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?

I’d do packed lunch because I would have wanted my dc to be eating such crap. Pizza and biscuits for school lunch.Just awful.

I gave mine an allowance at that age and told them they could have 1 school dinner a week and then make themselves pack lunches the rest of the week. If they bought school dinners on the other days I would reduce their allowance by that amount.
It worked well and they all stuck to making their pack lunches.
It was too expensive with three of them otherwise.

They were always hungry all the time though no matter what they ate at lunch!

My 15 year old daughter does a mix of school lunch & packed... I get really nice baguettes & make subway style sandwiches, get crisps & things she likes as sides or i do her things like (vegetarian)sushi which is her favorite or she also likes pasta salad to take .. if you make the lunch look really good he won't actually mind, I do spend alot on their lunches though but I have 3 to make lunches for .. I don't know that it would actually save me that much if they all had school lunches ... my younger 2 definitely don't want any hot lunches unless it's from home in a thermos 🤣 x

Even my 3 year old won't eat the school hot lunches, he asked if he could try them so naturally I signed him up because packed lunches are faff. We got 3 weeks before he went rogue at lunchtime and tried to steal his sister's (7) flask full of homemade spaghetti Bolognese when he was served a plate of school spaghetti Bolognese. 😂