Shocking state of school dinners!

[dottiedodah]

This week a headteacher asked how hard it was to cook a potato? Really grim offerings .Sad part is that some children only have that food.Do those old enough to remember traditional school meals feel they were better then ?

@Mumteedum

The menus all look good (locally anyway) nice for parents to choose from.

but what's served up bears no resemblance to what you picture in your mind!

unappetising

i feel so sorry for children, for whom, this IS their only meal of the day. For kids that get a decent breakfast, snack & dinner at home, they can eat anything that vaguely appeals & move on. Happy to pack lunches if they prefer.

@TwylaSands

i sgree the meals should be made on premises with good quality basic ingredients. Stews, casserol /cottage pie etc , but not stew everyday.

No obviously not stew everyday. I was giving an example of a healthy nutritious one-pot.

@Horaced

rice with pizza is just WEIRD, but surely pizza IS the carb.

I've heard from someone who works for chart Wells that they suck. Especially the jacket potatoes which are really dry with no butter and nasty cheese. They also changed the recipe of their spaghetti Bolognese to save money less actual beef more fillers.
Not to mention they insisted all meals have to be ordered online weeks in advance by the parents and no food on the day if that doesn't happen. No exceptions. Really sucks because the same kids who's parents are too lazy to order their meals are also too lazy to cook them dinner at home. so they're pretty much starving all day or dinner at home is one piece of toast

Bring back ravioli and chips!

And Panda Shandy to wash it down with.

What are the fillers? I make spag bol with lots of veg, grated beetroot, or courgette when there is a glut. We then go easy on the pasta and have a decent serving of bolognese so better overall. If fillers are nutritious like veg or lentils, I don't see any harm, as long as there is still sufficient protein.

Octopuslethargy I supply teach and go in many Primary Schools. If teaching KS1 I'm often expected to help serve and supervise dinners. I have never seen food I would be pleased to eat myself.

@Octopuslethargy

that would be great if you could!!

I'm not sure tbh the person who was telling me this didn't say but they did say a lot of the kids could taste the difference and really didn't like it.

I also forgot to add on my first comment that the no exceptions to ordering online includes the kids in key stage one and the poor ones who would get it free anyway. Sooo literally playing jobsworths with some kids nutrition. The dinner ladies literally aren't allowed to deviate from the online ordering stuff so no giving a hungry kid who's parents forgot to order any food.

Primary the children are allowed to bring in a snack, cheese and/or fruit. Lunchtime a three week rolling menu. They're always starving when they come out.

Secondary near us. The lunch break too short. They run out of food every day. You pay per item.

School meals were awful in the 80s/90s when I was at primary/secondary in a London suburb.

They got marginally better in the mid-90s when we were allowed to have cheap chicken burgers and chips every day but they certainly weren’t healthy or nutritious.

When i was at school our options were school dinner or go home, only in the last year were we allowed packed lunch.
Our school dinners were fresh and really nice. Roast beef dinner, savoury mince, beef goulash etc Friday was fish day( no chips) Always 2 courses, soup in the winter and pudding in the summer. Our meals where on proper plates, our water glasses were real and we carried our own meal from the servery to the table, even aged 5.
Todays school dinners look awful, served on prison trays or shoved in a takeaway container. I wouldn't feed the slop they serve to a pig. How can they get it so wrong? Maybe it is time to go back to food being cooked in school kitchens and not on some far flung industrial estate.

I’ve just left teaching (secondary) but the meals in the otherwise consistently good/outstanding school were shocking. The food in the pictures shared by the headteacher looked much nicer than the food served in my school (also Chartwells)…and that’s saying something as those pics are fairly grim.

In my opinion, there are two main reasons for the appalling standards of food in some schools.

Firstly, many schools only have half an hour for lunch. That’s half an hour to get 1600 pupils fed for my school. This results in one small main food area serving the “proper meals” and lots of “outlets” around the school serving cold and bland grab and go foods such as pizza slices and paninis (both made with cheese that would be unrecognisable as cheese in a blind taste test due to an absolute lack of taste). Everything is a rush; kids are still queuing for their paltry pizza slice 3 mins before lessons begin again.
Secondly, the outsourcing. Many schools outsource to companies such as Chartwells and in some cases there is even a middle man where there is a management company that the school outsources lots of things to (catering, maintenance etc) and then that company outsources to industry specific companies. This means that it can be very difficult for the headteacher to address the issues in the short term. There was a good interview with the headteacher in question on radio 4 on Thursday where he explained his frustrations.

It became such a running joke that my form used to come and show me their lunches, like a “rate my plate” race to the bottom Competition. I remember one pupil asking me what they thought they had ordered for lunch They opened up their panini to show me the cheese and two solitary pieces of cubed ham. I was horrified as I thought she’d been served ham by mistake in the “vegetarian” cheese panini option…nope…she’d ordered a ham and cheese panini! Really terrible.

Go back to proper dinner time staff employed by the school than can broker deals with local food companies and make healthy food with the ingredients they get. Our children deserve and need to be fed better.

The best school meal I've eaten recently (I work with schools) was in a secondary school where there were no options at lunchtime. Everyone ate the same meal (aside from those with allergies / medical diets). Vegetarian. Cooked from scratch with fresh ingredients. No junk food on the menu. Dessert was fruit.

I had school dinners in the 80s. I don't remember them being great or healthy. Horrible mash, rice pudding... I did like cornflake tart!

Me to!
I went to primary school.from 1978 /1985 there was no vegetarian option and it was a very middle class white British school so the options I guess.were limited but they were as I recall ample and tasty as long g as you didn't have any requirements.

sikh schools have good meals usually -vegetarian -no eggs

Thanks for this! It's a great read 😁

Portion sizes are calorie controlled to meet govt requirements.

Surely the government understands the very basic differences between a 4yo and a 16yo, though?

Exactly the same here. The food was really good.

I hated dinners in primary school. A scoop of waxy potato, mince n gravy, and turnip. And you couldn't leave until you had eaten it.

High school was great though. Chips upon chips. Curry. Fish. Breaded chicken. Soup for starters. Baked potato and a salad bar. My favourite day was Lasagna and chocolate cake day.

It's not that difficult to mass produce tasty food, but obviously, it isn't going to be the healthiest. Schools need a bit more imagination.

Our local academy has been in the papers several times for the state of the food. Last time it was raw chicken. DS will be packed lunches. Mind the food is probably the least of the schools issues.

What's the obsession with 'one-pot' meals? Very odd.