Horrified by school dinners!

[WillieverlearnQ]

I went to my daughter’s school yesterday for dinner with the parents. All they had was two scoops of mash (my daughter did say that it is usually just one scoop) the thinnest slice of turkey I have ever seen and a tablespoon of carrots with a drizzle of watery gravy. With a tiny pot of ice cream. When I was at school it was nothing like this.

She has been asking for packed lunches for a long time but I’ve always refused. But today and going forward I will always make her a proper lunch.

It just make’s you question what on earth is going on? How can that be a sufficient for a child at school for 6 hours. Also why on earth are parents paying £3 for such a terrible meal.

Why would they need more than that? It's lunch.

1944 school meals by law had to meet high nutrional standards, under the Education Act. This requirement was watered down by the 1980 Education Act, and has been reduced further and further by successive governments.

I never had school meals. We all had packed lunch’s for primary and secondary. There was 4 of us so my parents couldn't afford it.

son always had packed lunches until he left mainstream; then he had funded school meals; but it was a private school and they were nice.

stepdaughter has coeliacs and did have school dinners last year, but she ended up having the same thing over and over again, so ended up having packed lunches again.

it’s not a fine dining thing 😂😂

Primary school children eat breakfast, snack, this sized lunch and then snack when they get home. Plenty of food.
Just wait till they are at high school and all that is on offer is bacon butties, sausage rolls and pizza slices.

When I was at school portions were massive and obesity was not around. Proper cooked meals so children did not need to snack and eat junk inbetween meals.

Not true I’m afraid. My primary school in the 1960s meals were cooked in a care home a couple of streets away and wheeled to our school on barrows so they were stone cold when they reached us.

The primary school I work in cooks everything from scratch on site and because it’s in a London borough it’s all free.

Ah I remember. Frogspawn, semolina and teaspoon of jam, watery rice pudding which I used to smear round my bowl to make it look as if I’d eaten it, watery stew, spam fritters and lumpy mash, vegetables were only carrots and peas. It’s amazing we weren’t starving but then this was the 50s and rationing had just ended.

Sounds like we went to the same school.

There are food standards updated and published this year. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-food-standards-resources-for-schools

But they weren't nice, were they? Or healthy.
Liver and onions.
Salad, if you were lucky to have one, would only be a tiny side salad, tired lettuce, one tiny slice of tomato and same of cucumber.
Pudding every day and you could turn your bowl around and the custard wouldn't budge.

Those meals look absolutely fine - perhaps particularly active children in the top couple of years might want more but surely that is when they go up to get seconds? That’s what happened at both of my son’s primary schools - if a child was still hungry they were allowed seconds of the main course but not of pudding. If there was nothing left for seconds then they could have salad or bread and butter.

I think reasonable portion sizes have been lost sight of - my boys are very very active and both in secondary years now so they do eat more but at primary ages those meals would have been plenty, especially in addition to fruit and milk at morning playtime. It’s only to last them until 3pm after all. I always just took a healthy snack to pick up at 3, that they could eat on the 20 minute drive home.

Yes, but in the old days the emphasis was on children getting enough calories and now we have the opposite problem.

I was nodding along until you said 50s. I was at primary school in the 80s and it was very similar.

It's school 'dinner' i.e. supposed to be the main meal of the day.
Having said that, it's not clear to me that that is not enough food for a seven year old as I don't have one.

Assuming this is primary school Ilthese look ok to me. They shouldn't be having adult sized portions. Think lots of people have forgotten what actual healthy portions are.

Whoops I made the same mistake, I had that slop in the 70’s.

I worked for the company that delivered the food for school meals and took the orders from the cook. 3 years back I was told that each child has a costing of 73 pence so paying £3 for a meal speaks for itself.
I know they used to rinse tins of beans to use in chilli con carne as they couldn’t afford the others in the budget.
the other problem is the kitchen staff are told what to cook, so whereas years ago the cook had control they now have none

The worst "school dinner" that I ever saw was pasta... in gravy... and some of the children were eating it with their fingers!

School dinners are far from fine dining, and it doesn't even get cooked on site for a lot of schools.

At secondary school my Mid teen DD often has a packet of the 'healthy' popcorn for lunch as the offerings are all terrible apparently. And yes, have tried packed lunch but she doesn't want it.

You get better in prison

Have you ever been in, let alone eaten in, a prison, OP?

Criticise the nutritional value, cost and/or portion size against government requirements for school meals by all means, but don’t make wildly irrelevant comparisons to the food you’ve probably never seen (and which should probably be of similar quality but bigger portions given its government funded food for adults…)

my daughters school had a lunch taster day for parents. The food was delicious!
I check the menu weekly and the options look great. An example is on Monday it was lentil curry with rice and a samosa. On Tuesdays roast chicken with potatoes and carrots and peas. Desserts are things like ice cream, crackers and cheese, treacle pudding, jelly and fruit etc.

School dinners, school dinners,
Concrete chips, concrete chips,
Soggy semolina, soggy semolina.
I feel sick. Bathroom quick.

seeing that photo of a school ‘roast dinner’ has literally bought the taste back in my mouth🤢

I work in a school…. The school dinners are awful. Small portions - at times we take the Meals back if really small and ask for a better portion. They taste awful, just no Flavour. The puddings are the worst. Portion sizes are not consistent.
We take pictures and inform the head or deputy head when it’s really bad.

My youngest is year 6 and I will not pay for school dinners, with the exception of Xmas dinner day when she asks for it.

I don’t think a lot of parents realise just how bad school dinners are.

School dinners vary a lot from school to school. However I think one has to bear in mind that they're meant to keep pupils going and aren't intended to be a substantial meal.