Less pupils eating school dinners

[speedymama]

Fewer pupils eat school dinners since the healthier meals campaign started, according to this news report here .

I thought these comments were quite telling:

Irene Carroll, national chairman of the Local Authority Caterers Association, said a key problem was that children were not being given healthy food by their parents.

Mrs Carroll added that another issue affecting school dinner take up was shorter lunch breaks which give pupils no time to eat full meals.

"Lunch time periods now are so short," she said.

"Ideally we would look to give them a plated meal and pudding. But they have got 30 minutes and in many cases they've got 25 minutes.

"And the only child getting 25 minutes to eat is the first one in the queue."

When my DTS start school, I would like them to have school meals. If the meals have improved, why do so many children have packed lunches - doesn't that just make more work for the parents?

I really don't understand the issue at all! I'm from Aus, and there is no such thing as a school lunch. everyone brings packed lunch or buys lunch (a sandwich or similar) from the canteen and then all eat together in the playground.
No problems there apart from stupid parents (global phenomenon).
Why do kids need 2 cooked meals a day!?

In the UK cooked meals were introduced at state schools because for many children this was the only proper meal they had each day. Similarly that's why every child was given a drink of milk in the morning (don't let this turn the thread into a Thatcher-rant). There used to be a serious problem with child poverty and consequent malnutrition in the UK...and it looks like we're headed that way again.

Part of the reason that some schools have cut down on lunch times is due to declining standards of behaviour in the afternoon. As some people have posted, this may be due to poor nurition.

One school in the lea that I work in closes immediatly after lunch....there are no klessons after lunch, this is because most of the children went off site at lunch and simply never returned

Where I work we have a 45 minute lunch, the hot food is excellent 3/4 options daily which are good standard. We also have a salad bar/asnadwitch bar, which is excellent. There s no reason for a child not to have good food where I work.

However you still see kids with shite lunch boxes, earlier this week I cloked a good one. Three chocolate bars, two packets of crisps and a friut shoot!

SweetyDarling - not all children get a cooked meal at home after school.

The BBC report headline seems highly misleading when you read the whole article, though. Overall, the decline in take-up of school dinners is only 5.8%, and of the schools surveyed by the BBC, many said the decline was to do with the lack of vending machines and the extended warm weather.

So hardly 'the Diners are revolting!'.

I think that it will take time for the reeducation to filter through to the older age groups. Good habits take a while to establish but as the primary children move up they will come to appreciate and accept it more readily. Also there is always going to be a proportion of parents who will stamp their feet and not want to be "dictated" to in this way and their kids will follow in rejecting anything new on principle. Do you still get free school meals on IS or do families get that funding another way now ?

I do think it is a shame that cooking no longer features in the curriculum, and we are doing our kids no favours by not showing them how to create tasty , quick meals from scratch. It should be part of PSHE surely ?

Prettycandles, school dinners were first introduced approx 100 years ago! But for more pressing reasons I think. Malnutrition of a different kind I think.

Where I live children are still offered milk and a piece of fruit every day. When my mum was at primary school in the 1940s they were given milk, cod liver oil and orange juice (not fresh) every day!