to think that if school dinner puddings are unhealthy EVERY DAY, then I can

[CocktailQueen]

give my dc a gingerbread biscuit in his packed lunch??

School is cracking down on 'treats' in packed lunches. So no crisps, sweets, biscuits etc. except for one treat on Friday. Fair enough. But they have kept 'unhealthy' school dinner puddings - chocolate crispie cake, chocolate pud with custard, etc.! How is that fair?

Now, my ds is skinny and always on the go, and he needs some fat in his diet! So I gave him the gingerbread biscuit yesterday and he said he had to hide it to eat it in case the dinner lady saw him and took it away!

I don't know if our infant/junior school is large or small, it has 420 children in it

Veg etc is preprepared and cooked on site as are the puddings (except yogurt and fruit) sausages, fish fingers etc are brought in

They have roast dinner, butternut squash curry, toad in the hole etc served with at least two veg

Not only do they get pudding at ours - she gets 2nds and even 3rds.

Yesterday she had 2 slice of pizza, friend potato things, peas ( healthy!) and then double choc sponge and custard.

All her friends are free school meals (we aren't) and the hot dinners are at a separate time from lunchbox - so if she doesn't do the hot meal she eats her sandwich on her own and then plays in the playground on her own which was really upsetting her.

I've spoken to the school twice and I've raised it at governors meeting (I'm a governor as well) and was told that hot dinners are nothing to do with the school - they subcontract them to an external organisation at county level. I've written letters of complaint to them but no real response. The cook is employed by the external organisation and she doesn't interact with the head and won't engage with parents ( unless it's allergy based)

Lunchtime supervisors are employed by school - and they do keep an eye on lunch boxes and will send a letter home if there is a can of coke or too much unhealthy stuff.

Luckily our school don't have such a ridiculous policy About no unhealthy puddings in lunch boxes. I know I would be the first parent in to complain if my children were told no cake etc. their dinner is healthy and they eAt it. Once a week they have a school dinner. School pudding includes cake or a biscuit every day, so no different to the type of pudding I put in their packed lunch. I would take this up with the head teacher and put up a good fight in my defence. A child at our school takes a packet of sweets and a chocolate bar most days for lunch. The school kitchen try and provide her with something extra every day. I'm sure we are very lucky at our school that it is only one child with this kind of lunch, but if the school think banning cakes will help this kind of child I really wonder about the leadership team. Providing a free school dinner to all children is the only way to eradicate poor quality packed lunches IMO. And putting a cake in does not make a poor quality lunch if everything else is healthy.

I think it ridiculous to serve a sweet pudding after every school lunch. It's a very bad habit to got into.

Raisins, bread and yogurt will already have sugar in - your DS doesn't need anymore. Sugar is not necessary or healthy.

Sandwiches, breadsticks are enough wheat already. Does your DS have wheat for breakfast and tea also? Does he need any more? No.

Can't you just put healthy good in? Pop some pop corn, oatcakes etc.

Dd came home to say she is no longer aloud a penguin biscuit in her lunch box yesterday...... The School meal children had chocolate cake and custard....

She can however have a biscuit with no chocolate???

I wish we could afford school dinners but with 3 children at school that's 33 a week and the portions are so tiny they would still need a decent sized dinner when they got Home :(

My DC don't have a packed lunch (we have no choice, they're on FSM and couldn't afford to give them one!) but it has to be a blanket rule, doesn't it? I think it can be hard for someone to say 'yes, that cupcake is fine for a treat, because you've had a healthy lunch and haven't had a cupcake every day of the week etc;' and then tell the kid next to them, that they can't eat x, y or z because it's unhealthy. Clear to us, but I know my DC would see it as very black and white iyswim. I really don't like them having school dinners but it's that or I don't know what, and at least they have to have a good sized veg portion, and a fruit.

Onesie - *Raisins, bread and yogurt will already have sugar in - your DS doesn't need anymore. Sugar is not necessary or healthy.

Sandwiches, breadsticks are enough wheat already. Does your DS have wheat for breakfast and tea also? Does he need any more? No.

Can't you just put healthy good in? Pop some pop corn, oatcakes etc.*

DS doesn't like oatcakes or popcorn. Any other suggestions?

Quite timely as we have just had a reminder in the newsletter today of the new directive that all infants are entitled to free school meals starting in September and asking us if we will take it up 5 days a week, a few days a week or not at all.

My first reaction was, hey it's free, why wouldn't we take it, but now I am wondering whether this will be good health-wise. It also then leads me to think I will have to also pay for my child in Juiors to have the school meals....hmmm.

My kids eat so much crap at school. I hate it. Every day, some sort of cake and custard for pudding, then chocolates and sweets handed out in lessons, and then - combined class of 60 kids - the obligatory birthday sweets as well. They even give them milkshake.

1. It's shite and I don't want them eating it every day, and 2. It would be nice to treat my child to these things once in a while, but I can't, because he's already stuffed to the eyeballs on rubbish.

Healthy eating indeed.

That's just it isn't it. People bang on about how great it would e if all kids had a proper lunch. How school dinners would banish the appalling lunch boxes etc

I am willing to bet that actually the percentage of children who would End up with a less nutritional lunch is far higher than the percentage of children who would benefit.

