Guest post: 'Offering every infant child a healthy school meal has just become a reality'

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With school cooks, head teachers and caterers gathered in Whitehall to celebrate the launch of 'Universal Free School Meals' last night, the deputy prime minister pointed out in his speech of thanks, that we don't need university based studies and hoards of scientists telling us what we intuitively know - that school children work better in the afternoon with a healthy, balanced lunch in their tummies versus a jam sandwich and sugary drink.

But the good thing about the free school meals is that, actually, we do have the research to prove just that, in the form of a pilot study carried out in Durham and Newham between 2009 and 2011.

It showed that children who were given healthy, free school lunches were two months ahead academically compared with their contemporaries, as well as revealing an almost 25% increase in vegetables being eaten, an 18% reduction in crisps and a fall in consumption of sugary drinks.

The lunches also led to children eating together. Socialising around the lunch table. Trying new foods. Experiencing new tastes. Having a go with new textures.

Universal free school meals for primary school children were a key recommendation in the independently produced School Food Plan, published by Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent in July last year.

To the astonishment of most people in the ‘business’ of delivering school dinners - from the civil servants to the school cooks, the local authorities to the head teachers - together they have virtually pulled off this vision for children from reception through to the end of year two.

However, many questions have been raised. Questions like ‘why stop at year 2?’, ‘how do we know standards will be kept up?’, and 'what about the hundreds of schools who haven't been able to get the service up and running?’ In spite of much-hyped horror stories of teachers trekking to the local pub to buy in sandwiches, the vast majority of schools are on board and able to offer free school meals, and for those who are struggling, a further £150m and a dedicated support service has been set up to offer advice and help to make the grade.

And now that the majority have signed up, the task is to maintain standards. How do we stop schools going off-piste? This will partly be down to parent-power, but from January, school cooks will be preparing lunches to comply with food-based regulations such as limiting fried foods and pastry-based foods to twice a week and using low fat milk.

These food-based regulations are much easier for cooks and parents to understand. If, as a parent, you look at the school lunch menu and think ‘hang on, there are more chips and chocolate sponge pudding on the menu than there should be’, then you can go to your school and lobby to get things on track.

People have questioned why parents who can afford to pay for school lunches should benefit - isn't it a waste of money? I don't think so. Beyond the fact that parents who are struggling will no longer be landed with a £400 bill every year, the scheme means that everyone - whether their parents could afford that bill or not - is eating and enjoying food together.

A friend of mine's little girls tried school lunches for the first month in reception last year. A combination of being frightened by the size and system in the dining room - as lots of reception children are - and her best friend having sandwiches in another part of the hall meant she was crying into a jacket potato most days, eating virtually nothing and falling out of school at 3.20pm white as a sheet and with her concentration levels long since blown to smithereens.

Now, her best friend is having the free school lunch, which in turn has given my friend's daughter the confidence to have them too. This is great for her, but also good for the school lunch system - now she's in it, she’s likely to stay in it, and be a crucial ‘customer’ to the end of her school years.

The bottom line is this: we know that a healthy school lunch can improve a child’s academic performance - and we also know that, according to research, only 1% of packed lunches meet the nutritional guidelines that currently apply to school foods. Having everyone eat together can also help embed social skills around the dining table. The goal to offer every infant child a healthy, tasty school meal has just become a reality, and surely this should be celebrated.

'independently produced School Food Plan, published by Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent'

That Henry Dimbleby who runs a fast food chain? Yup, that sounds totally legit...can't see any motivation for him to recommend schools buying in catered meals .

I'd also like to see some evidence for the claim that 'only 1% of packed lunches meet the nutritional guidelines that currently apply to school foods'.

For a start, I'd like some recognition that ensuring that a menu meets 'nutritional guidelines' is not quite the same thing as ensuring the meal on the plate meets them. So far, my dd2 has been served one meal out of three that matched the menu.

I'd also like some research into typical wastage - what proportion of the food on that plate gets eaten, & what goes in the bin?

I'd also like some research into typical wastage - what proportion of the food on that plate gets eaten, & what goes in the bin?

Judging by the size of the slops bin-a lot!

Agree with what others have said. Our dinners this week have been far from healthy, and now the kids are offered squash and milkshake to drink instead of the water previously. Ridiculous...

I'll pass! Apart from the fact I don't want my children eating low fat mass produced low budget crap, my oldest DD is coeliac and DD2 is likely to be.
Last time I enquired about gluten free school dinners I was laughed out of the school office!

I agree on the milk issue - lots of new evidence around that low-fat milk is not very good for you. Mine all have full-fat milk (and none are overweight by the way).

On the packed lunch issue - the blog poster does make a generalisation about packed lunches and I know many parents do send their children in with fantastic healthy lunches. However in my child's school the packed lunches are not always good. Yes there are many who will pack fruit, vegetables, water to drink etc but there are also many parents who send children in with chocolate spread white bread sandwiches, fizzy drinks, sweets, even though they are not supposed to.

