To think school dinners are taking the mick now?

[QuietRiver]

Just signed up here after lurking for ages so sorry if I do this wrong!

DS1 is in year 8 and has school dinners most days. They’ve just put the prices up AGAIN and it’s £3.20 a day now. For that he gets a slice of pizza and a cookie or a wrap and a juice. He’s always starving when he gets home and raids the fridge so I end up feeding him twice anyway.

Packed lunches would work out cheaper but he says everyone at school does dinners and I’m being tight if I make him take a sandwich.

It’s not even that the food is nice - he says the chips are soggy and the queues are massive so he barely gets time to eat.

AIBU to just send him with packed lunch from now on even if he complains? Or is this just the price of having a teen these days?

Just remembered Jamie Oliver trying to tackle this issue and not getting very far. It's a shame.

£16 a week for a slice of pizza and a cookie is extortionate. DD is in sixth form but often doesn’t have a full meal as less choice in 6th form cafe but won’t take a packed lunch as she is so fussy so often cooks as soon as she isn in through the door.

School dinners aren't suppose to fill them til bedtime, everyone needs to feed their child again when they get home 😳

This is what one of mine has been buying can’t say I’m overly impressed but it’s lunch a snack not dinner. Why are they obsessed with Radnor.

That sounds a lot. My sons school has a few optiond though. Every day there is a meal deal, its £2.75. Includes a hot main, drink and side or desert. If you want things outside of that like pizza then it works out more.
They also have a second place yo buy atreet food style stuff.
Someone on here suggested bulk buying the same drinks they have at school on amazon which is a great idea.
Have you checked the menu to see what hea buying.
Saying that, my child will get the meal deal but then get stuff at breaks as well and ends up spending at least a fiver a day and it drives me mad!

By Y8 he’s plenty old enough to understand the difference between being tight and being sensible with money because there isn’t a magic money tree. And that you don’t always get the same things as your mates. That is life.

They do have to serve a hot meal that meets various nutritional requirements (pot noodle definitely would not with the sodium rules!) but there's a la carte options at high school like pizza etc. The quality is absolutely not French level, though the range depending on where you are goes from "awful" to "quite good". It's hard to provide a meal that is both healthy AND tasty within the budget given especially as costs have skyrocketed. Some areas have rules about not selling junk food at all, but that's not a national one.

Same issue here with the nutritional requirements being the same from K-12 and high schoolers saying that the portions aren't filling enough.

We had universal free lunch for a few years, which was very nice. But I refused to pay for it if they weren't going to eat a real meal.

You may as well buy a supermarket meal deal for that price.

The school i worked at,the students could buy a grab and go,cob drink crisps etc.hardly any queue time,is there anything like that at his school? Lots of kids used to do this option,then stand in a ridiculously long queue at lunch.

Make him something 10x nicer and he won’t be embarrassed to eat it in front of his friends. Plus he’d probably have noticeably more energy and focus if it’s more nutritious than pizza and chips. Could you give him leftovers from the previous night?

Ah I see not much has changed since I left just under a decade ago! Other than the price rise.

The food was quite nice but yes to massive queues you spend your whole lunchtime waiting in and then get told off for eating in class.

He's probably exaggerating about "everyone" having the dinners just so he can eat pizza though

School food providers are profit making businesses with significant overheads. The government 'allowance' for free school meals has to be supported by those required to pay. Exactly the same as care and nursing homes etc.

IME schools struggle with the fact that the vast majority of kids want to eat crap, to put it bluntly. So pizza comes up constantly on primary & secondary school menus because take up increases very noticeably on pizza days, and good school meal take up helps schools balance the books. And at least the cohort of children who really don't eat / aren't fed at home get something.

You can get thermos bowls now so you can pack him off with pesto pasta or bolognaise interspersed with wraps/sarnies. I’d be annoyed at the lack of nutrition as well as the expense if I were in your shoes. Saying that when I lived overseas, the overachieving Mums used to get competitive and post photos of their amazing bento boxes… luckily my kids go to a school with brilliant catering and I defo don’t miss making packed lunches every day!