It's about time it was recognised that in many schools the standards are crap or that the system used means that food runs out leaving kids with little more than rice and bread.

I remember reading on TES about a girl who made a blog about her school dinners. She shot to 'fame' after a blog post (and i ink she wrote to her MP or paper or something about it too) about the dinner she had where she was only served 2 potato wedges. I remember her putting something like 'could you work the whole afternoon on just 2 potato wedges?'. It caused an outcry with her school etc.

The thing that really struck me was that she was served those 2 potato wedges alongside a portion of pizza. Surely the base of the pizza is enough carbs/stodge for one meal and the potato wedges were actually completely unnecessary?

And having seen the weird combinations some of the meals contain, I don't think I could eat them. Eg chicken wrap - plain chicken breast pieces, tortilla wrap, sweet corn, broccoli. Technically balanced, but would you want to eat that?

Why not make it like a fajita? A small amount of seasoning on the chicken breast (not too much as I understand that many children don't like spice), strips of roasted veg like butternut squash, pepper, even carrot so children have something familiar. Then you could have a healthy sauce on it either smooth tomato salsa for those that like spice, homemade guacamole, sour cream/yoghurt for those that don't. And the children could have mini tortillas and have a go at building and eating their own fajitas.

Although I think that parents shouldn't have to fight for a good school meal (should be automatic) maybe that's what people should do if they are not happy

As I have said our meals are balanced (don't disagree that they may be weird combinations ) and we don't run out of food, so why my school/county and not everyone's?

God I dread to think of a time where school dinners would be compulsory. I would be horrified. I own a restaurant and we refuse to serve frozen chicken nuggets, crap sausages etc.

Dh says he wouldn't serve frozen shit to adults so why would he to kids. We do small portions of the menu for them and the families love it.

I wouldn't feed it to someone elses kids, I would allow them to eat it.

And its about time they woke up to the low fat, low sugar shit and the damage its causing. I would rather dd had an occasional class of full sugar coke than diet. Not that I like coke, but sweeteners and the like are disgusting and so bad for us.

School dinners actually made my dd ill. She often didn't like the slop she was served. Turned out she was filling up on the free bread they had along side meals and a hard boiled egg from the salad bar. And of course she devoured the pudding. So egg, bread and a massive flap jack/cookie/wedge of pie and custard etc. Not exactly a balanced diet!!

Of course you all say - just cook a proper dinner when she gets home. Well that was of course possible for me to do. However if my dd has a big lunch she won't eat much more than a slice of toast or a couple of crackers and carrot sticks for tea.

She has never been able to eat more than one main meal a day.
Me thinking she was just being deliberately fussy made her give them a proper go :(

Til one day she actually cried at home because she hated then that much. She was pale and tired and bloated.

So now she has a nice light packed lunch that she enjoys and will eat and even better she has room for tea. A tea where she can have steamed veg not over boiled slop and I can make sure she doesn't fill up on plain rice or pasta and not eat the meat/veg part.

There is no way she is having them ever again!!

awaits the MNetters who will claim egg bread and cookie is a perfectly balanced meal

School dinners are gov set guidelines. They have a certain quota of food to serve out on a weekly basis.

Milk for example, at an all day school they would aim for dc to have 3 quarters of a pint a day. They do this by making custard and cake to go with it.

It's not adult healthy, it is what gov have set.

Adult diets are not suitable for children, taking away all the crap out of lunchboxes isn't helping. Adults don't need cakes but there is nothing wrong with dc having homemade cake regularly.

I wish people would stop confusing a healthy adult diet to a healthy children's diet, it's really not the same.

problem is the government are wrong. Sweetners and low fat is not good for kids. And, imo, neither is cake every day.

And it could be technically the most nutritious meal in the world BUT if it's made with cheap chewy meat and turned into tasteless unseasoned slop that even a dog won't touch then what's the point???

Serving it just checks the gov's boxes it doesn't do anything for the children.

They just fill up on the bread and cake instead.

Oh and the food may he there at the beginning looking all government compliant. Doesn't look so good at the last sitting though does it? When the poor kids are walking away with plain pasta and ketchup cos it's all gone.

And parents are paying £40 a month for the "privilege"

Would love to know how pizza, wedges, beans and jam sponge is a balanced meal.

Well the meals are balanced over a 5 day week and a 3 week rota. One meal on its own isn't balanced.

They have to shove a set amount of calories into them,

I'm not defending them, some are vile but the cooks have to cook what's been set. They can't say well actually we won't make them cake today.

So how are the class on the last sitting for the week getting their set calories?

I am not saying ots the cooks fault. But you can't balance meals over a week, since you aren't taking into account what the kids eat at home. If they were attempting to balance one meal, fair enough.

you can't call a Childs deit balanced if they don't have a balanced meal.

A child doesn't just need calories. They need protein, carb, veg etc. In moderate amount at each meal. Carb overload one day is not ok as long as they have loads of protein in the next meal. Its not teaching healthy eating.

No-one seems to have mentioned the fact that free school meals are to be provided for every Infant School child from September... www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jan/14/hot-school-meals-for-infants-will-help-academic-progress

There's no mention of it in the article, but I assume that packed lunches will be banned completely when this ruling comes into force..