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 ?

I do a packed lunch

Sandwiches/Thermos stuff
Cut fruit and/or cut veggies
Biscuits
Yogurt
Crackers
Homemade Banana bread or a muffin
Apple sauce
Cheese sticks
Dried fruit

Yes it's tedious to prepare but better than the rubbish in the school café

DD is in y6 and hasn't like school dinners from the start - her school is fan and cooks them in house and has a varied menu etc, and while in the infants and getting free school meals, she had them! But often didn't enjoy them. Then the provider changed the quality of the foster on 'fish Friday' and the dinner on Weds (normally a proper dinner), she refused full stop.
I'd rather send her in with decent food (we have some insulated containers too) that are healthy & she will eat for way less than £3.30/day

They are frequently recommended on budget threads on here. Cheap and nutritious, easy way to bulk out meat with veg and legumes. Common in community kitchen settings as they are suitable for serving large numbers and the food stays hot.

It’s so annoying! I hate fake cheese it tastes awful.
the short lived Linda McCartney pizza 😭😭😭

I agree these are good meals but unfortunately they do tend to be the ones that are left by the children. I'd say on pasta and curry days at least 50% ask for the meal with no sauce - so they just have the pasta or rice plain with the protein on the side (it's separate anyway). There's a beef stew day that's a disaster as so few children will even touch it! I just don't know how you get round that as all these children have had free meals in KS1 and we only do one option (vegetarian meal available is ordered specifically beforehand) so the children have grown up with these meals in school at least but they still refuse them - they would rather be hungry.

School dinners were terrible when I was at school in the 1960’s terrible when my children were at school in the 1990’s and terrible when I worked in schools in the 2000’s.
Unfortunately there is no point in preparing healthy meals as most children won’t eat vegetables.
Much easier to send them in with a packed lunch and prepare a hot meal at night; at least then they get some nutritious food.

Dsil used to manage a school kitchen run by Chartwells.
She is a trained chef and served nutritious meals to over a 1000 dc in less than 2 hours every single day!
However Chartwells expected dsil to make 60% profit a week!
I think a lot of kitchen managers would struggle with this.
Dsil has worked in huge hotels so understands getting good food out quickly.

She always worked 2 hours a day extra unpaid as she was also expected to do all paperwork involved too.
They had a freezer pantry that broke down continuously and refused to replace it.
There are very strict rules so no salt allowed ever, can’t imagine Jamie Oliver cooking at home with no salt.

Dsil has now left and works at a school where she has half the pupils, no Chartwells and doesn’t have to spend hours on paperwork.
She loves it.
The first school were upset she left and the new school think she’s amazing.
She is.

Oh and all of your dc would eat chips everyday if allowed. 😂

At my dc primary We order at least a week in advance but lunch orders are checked by the teacher first thing and admin call the parent if there no lunch order. Usually I've been able to deliver a packed lunch but there have been occasions where school have bunged in an extra jacket potato for my kid that I then pay for later

In my school the common argument is that if you served healthier one pot type meals (chilli's, stews, pies etc) then the kids wouldn't eat it. I think we need to take a 'well tough' stance. If they don't like it they can bring a packed lunch with junk (I'm secondary). We owe it to the children who will only get this one meal for it to be decent and nutritious. Most meals should be vegetarian too, but a minimum of twice a week.

Agreed. Why would the assumption be that kids are incapable of eating a casserole or veggie chilli? What are they being fed at home I wonder?

They shouldn’t be making any kind of profit. This is the nub of the problem.

We should go back to school kitchens being run by the school with an actual cook running it properly. Given a budget at the beginning of the week and catering accordingly. There are too many middle men all creaming off money and at the bottom the children are the ones suffering.

My kids’ nursery was very strict about food - every meal had veggies, they had to try a bit, food was pretty adventurous (fajitas, tagines, stews, mince and dumplings…) and real food. Kids (and these are little kids, aged 1-4) ate it.

Then they went to school and suddenly it’s “kids could not possibly eat this”, and they get junk food every day. Even something real like a chicken dinner comes essentially without veg. There is a salad bar with croutons, corn and raisins. I despair.

Well this is what happens when the Government encourages outsourcing to private companies for everything. They don’t like the public sector (never have). It’s happened in healthcare too. And quality always goes down, of course it will, that’s a no brainer.