My daughter's last school was awful.

We had to have special permission from the head to guarantee she could have a vegetarian option! 99% of the time the only veggie option was half a cheese panini. Not even a whole one (confirmed by the school). Almost £5!

But as someone else said, the lunchbreak was so short that they didnt have time to queue and eat anyway. In her last year there she pretty much stopped eating lunch.

She wouldnt take in a packed lunch because the packed lunches had to be eaten in a special area so she couldnt sit with friends.

Her new school is slightly better. A lot is just because it's a lot smaller. Food still isnt great but it's calmer and she's eating lunch now. £4.30 for a main (pasta pot etc) and a drink. She generally gives the drink away but there isnt an option to just buy a main.

I'm sure there will be an actual meal option for less than £3 which includes a pudding but your ds is chosing the grab and go option. Check the school website

DD gave up school dinners very early on in Secondary school for this reason, and also because what was offered didn't fill her up. She took in packed lunches. At keast she could tell me that she was eating the things she liked and satisfied her hunger. A sandwich with salad and a protein inside, fruit, a packet of Walkers Baked crisps and a Penguin was typical. School dinners were a rip off, even seven years ago when we made the switch.

My daughter wouldn't have had time to have the full meal, so she ended up with a cookie and a bottle of water. Lunchtime was cut to 30 minutes by her Academy. There simply wasn't time to queue, sit down (if there was a space) eat a meal and go to the toilet (not allowed to go in lessons). It was a complete farce. It was to cut down on 'incidents' occurring at lunch times.
As for packed lunch... She wouldn't have had room for a box in the stupidly small mandatory school bag.

I feel your pain @QuietRiver

Mine always had a packed lunch. It was simply a fact that the meals offered were not of sufficient quality to justify the price.

Similar at my kids school, there is a better main meal on offer but lunchtime is only 30 mins and if they are going to manage to go to the toilet as well then they don't have time for a proper lunch. Dd takes packed lunch. DS just does double lunch, eats one at break and one at lunchtime, usually a panini or a wrap.

The problem with school lunches now is most of what you are paying isn't going on the food.

Its going on all the labour costs for it being planned, purchased, prepared & served, a technology system for parents paying and making an order. The electricity/gas costs of cooking. Its no longer done by the school, its done by external caterers so there's also their admin costs, and a layer of their profit.

Of your £3.20, only about 50p is paying for the food. Even at wholesaler prices, its not enough. My kids have packed lunches, i can provide much better food.

Yes the issue is that it's probably done by external caterers who are trying to make a profit - they obviously have to pay their staff both onsite and those who do prep work and driving offsite, rent for any off-site warehouses, kitchens etc, before they even get to the food - plus usually they provide takeaway boxes and cutlery at secondary school which obviously only costs pennies per child but it is still included in the cost you pay.

Which is not to say that the offering isn't usually poor and there's not enough time to eat a proper meal anyway, but without additional funding for school meals, unfortunately costs will likely continue to go up and these will be passed on to parents.

If you are struggling to afford it and can do packed lunches much more cheaply then you do need to have a serious conversation with your son about this - at 12/13 he is old enough to understand this.

My son is Year 10, he takes a packed lunch every day and I just make sure he has a small amount of money on his account, so he can buy something extra. I would tell your son that for what you're paying, the fact he's coming home hungry, and the fact they're not good, school lunches are clearly not working. It's an added unnecessary cost per month, where the money can be used for other things.

I resent having to pay around £3:50 per day for a load of junk that doesn't leave my son satisfied. Thermos bowls are a great investment, especially at this time of year. I tend to cook more than enough the night before then reheat in the morning. Chilli, Bolognese, soup etc with some healthy snacks and fruit is much more nutritious and satiating.

Makes me laugh how policed parents are about their child's lunch box at primary school and then when they get to secondary school theres nothing but shit on offer