To think secondary schools shouldn’t have compulsory school dinners

[HitMissBowl]

DS is going to be starting a new secondary school in September. He will be one of the first set of pupils in year 7.

The school have stated that they will have compulsory family lunches, so nobody will be allowed to bring in packed lunch or any other type of food into school. Sounds good? Except in a few years time I’ll have 3 children in the school and will be spending well over £7K a year on school lunches for them.

How is this even fair? Dh and I will be earning over the £16k limit for free school lunches so how will we afford it? Apart from this, and the school uniform, the school sounds like it will be exceptional and academic and suit DS.

Is it legal for schools to make school dinners compulsory?

Vegetarian also doesn't = Quorn.

Quorn is actually quite expensive so I don't see a school providing it at multiple meals.

Our local secondary schools charge £2.30 for basic main course and £1.20 for a pudding. There are other more expensive options. £22.50 per child per week so it does mount up.

Just checked our local Free School, compulsory school meals at £2.70 a day for main course and pudding. Bread, salad and fruit also available apparently.
Free Schools and Academies can do as they please.

I have a son with severe food allergies. How are they going to cater for this? I would imagine there has to be a caveat to this policy, otherwise can they guarantee that all the food they provide is free from his allergens? I am not talking about possible cross contamination from peers as you can't be r
easonably responsible for someone else's actions, but they are responsible for providing safe foods for everyone who has an allergy. Allowing packed lunches would surely decrease the risk (and their liability).

Sorry about the space, I don't know what happened there.

The one near us Cappuchino has their own chef on site (food cooked there not brought in) who said they can cope with food allergies, gf etc. How true this is I don't know, we didn't choose the school but I assume there must be get outs if they can't.

This school has a higher than average proportion of children on fsm and is actively being sought out by parents of children with asd/adhd so if they have been set up to exclude less "desirable" families it's not working. That said its only been open 2 years so no data yet on how such children fare in the super-strict system.

That would have ruled out DS2 going to that school.
I did try being vegetarian and gluten free, (particularly when travelling) but it was such hard work that I gave up.
And just because something is GF doesn't mean he'll eat it.

£1500 a year to feed 3 teenagers a hot meal 5 days a week sounds like amazing value, I'd bite their hand off personally.

Boarding schools manage to feed all their kids, so I'm not opposed in principle, though I'd like to see how they proposed to feed ds who has ASD and a very limited diet.

Would I suspect indicate how much they wanted to accept dealing with an autistic child in general - probably not very... Though if they had a good attitude and understood his food issues, then I'd welcome someone else feedinghim!

Boarding school kids are generally allowed to have a supply of their own snacks and often they have access to a kitchen to do themselves toast, supernoodles, snacks or whatever.

I’m personally not worried about the vegetarian aspect (apart from the Quorn) as we’re meat eaters and we have meat dishes during the week at home. It’s just the compulsory aspect and paying for it and then paying for break time snacks on top of it. Not sure how much they’ll be charging for additional snacks, but I’ll be pretty miffed if an apple is 50p or something stupid like that. On top of all of this, we’ll be spending money on bus travel, so it’s not exactly a “free” school for us.

The school have stated that they will only be providing “healthy” snacks like breakfast bars, but how healthy are breakfast bars?! They’re sugar and oats.

I think as the school grows larger, controlling food like this will get harder. Unless they have morning bag checks, I don’t know how they’ll stop children from bringing in extra snacks.

I wouldn't want my child to be fed Quorn at all, and it doesn't sound like there's going to be a lot of option to choose from (going off what you've said so far)

I wouldn't touch my school dinners as a child and so often had no lunch throughout being in education, though I have always had complex food issues.

I don’t think the school can enforce this.

In principle it sounds a good idea although I would like to see two or three choices available to children, with the option of a packed lunch for those who really dislike or cannot tolerate the lunches.

Well that's one way to weed out the parents who aren't organised and able to support their kids. Gone too will be the SEN kids with texture/temp issues. That's definitely selection by the back door.

We were given a big form about allergies and intolerances that had to be signed and stamped by Doctors/ hospital. Then a form to sign to agree to meet with the food suppliers to organise and decide and agree on an appropriate menu. So it sounds like they’re accommodating all food intolerances and parents have a choice and say in what their children will be happy to eat.

The children starting who are on pupil premium is at a higher level than the other local schools, so I’m not sure if they’re weeding out poor children. If anything, they’re trying to make everyone equal with the same lunches.

My son's primary is a free school set up by a group of local parents (DP and I among them) and in our application to the DfE we laid it on thick about a family style eating "experience" where the children would have hot food served at the table on real crockery yada yada. Sounded fab and worked well when the school first opened and there were only KS1 children at school (as the meals were free to all).

But as the school got larger more and more people didn't want school lunches because it was slow and the earlier children would eat all the desserts but not bother with the main course which hacked off the children who cam in later.

My son gave up on school meals in year 4 as the whole "family style" utopia had fallen on it's butt. This year the school admitted it couldn't service all the children in the limited time it had for lunch break and they have moved to cafeteria style dining.

I wonder if your DC's school had something similar in their DfE application OP? It's not enforceable at secondary though - just as it wasn't enforceable for my son's school and the KS2 children.

I think it's a type of social engineering which tries to dissuade those on lower incomes from applying. I posted a while back about my son's new secondary making an iPad a non-optional piece of equipment. This is the same sort of stunt IMO.

DS goes to a private school, but he doesn't board. He has a compulsory school dinner, (included in the fees) but there are various choices. He has a number of friends who have allergies, and they seem to be catered for. There are boarders, many of whom are from abroad, and the school is pretty rural, so no nipping down town to get snacks/fast food for them.

As I said further up the thread, countries like Finland already do this (although for free) and in Finland there is no choice of main meal, everyone eats the same, but allergies etc are catered for. It is interesting how they must be able to cope with different dietary requirements, whereas parents in this country seem to think it is impossible to do that.

This does sound a bit like back handed selection. They'll remove any kids with ASD and eating issues and any who don't qualify for FSM but don't want to shell out for an expensive school lunch. My friends and I all had packed lunch in secondary because we were fed up of spending most of our lunch break queueing.

They want the FSM children to get their hands on the extra funding that comes with them.

OP you might contact your MP to see if this is legal. Education in this country is supposed to be free at the point of use. There are almost no other situations in which a school can compel parents to spend money - uniform being the only exception I can think of and even there, if parents can meet the regulations some other way, the school cannot demand they pay out.

It is a 'rich ' school thing. This reminds me of my friend who got a scholarship to a posh school. She said that there was a real social division in the school. That the people who couldnt afford school lunches were put in another room and looked down on by the other students. I think it is a very strange idea to make this compulsary. I would challenge it

As long as the lunches are well thought out, healthy and taste good, I think it’s a great idea and good value for money for a hot meal.

I see an awful lot of kids who bring terrible packed lunches into school. I’m not saying every child does but the majority are not well balanced or healthy and I bet quite a few of those don’t get a healthy meal in the evening either. I am all for children getting at least one good meal a day (although I’m not convinced there is a need to make it vegetarian).

One of the local secondary schools does that, and says it’s vegetarian as the meat they can afford on the budget is really low quality, and they can get much better quality veggie food for the same money. It’s only in it’s first year, so will have to wait and see, but I’m considering it for DS 3 in a few years time

I’d have loved this at secondary school, we had a cafe but being crazy poor I wasn’t exactly eating much at lunch.