On school trips I have seen some really bizarre lunches..... like a cold mcdonalds burger .... I have seen teachers give a child (who usually had school dinners) a spare school-provided packed lunch, or even food from their own lunch, because the packed lunch the child had been given from home was so poor.

Of course the school does give feedback to parents whose have inappropriate items in their packed lunch but this doesn't always get taken notice of.

School dinners are not always perfect - I have complained about my child's school meals at times. It is all cooked in-school but portions sizes not always big enough. When the Head got a number of complaints she met the meals company and asked them to improve.

I am guessing that the parents who are very indignant about their packed lunches being criticised probably have schools with a more wealthier intake where parents understand and care enough to provide a well-balanced meal. This is not the case in all schools unfortunately. My children's school is in London and has a very mixed intake from various backgrounds/classes/cultures.

For this same reason our Headteacher wisely instigated a donation-only breakfast club to help those children who come to school on an empty stomach. The majority of families will pay for their breakfast, but for those children who are left at the school gate with no breakfast and no money at least they don't have to start the day hungry.

Please do think of the children in our society who unfortunately don't have the caring, nurturing parents like all of you...

It's for exactly that reason many object to this policy donteattheplaydough kids like mine are now eating a free - But worse - lunch, while children who really need it in older age groups get nothing. Higher limits for the usual income related fsm system would be much better.

It also hides pupil premium for families on low incomes - those with children going into reception who would have applied for fsm for their child, don't, because they know their child will get a meal anyway. In the meantime the school has missed out on a chance to take note of which students might need additional input AND the extra money/pupil premium £££ that comes attached to each child.

It's another policy that superficially looks good but actually makes life worse for poor families.

I would love someone to come and analyse exactly how healthy the food served up at ds2's school is.

There is no kitchen so it is made off site by a catering company and then delivered to school. But it is delivered soon after 9.30am and sits there in a hot box stewing away until it is served at some point between 12:00 and 13:00 depending on which lunch sitting your child is in.

I would love Nick Clegg and his advisers on this to have to choke down eat one of these school meals and then see what they think of their policy. DS2 at nursery used to wolf up their home made meals and regularly had seconds and thirds. There was the odd thing he didn't like and very occasionally he would be 'off his food' - which usually coincided with him coming down with a nasty bug very soon afterwards. Since having school food, there are lots of foods that he used to like that he now is adamant that he doesn't like as he has had them at school - and it's getting harder and harder to get him to try things that he used to like at home again.

I happened to be in school last year at lunch time one day when they were serving up pizza. It was thick, doughy, soggy on the bottom and burnt on the top and had been kept hot for at least 3 hours (and who knows at what time it had set off from the factory it was made at). There was minimal cheese on it, so very little protein in it. I'm not against pizza in general - homemade it can be a great way to get lots of cheese and tomato into children, as well as loads of other toppings plus a great mechanism to get them to try new things that are popped on top along with other stuff they like. But when something that should be so simple for them to serve up well is served up so badly it really makes you worried about everything else they serve up.

As I said, I would love to see what would happen if they served this food up in the House of Commons canteen - compulsorily - for a week and see how the MPs felt at the end of it. I really do think they are all congratulating themselves for a job well done and are sitting there imagining that all children are getting delicious hot meals (probably along the lines of the exemplary ones that are found in some places and no doubt used to showcase how it could be done) instead of realising that many children are eating food that is only really fit for the slops bin.

The school would love to have a kitchen - they've looked into it and even discovered they could get a grant of about £17,000 to pay for it. Except when they last looked into it about 5 years ago, it was going to cost them £170,000 to get one built on. Plus the school hall needs to be enlarged which would cost a similar amount - money which they just don't have and don't have any way of raising.

Additionally, the free school meals are having a much wider knock on effect on the school - as it was built for about 160 kids but there are now about 300 there - it means that it takes significantly longer for lunch to be served and will need 3 sittings instead of 2, which means the hall is not available for as much time as it used to be for games lessons, practising the nativity play, rehearsing instruments, doing write draw workshops and more. This in turn is impacting on what the children are able to do at school - not in a positive manner.

There's a thread on here at the moment where the mum is upset because the school doesn't have a kitchen so they have said that this term they will be getting the local sandwich shop to provide a lunch box instead. Each child can choose from either a ham sandwich or a cheese sandwich and then they get a piece of fruit and a drink of water. Nothing else in the sandwich, no yogurt or hummus or pasta salad or cucumber sticks or even cake to keep the kids going through the afternoon. There's a good chance the ham and cheese will be highly processed, the bread too. And the thought of having that every day for the entire term (and if you can't eat ham or dairy then you don't get any choice, you'll have the same every day; if you can't eat either then you're going to go hungry as they are not allowed to take their own lunch in) - well you'd be hard pressed to say the school are providing a meal, let alone one that is healthy and tasty.

For many schools, the job now isn't to maintain standards - it's to raise them to be baseline acceptable which they currently are not.

