What is your school doing about school dinners?

[SchoolDinners]

If your child is attending school tomorrow is the school providing a school dinner or have they asked that your child takes in a packed lunch?

Bump

So the reason I'm asking is because my local primary school is insisting the kitchen staff still go in to provide hot meals for the pupils.

There were 21 children in today, 5 of them brought a packed lunch. There are normally approximately 700 pupils at this school.

There were 3 kitchen staff providing a full menu.

This just seems daft and unnecessary. All children can be asked to bring in packed lunch, or if they are FSM a packed lunch could be provided. This is what the local secondary school is doing.

We asked children to bring in a packed lunch. Our school made packed lunches for FSM children and we delivered them to the doorstep of those self-isolating. Seems ridiculous to have the whole kitchen open for a handful of children.

Thank you for replying mamaduckbone.

What you're doing at your school makes much more sense.

There was hot dinners at ours. I offered to do a packed lunch but was told it wasn’t necessary

SugarSugarShimmy do you know how many children were at the school today?

I just thought the whole point of shutting the schools was so that less people were coming in contact with each other. The 3 kitchen staff had to prepare and serve the meals, so were definitely coming into contact with the children.

I think that after this week, when schools can better predict the number of pupils they can expect to receive each day, meal arrangements will change and there will just be one person coming in to prepare sandwiches or a one-option hot meal like jacket potato and filling. Today so many schools were unclear what their likely attendance was going to be and will have prepared accordingly.

My local primary schools are just doing a sandwich lunch for those who attend and for FSM pupils to come and collect. The latter isn’t ideal but unfortunately they’re aware that if they just issued supermarket vouchers, some parents would trade or sell them rather than use them to provide food for the family.

Full meal with vegetarian option for FSM children attending, packed lunch for others, staff only coming in for lunch instead of 3 in from 6am for breakfast and breaktime.

Vouchers worth 12 school meals per child issued by email or text for FSM children not attending, redeemable in Sainsbury's. Morrison's or Tesco's. The majority of students live nearest to large branches of Waitrose. But I suppose they didn't want to get involved. No way did they want kids coming from five miles away for lunch and then going home again.

10 in school, hot meal still provided, not sure how many had it. Sent both mine with a packed lunch to take a bit of pressure off. They did packed lunches for parents to pick up - those who usually get a free school meal.

MitziK apologies if I've misunderstood, are you saying that only the FSM children were allowed a hot meal?

Part of the information gathering when getting notifications from keyworkers/vulnerable children for places was whether or not they wanted a school meal or to bring a packed lunch.

The catering ensures that all the FSM children, whether or not they manage to bring a packed lunch on the day or not, have access to food; there will be enough for kids who forget or have run out of bread, as the kitchen has huge freezers and fridges still full of ingredients (everything is cooked on site and when this started after half term, the manager made a point of getting extra in each week in case something happened) but in all honesty, there are enough financially secure families that if they've informed us they will be bringing packed lunch, they have sufficient food in the house to do it.

@SchoolDinners i think about 30