I'm 57 so went through the evolution of school dinners.

Primary there was one dinner and one pudding and you had to eat it. I went to three different primaries and that was the same at them all.

Sometimes it was good, others, not so. Second primary did spam fritters on a fairly regular basis that I hated and at school 3 there was a weird stew they served with a slice of pastry, we all called it spew.

That school also served milky coffee in the winter.

At secondary we got a choice of two meals and two puddings, still meat potatoes and 2 veg type meals.

Then the rules changed and we got a choice of the main meal or 'soup and a sandwich' which was actually a fairly decent meal. No I didn't grow up in Ireland but the school was run by Irish nuns.

When I got into my final year it changed again and it was basically 'chips with everything'.

We also had a couple of students who went home for lunch.

I actually think the soup and sandwich could work for a lot of children. Hide the veg in the soup and have an assortment of sandwiches / rolls / baguettes.

We need a total rethink. Food should be something that contributes to education. I did supply at one school that had a French chef and compulsory (free) breakfast - you didn't have to eat but you had to go with your class to the dining area.

Classes were often a nightmare before breakfast, mainly due to students wanting to know what time breakfast was that day.

Breakfast was porridge or cereal, beans on toast, spaghetti on toast (tinned stuff) hot and cold drinks.

@StaunchMomma 'one pot's meals are easier to make, cheaper, and you can put all sorts in them, different vegetables and pulses for example. Therefore, more nutritious than just putting one vegetable on the side. A school canteen has to be efficient, they aren't going to be farting about plating several smaller dishes.

When I was in primary school, aeons ago, school dinners had nutritional standards. I remember my favourite was braised beef and onions, we had fish and chips about once a month.
Other items were things like shepherds pie.

Exactly. Teachers could see it coming. I brought it up on here several times but no one cared.

Have you ever met children?

Portion sizes seem too small, way too much adult spicy stuff such as 'Mexican spicy bean burrito' and think the 'picnic' 'school packed lunch' option isn't great as it means not all kids get a proper hot meal and it's very sparse in my daughters school- a small triangle sandwich, abit of Cucumber and a biscuit I think.

The meals don't seem filling enough....where are all the things like cottage pie or Lasagne and sponge puddings with custard?!

I'm wondering if the choice of no 'sauce' is the problem (in the absence of an eating disorder like AFRID). 50% of children may prefer to eat plain pasta or rice, but how many would just eat a proper dinner if not offered another option?

Mine, and many others I know, grew up with this kind of food everyday.

I think @TwylaSands has the best approach.

Offer a choice of vegan/salad, bread & fruit, or a one pot. Much easier to make, serve and better nutritionally.

Cassoulet
Chilli con carne
Sausage casserole
Spag bol
Goulash
Chicken stroganoff
Assorted curries
Fisherman's pie
etc

None of them are difficult to make or particularly labour intensive.

Time is a big issue too.

At my sons UK primary the food was okay, poorly seasoned, but veg wasn’t tasteless warm mush. But they had 35 minutes to serve every single primary school child, get them to eat and out of the hall. Young children aren’t exactly known for speed eating when sat on a table with their friends.

Where we are now lunch is an hour long, slots are staggered so when each year group goes to eat there isn’t a big queue already, for the younger years larger items are already cut up for them to speed things along. The food is good, its free for all school age children to uptake is good, but importantly they’re also allowed to appropriately season food!

I went to school in the era of turkey twizzlers, I took packed lunches

Don’t disagree but Chartwells (in particular) grubby hands have been all over school meals pre dating this government though.
I know because I was on a governing board of my children’s primary years ago when the contract for supplying school meals was due to renew. It was just a board meeting point that the Headteacher expected to be box ticked and put through - because that was what had always happened. I suggested that we should put it out to tender and a wp look at alternatives and have them all in to present. We went from them raising the price by 20p a day to reducing it by 10p a day, offering a packed lunch, and menu changes and having members of the governing board do a spot check once a month (going to the school and actually eating the meal offered) with terms in the contract that meant it had to be agreed they were still providing good food and good value. Chartwells were definitely shocked to be in that position, they’d clearly been used to no dialogue whatsoever and contracts just being waved through. I was sympathetic with that Headteacher when I discovered he couldn’t even be involved in negotiating the contract for his own school.