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!

Sorry phone is shit.

Some kids don't like raw veg or seeds but dd does so that's what she gets.

our staff room is full of sweets, cakes and biscuits thank fuck!

:o booty

Bootycall, trust me here, it's NOT the teachers fussing over this.

Our only axe to grind is a preference for not teaching afternoon lessons to kids wired on Monster drinks.

(Actually, being a parent as well as a teacher, I'm firmly in team 'bugger off & get the school dinners fit to serve to a dog before you diss my homemade blackberry muffins'.)

My dcs school dinners are horrid, even the pudding gets rejected, the chips, the mash with no butter - what's the point of mash with no butter....and my dcs are not fussy, they are used to variety but not to poor quality food.
Packed lunch I usually throw in a homemade cake but I would be perfectly happy not to bother if I could get away with it but all their friends have fruit strings, crisps, fruit shoots, chocolate bars, sweetened yoghurt, so they feel a bit left out and one piece of cake is the compromise, at home we don't have pudding....IMO it's a bad habit and the school should stop encouraging it for school dinners and for packed lunches.

cosikitty's right about the staffroom biccies though. we do like a nice biccy.

All this banning of sweet items from school lunches is down to pressure on schools to gain those stupid 'healthy school' awards. Teacher's hardly give a shit, they have bigger fish to fry with their own stupid targets to meet.

Yep healthy school awards that encourage kids to bring in fruit or veg, so the kids bring in those chewy things made entirely from concentrated fruit sugar - yep sweets by any other name, the thing they ban. Yet I can't give my dcs a chuck of cheese, that might actually contain some nutrients.

Oh God, yes, I hate seeing the kids eat those fruit winders, ours also bring cereal bars, those fruit stars, baked crackers etc- all junk which parents believe is healthy (and many of the teachers).

Yes, snowdown. Our infants get free fruit, our juniors are allowed to bring in fresh or dried fruit or veg (NOT winders etc), or cereal bars. So they all bring in something like a frosties bar, yet a homemade flapjack isn't allowed.

Mmmm, flapjack. Might have to make some.

By the way, I am quite partial to those fruit drop things (can't remember what they're called, but they're aimed at kids' lunch boxes and made almost entirely from fruit sugar). However, I eat them as a treat instead of actual sweets. Not as a daily snack.

I just made some flap jacks :)
Dried fruit, seeds (would have been nuts too damn but ban)

Subbed butter for coconut oil
Syrup for agarve nectar

So reasonabley healthy amongst the rest of the lunch and in the small portion it's cut into. not a planet sized wedge

It's even hit my DS3's preschool. Now my DS3 has tons of serious allergies, so balancing meals is done in conjunction with an allergy specialist dietician...he has a freshly made fruit salad every day, a ham sandwich on GF bread (with marge as he's dairy allergic), a fruit squeezer, some homemade (they have to be) biscuits, and a rice milk couverture bar. I have been asked to remove the rice milk couverture bar by the preschool - despite it being an easy way yo get essential fats into his diet.

Apparently the 'Lunchbox Police' know more than an allergy specialist dietician...

Stop it giles! I usually use fresh apple juice and honey to sweeten instead of syrup, and add an egg to help bind it together when baked. Sounds weird but it works. No added fat. And like you, dried fruit, seeds and nuts.

CouthyMow- what did you say to that? I hope you have some information from your son's dietician to put them straight?

Actually, that reminds me. I must remember to tell one of our parents that their child was caught drinking lucozade in school and not to let it happen again.

I know she has diabetes and her blood sugar was 3.1, but still, we have a water only policy...

(Disclaimer, the above was made up just to illustrate how idiotic CouthMow's son's preschool are being, not allowing variations to be made for the treatment of health conditions)

Our primary school goes on and on about their healthy school lunches. I finally snapped and wrote in that their school lunches aren't at all healthy and they should stop telling children that they are. They have red meat almost every day, particularly processed pork which is apparently a big cause of cancer. They also have chips, plus an unhealthy pudding almost every day. They didn't bother to respond.

They ban sweets in school, but the weekly Christianity club bribes the children with sweets every single week.

My DS2's school has hot meals delivered daily. The kitchen was (is) in the centre of the school. No room to expand as corridors on all four sides. It worked well when there were 200 pupils there - not now there are 400+. It was an impossible situation in a Victorian built school in the centre of a housing estate with no land to build on.

Yet they are FAR better meals - more 'real food' than his last Primary, which hired its own cook, had a fully stocked, large enough kitchen to cope with the 400+ pupils there. "The food actually smells of food" was DS2's first observation on starting at the new school!

