy used to get 45 min and had a chicken wrap every day for 5 years as far as I can tell!

My DD has Crohn's and we stick to a fairly low residue diet which probably looks very unhealthy. White bread, white pasta, chicken, rice, limited fruit and veg in packed lunch as she tolerates it better soft and cooked. We do bake a lot as emulsifiers are in almost everything pre-made and are thought to be part of the huge increase in IBD in the Western world.

@KatharinaRosalie

I understood that the thread is about children who don't have special dietary or other needs, obviously nobody will be expecting allergic or intolerant children to eat the meal that would make them sick.

My daughter has coeliac disease so special dietary need. Still doesn't get a choice in her school lunch, the kitchen just makes sure its gluten free for her (most of the meals are naturally gluten free anyway, but when its pasta for instance, then she gets gluten free pasta separately from the kitchen). Not sure how it works for vegetarian or vegan children, I had to give a doctor's note to get her GF meals. I expect a doctor's note would also work for children with diagnosed food aversions/issues.

Our school in France has a vegetarian menu for vegetarian kids, but also no choice there, either you eat it or not. And an allergen list is sent out, so I guess allergic kids get to take a lunchbox if allergens are served. But there is still just one main course, not several options to choose from.

@KatharinaRosalie, One menu, with some type of vegetarian alternative, would clearly resolve the issue. However, parents in the UK have a ridiculous amount of power, and the councils who make the decisions about how the funding from central government is spent, would never dare to implement change. They would rather waste the money than deal with the parents. And it is an obscene waste of money if all the healthy options are actually being binned every day.

It’s like everything else in education - badly managed. Somewhere along the line there should be some accountability for how school budgets are managed, including how much money is spent on food that no one ever chooses to eat, rather than simply repeating the mantra that schools are ‘underfunded’. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

[quote EYProvider]@KatharinaRosalie, One menu, with some type of vegetarian alternative, would clearly resolve the issue. However, parents in the UK have a ridiculous amount of power, and the councils who make the decisions about how the funding from central government is spent, would never dare to implement change. They would rather waste the money than deal with the parents. And it is an obscene waste of money if all the healthy options are actually being binned every day.

It’s like everything else in education - badly managed. Somewhere along the line there should be some accountability for how school budgets are managed, including how much money is spent on food that no one ever chooses to eat, rather than simply repeating the mantra that schools are ‘underfunded’. It’s a lot more complicated than that.[/quote]
In many schools the meals are provided by a third party and the kitchen staff are not employed by the school.
The school have little or no say over what is cooked.

It is the cost issue. Things like fish fingers, sausages and weird slices of "beef" are cheap. Fresh cod, pork steaks and chicken breast are not.

I do get annoyed with my daughter's school who claim that they serve "seasonal fresh vegetables" which is baked beans at least once a week, and frozen peas or sweetcorn at least once each per week. Actual fresh vegetables like carrots, cabbage and broccoli are not expensive. One think I can comment on in a positive way is the snack, which is always fruit or vegetable (although whether a large tomato is a sensible snack for a 5 year old is questionable!)

My daughter has packed lunches twice a week, which I try to make as healthy as possible to make up for the fish fingers and chips which she insists on having every Friday! We have fresh meals cooked from scratch with seasonal fresh vegetables almost every evening at home, but a lot of kids don't.

@MaryAndHerNet

In the 60s and 70s when I was at school, there was pudding with every meal, and I can only think of one overweight person in primary, three in secondary.

I grew up in the 80s, we had pudding with every school meal. Often something with custard, Roly Poly, Spotted Dick, syrup steamed pudding etc. Sometimes a Bakewell tart or other little cake.
Overweight people were relatively rare back then. In my whole family, only my aunt was overweight, but she was the family cook and made all manner of things. Always had big steel pots on her oven tops, forever stirring and adding spices to something.

I do not know the exact reasons for why obesity is such a huge problem now. But as the money rolls into the pockets of gyms, weight watchers, slimming world, personal trainers, diet book writers, 'healthy' snack manufacturers etc there's plenty with a vested interest to keep people overweight.

My mum lived onto her 80s, her diet never changed and can be summed up:
Eat what you like, just don't eat too much.

I should have said a pudding with every school dinner.

At home, puddings were only for Sunday tea.

@thekaratekid thankfully when I was at school in the 60s/70s there was always a jug of water and little glass beakers.

I cannot reconcile children being expected to buy evian rather than drink corporation pop. Water is free.

School dinners aren’t great because food in the U.K. has always been about quantity over anything else. As long as kids have something to fill them up, it’s fine.

French do food better.

I would love a school swap tv show ( I know there a couple about naughty kids and some single swap documentaries)lt would be brilliant to see what children made of other countries systems. Expensive but interesting.

There's nothing wrong with fish fingers, they are quite nutritious.

Though school dinners were generally crap in my day, we did have a decent piece of fish once a week, served with chips.

Not to veer too far off topic, but I would like to add something to a comment I made earlier about it being a lot more complicated than schools simply being ‘underfunded’, as so many people on Mumsnet like to claim.

Every second person on this forum has a child with ASD. That’s not a judgment, it’s just a fact. And it’s borne out by what I’m seeing at my nursery. I don’t know what has led to the increase in children with ASD over the past 20 years. What I do know is that EHCPs for these children cost local authorities somewhere in the region of £18,000 per child per year, and substantially more (£50-60,000) if the child attends a SEN school. If 10% of children have an EHCP, that is an enormous amount of money. I suspect it’s higher, and if it isn’t, it will be in a few years.

There’s also the fact that PPA time for teachers (often a whole day each) is covered by agency staff, and this costs at least twice as much as it would if someone was employed directly by a school. Most of the money goes into the pockets of the greedy agency owners, who are nearly always ex-teachers.

It is true that the school caterers are engaged directly by the local authorities, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be accountability when it comes to cost. Someone should have the common sense to negotiate a much cheaper price with the caterer for providing less food, but clearly there is no incentive to do this.

What is underfunded is Early Years, and that’s because there’s no money left after so much has been wasted on food that gets thrown away, and because so much is needed to enable schools to cope with the rising numbers of children with SEN. Things are bad and getting worse and there are no easy solutions.