WHAT??? Banning Packed Lunches!

[MojitoMagnet]

So apparently Packed Lunches are likely to be banned!

guardian article

I suspect the main reason is to drive down the cost-per-meal for school dinners. The idea that anyone should be able to dictate what my child eats is so repugnant I'm lost for words. By all means give schools the power to intervene if a particular child is regularly sent to school with a bag of crisps and a mars bar, but taking the choice away from everyone else is ridiculous!

Something that may have been overlooked in the (justified) outrage is that they are providing a lot of money to give breakfast to those children who come to school unfed.

That is a good thing I think.

Another link for you: www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23270715

1. Whatever they feed in our school, my kids won't eat even if it cooked properly from quality ingredients. They don't like anything sloppy-mashy-mixed. So all these lasagnas, bologneses, pizzas, beans from the can, ashed potatoes, greasy sauces are off.
2. All we have on the menu could be cooked badly but cheep. Parents never have a chance to try school meal. It rise the question: is it a good quality food?!?
3. Price is the same for 4 yer old 10 year old. What's the odds that school won't "redistribute" food between age groups and I will and up paying for some older child?!? Kids will not say anything, especially if they don't like the food.

It would cost me £50 per week for my 4 DC to have school dinners at the moment.
Their pack lunches for the whole week cost between £10-12.
On the odd occasions that they do have school dinners they come home still hungry and end up having another cooked meal in the evening.
At least with packed lunches I can put in healthy food that they like.
School dinners at their schools only have a choice of two meals so you are a bit stuffed if you don't like either choice.

Easterholiday how do you ensure that the quality goes up when the uptake goes up and the cost goes down? Who checks it? Surely the incentive for a shareholder-funded company is to keep profits constant or improve them? Where would the incentive be to improve quality if school meals were mandatory?

read the report - the numbers suggest that at 50% take up of school meals, the purchasing power significantly improves and therefore local authorities get cheaper access to better product. Not sure where on earth shareholder funded companies come into it.

My kids school has its own kitchen so everything is made fresh on site. The food is pretty good (they have come dine with me days each week, so I have been and tried it). It costs £1.80 per day.

Making it compulsory - never going to happen.

Parents would totally resist.

YY to whoever said it is to distract people from the dismantling of the education system

As I said earlier- my school's meals are now supplied by a large private conglomerate company. The quality is markedly lower but they won the contract because the LA doesn't have to pay them as much as the previous suppliers.

Saying that quality will go up presumes that everyone has the quality of the food as their primary concern. That councils will use their purchasing power to buy better food, even if it is more expensive, instead of appointing the cheapest supplier and making a surplus. That companies like the one I refer to will decline to use meat from battery chickens, even if it would increase their profits. I don't believe that's the case.

Yes, many kids do take loads of processed crap to school, but I don't like the idea that no parent could be trusted to adequately feed their child.

Both of my boys have ASD. I've tried one of them on school meals, several times, even when they were free, and went back to packed lunches. He struggled to find enough food that he liked (the menus were very red meat and potatoes based - he will eat neither) and often spent a hungry afternoon in a state of meltdown. The poor quality of the veg put him off a lot of veg that he likes, too, and it's taken me over a year to get him to the point of trusting those foods again. DS2 has quite severe sensory based restrictions to what he will eat and there's only a couple of days a week when we could cobble together a meal from the menu that he would even try to eat - and it would be even less healthy than the admittedly beige packed lunch I send him in with.

I love the idea not having to pack lunch for my dcs everyday providing the meals are free and my dcs will ate the meals. I used to pay for school dinners for my dc1 as I want her to have a proper cooked lunch every day until I realised she did not eat most of the food because she never like the veg and the meat. So I started giving pack lunch so I can monitor her diet. But I don?t see that many fat kids in our school. Majority of the children in our school are well in proportion. May be it is more an issue in some areas than others.
However the main problem I have is forcing parents to pay for school dinners. If the government want every child to have school dinner then give it out free to everyone.

again, it's a question of reading the recommendations - they do cover quality control and independent auditing (funding already earmarked for that) as well as provision of free / subsidised meals at least for primary school level plus cooking lessons on the antional curriculum, and funding for improvement of infrastructure so schools have the capability to provide all those sit down meals, with teachers eating with the children.

Easter But in their own business, Leon, they spectacularly refuse to cater for vegans and vegetarians. This is an appalling signal for their likely impact on, and attitude towards, school dinners.

Also they seem in thrall to CAKE.

I think they're smart enough to draw a distinction between consumer demand in their own restaurant business (more cake eaters than vegans, no surprise) & putting together recommendations for a wholly different catering model. In fact i know they are, because I know them both. and "spectacularly refuse to cater for" vegetarians? have you actually been in one? even their signature dish is a veggie one...

Afaik Swedish school still do not have packed lunches. But then:

a) school meals are paid for by the LEA

b) school meals are healthy: plenty of veg, no chips, no chicken nuggets, no burgers, pudding only very rarely

I think you'd have a job enforcing b) without a).

It's funny how much more likely parents are to take a hard line about their children's fussiness if it means the difference between getting something for free or not.

What are the dinners like at your DCs' school EasterHoliday?