They can't legally stop packed lunches at school because many LA's won't allow any extra budget for those with allergies. When my DC has 9 different allergies, who is best placed to provide a SAFE meal, with no risks of cross contamination, that is balanced for HIS dietary requirements - me or a school that is contracting out it's catering services to somewhere I can't even visit?

And that is despite me being entitled to FSM's. There is no WAY they can provide my DS3 with a healthy, nutritious balanced meal that takes into account all of his allergies for the same cost as their standard meal. I should know, it just isn't possible. His bread alone costs gram for gram 4 times as much as 'standard' decent bread, let alone the crappy value stuff you get with school meals. And that's just one part of a meal.

DS (6yo) has just swapped to hot meals from packed lunches and I can't believe the absolute shite they are served.
Today - fish cake, spaghetti hoops, chips, big cookie for pudding and "flavoured milk".
How do they get away with it?

I've given up - I give it to him on the way home from preschool! He doesn't have that every day - some days I give him dairy soy free Cheezly instead, but he's not over-keen on it - have you ever tasted it??!! It tastes like salty sweaty socks!

(And no, he can't have nuts for the fats he needs, he's bloody allergic to ALL nuts and the majority of legumes too, so no humous, no lentils, no peanuts, no tree nuts...)

DD's school dinners are compulsory and they are WOEFUL. 3 days out of 5 the meat option is either chicken curry or chilli. DD won't eat rice or anything spicy. The non-spicy option (pasta & cheese) gets snapped up by those on first sitting and all that's left is the spicy food with rice. She ends up having cheese & crackers or a jacket potato with no filling. I gave her a lunchbox to take in on curry day because I was so pissed off with the situation and they confiscated it then magically found a non-spicy dinner for her that day and told me there wasn't a problem because she'd eaten a proper dinner...

They won't take any criticism of their canteen (I'm not the only one who's complained) and react defensively 'oh, all kids moan about school dinners' so it's pointless to complain. Their idea of vegetables is appalling - sweetcorn twice a week - it's not even a vegetable! - or baked beans or peas. When she gets home I have to throw fruit & veg down her to make sure she gets her 5 a day...

This is a private primary school, but it shares the canteen with the upper school which is now a state school, so unfortunately we share their menu too - I really resent paying for my child to be half-starved and given poor nutrition!

She's on the waiting list for a different school and it can't come soon enough...

And they get the pizza, served with mash and sweetcorn as an option too, harticus - how is that a balanced meal?

Him being allergic to tree nuts, peanuts and legumes makes it incredibly difficult to get enough healthy fats into his diet. The rice milk couverture bars are made with coconut milk, which is full of unsaturated fats, plus it also has cocoa butter in, which provides more unsaturated fat.

(It's not the cocoa butter in proper chocolate that's bad for you, as an adult, it's the full-fat milk in milk chocolate. It's why dark chocolate is far better for you, as an adult)

Would you believe that in Y5, my DS1 was set a writing task where he had to write a letter to the HT where he had to pick one thing he would like to change about the school.

I wrote about it on here at the time - he chose to argue the reasons why those with packed lunches should be allowed to have two squares of dark chocolate in their lunch boxes.

At just 10 years old, he was able to make well-researched points about the antioxidant health benefits of dark chocolate, the perceived unfairness between the foods that were allowed in a packed lunch and those with a school meal, argue that developing children still needed a certain amount of healthy fats in their diet...

He won the contest, but they still were not allowed to bring in two measly squares of dark chocolate in their lunch boxes.

If even the 10yo's at the school can see that it's utter bollocks, why do the schools persist with it??!!

lovecat

Do you find it's affecting your dd's health?

I would imagine that those DC's who aren't getting a balanced lunchbox, and are being sent in with crap, do ACTUALLY know, by 7yo at the latest, that their lunchbox is unhealthy. If they can't change their parent's mind (pester power, anyone...) then why do some faceless idiots in an office think that by punishing the DC that turns up with a crappy lunch by confiscating it is going to make their parents miraculously give a shit and start providing a healthy, balanced packed lunch?

That money would surely be better spent on running a course that shows cheap ways of preparing a healthy lunchbox, then inviting the PARENTS (making it compulsory if your DC's entire lunch consists of rubbish maybe?) of those DC's in to attend the course.

That's the only way that you will improve that - and even then, that isn't always going to work.

Instead they are penalising children FOR SOMETHING THEIR PARENTS DO - few primary school DC's are packing their own lunch boxes, and even less are packing them in a house where they can't put together a decent sandwich and grab at least one bit of fruit...