I have read the summary of the Plan. I might get around to reading the full thing later. But I don't understand what 'standards' and 'audit' would mean in practice. A new body of school dinner inspectors? Sounds expensive. Perhaps if the teachers ate the same food as the pupils, that might have a quality control aspect. But at DD's school, they don't eat together. And I can't imagine that the plan is to make school dinners mandatory for the teachers, too.

Well, if the idea is for all the kids to have nutritious meals, then they need to stop serving such nasty glop, and give kids two large spoonfuls of custard, or just extra white bread, to ensure they dont go hungry!

Easter I see they are your friends. This of course explains a lot. The only Vegan options on their menu are a limited addition curry, and pea salad. Also chips and popcorn but that's hardly a meal. Neither frankly is pea salad. And many people don't like curry. There is not one vegetarian or vegan option on their kids menu. Not ONE. That is a particularly spectacular FAIL in my book, love. And it appears I am more familiar with their menu than you if you don't realise this spectacular fail, even though they don't want me to eat in there (I often pick up a bag of proper corn from there at lunchtime though. And a drink. Since it;s close. They don't have soya milk though (that might just be the one near my office)).

There are fewer vegetarians and vegans in schools than meat eaters too. If they don't give a toss about us in their own restaurants (when there is money to be made, for them) why would I expect them to give a toss about our kids? They have already proved they are just a couple of idiots. The one who was talking on R5 this morning did nothing to dispel that view, incidentally. Nothing at all.

I salute Basil for her posts on this thread.

I went to a comp with poor school dinners. Price (and there were 3 of us) and lack of quality meant we never had them, plus my parents wanted to have a home-made cooked meal as a family in the evening, which meant we didn't also need a cooked lunch. School dinners were full of cheap ingredients my mother didn't want us to eat, plus as a bi-racial family we had a completely different food culture that school dinners did not reflect. We packed up modest lunches of homemade bread sandwiches and fruit.

When my DS starts school he will be having school dinners. He is a cussedly awkward eater at home, eats better when he is with his peer group and most importantly, school dinners have greatly improved since my day, at his school at least. It's a multi-cultural intake which the menu reflects.

Neither choice is wrong, they are just things that only parents can and should decide for their children. If we move to the French system of spending a fortune on school food free for each child and making a much better go of it, I might change my mind, but not otherwise.

I find it interesting that our 'small government, individual choice' Tory-led coalition is being so doctrinaire about this.

Not read the rest of this thread but as a visiting teacher I go into a lot of schools and I can tell you there are very few where I would be willing to pay for the school dinners!

It's compulsory school meals and they're very good. We're lucky. Mine have tried things they've never had before and have discoverd they like them - being hungry & an element of compulsion has certainly broadened their food horizons, though the baked potato / cheese / beans option seems boringly relied on for veggies (mine are not, but they love a baked potato). Staff eat with the children, one on each table for reception. The menus are made available in advance.
There is a breakfast club, but it does look like a carb fest of cereal and toast.

ye gods russian, you do realise they've been commissioned to provide a report and recommendations, and not for Leon to take over school catering on a mass scale don't you? and sorry to burst your bubble, but vegan eating isn't a significant money spinner & therefore priority for any fast food restaurant chain.

missbopeep criticising a child's packed lunch for including ham, cheese and yoghurt? What do you seriously propose we put in them? There is a balance of nutrition, cost, convenience, and what the child is likely to eat in the space of time they have.

Easter their atitude towards choice and diversity is clearly that it has no place in the world they want to see. This was reflected in the comments on the radio this morning. Since they are happy to go on the radio criticising parents I'm happy to go on MN and criticise them.

I can see why, if you are lucky enough to consider your childrens' compulsory school meals to be good, you might think it a good idea for other schools. But I'm not sure this can be generalised. There are plenty of other factors involved.

I love the idea of all children eating high quality meals in a convivial dining hall atmosphere. But that is very far from my own experience and I don't see how making hot meals compulsory provides the mechanism to close the gap.

Our school has a brilliant system where all the children bring a menu home each week for the following week. There are 2 choices for main, 2 puds (fresh fruit always one of the options) and two vegetarian options, plus sandwiches or baked potatoe.
You can tick whichever days you want, and whichever choices you want and return it by Thursday so the cook has time to order all the ingredients for the quantity of portions each day. The cost of printing the menus is far outweighed by the savings in food waste.

This enables the school to budget very well on quite precise quantities. There is hardly any waste - often at the 2nd sitting (older kids) the cook will shout out does anyone want seconds, and even packed lunch kids are allowed to rush up and get some if they want. They would rather do this than chuck it. There is a little bit of leeway in portions in case a child forgets their packed lunch etc.

I think this is such a good system and the food is really good , so to support it my kids have school dinners 2 days a week which they choose themselves off the menu and the other 3 days they have a packed lunch. Which I have costed out many times and (I'm not going to list it all here) I KNOW I put together for about £1.50 per day for 2 children. Sometimes less. If I am making pizza I just save a bit and they have that cold the next day. Last week I did rhubarb crumble and custard on sunday, they had a portion cold in their little tubs the next day and love it.

Packed lunches costs the same or only slightly less than a school dinner if you put in all the packaged stuff like walkers crisps, cheese strings, branded yoghurt, cartons of juice etc. We have pots that I put a few lidl crisps or pringles in, a piece of homemade cake, or some yogurt from a big tub, and butchers ham off the bone on to one of lidl's lovely breadbuns. Drink is vimto squash, a £1 bottle lasts ages if you don't make it strong.