I think this is another instance where there were good intentions when they created the policy - but the reality on the ground for many children who will get these meals is not a healthy tasty meal. However, because of the way the feedback forms are structured, the fact that they provided something hot, that was nutritionally OK when sent out from the factory at 8am, well they will be able to tick the box and say that it was fine.

And I'm damn sure that they won't have got the caterers that provide the horrible cheap factory food type of school lunch to have catered for the launch do in Whitehall last night, nor will they have left it all sweltering in a hot box for several hours before serving it up to the guests!

And of course there's all the evidence that the original guy who declared that saturated fat was unhealthy ignored the evidence that didn't fit his hypothesis and that actually his advice has caused the obsesity crisis he was hoping to remove...
www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-science-of-saturated-fat-a-big-fat-surprise-about-nutrition-9692121.html

In which case these meals aren't going to be very healthy at all - there's already a problem at lots of schools where they try to teach children about healthy eating as if they were adults on weight watchers diets, rather than children that need to eat more fat and protein!

Not available in Scotland yet coming soon in January I think, but could all of you please look at the vegetarian meal options at your school. Here the options are appalling, salad, jacket potato, cheese sandwich, omelette and an odd stir fry, curry or bake once in a blue moon.
Very lacking in protein, variety or excitement and the pudding is usually a yoghurt. This needed addressing before the free school meals were provided. The dinner lady at our school is super but very tied by local authority standards.

I don't think it matters how God or bad a packed lunch or hot meal is when half comes home/gets left because there wasn't time to eat it and your kid had to leg it back to class.

social aspect? My arse.

Good

I was really I about the little girl crying into her jacket potato because she couldn't sit with her friend who has packed lunch!

Rather than implementing a countrywide initiative to supply every child with sub standard food, perhaps they could just let her sit with her friend?

Have you actually seen the menus? Lots of crap. Almost all items are white highly processed white wheat, processed protein, sugar and fat. Empty calories.

Ours is supposedly a top provider yet there is no whole grain at all, no alternative grains (rice etc) and no processed protein. There's an unhealthy pudding every day.

No unprocessed protein that meant to say

Even the healthy school yogurts are sugar filled.

My boys lunches included
tuna sandwich in whole grain
An apple
Chopped veg sticks
Small amount of Homous to dip
Some nuts
A few dried apricots as a treat
Water

DD is at a school where school meals were made compulsory a couple of years ago. It's a private school, so they can do that, and charge £3.50 a day for meals. DD is vegetarian but hates cheese. Almost every day the vegetarian option is covered in melted cheese, so she has a plain baked potato and a few bits of salad, plus pudding. No protein, very little nutritional value at all.

She ate a much healthier, more nutritionally balanced meal when she took in a packed lunch full of foods I knew she liked (often Japanese-style bento with rice, tofu, vegetables etc). She also complains that the vegetables at school are overcooked and tasteless, the carrots are spongy (I guess frozen - she is used to fresh, lightly steamed veg at home), the rice is dry and so on. And that is at a school with an in-house kitchen and a decent budget. The meals at her previous state primary were much worse.

There seems to be a lot of self-congratulation around without much foundation, I think.

This post was written by a civil servant on behalf of a politician wo has a vested interest in helping his mates make a profit from privatised food in schools, and the more people who opt in, or now are forced to opt in , the better.

News flash to Whitehall: Mumsnet members are more media savvy than you think, and also have their own vested interests - children - and they mean that we won't swallow your bullshit paid-for words, or allow you to feed our children your crappy food.

& even assuming the quality of provision wasn't so poor, the humkan variables are why the 'economies of scale' & 'lovely social interaction' arguments fall down, of course.

Some vegetarians don't eat cheese. Some children who'd love fruit salad are allergic to pineapple. Some children hate their veg cooked.

It'd be just as egalitarian to make everybody on this thread a free size 16 pair of jeans, but it's a big leap from that to assume that everyone's bottom would be better clad as a result...

Thisbitch - the guest post was written by Amanda Ursell - a nutritionist and journalist. It doesn't show up when I look at the thread on my phone, but does on my tablet. I'm not sure what her motivation is for writing it or whether she intends to come back to discuss it.

Yes she doesn't seem to want to discuss it. On the off chance she returns I want her to note that our menu by a supposed top company revolves around -

• White highly processed refined wheat as the substantial back bone of every meal offered (be it a sandwich or macaroni served with garlic bread all topped off with some cheap shit sponge pudding).

• the fish and meat are processed. They tend to be nuggets and other crap.

• there are daily unhealthy puddings and even the supposed healthy puddings have sugar.

• the providers are fulfilling the dietary requirements set out by the government and so consider themselves to be providing healthy food. Providers and schools are inflexible and refuse to offer proper healthy options.

There is little quality protein on offer because its cheaper for the providers to heavily bulk the meals up with cheap crap white wheat

There is no use of other grains. And the main alternative carb to cheap white wheat is oven chips.

Even my kids laugh at how unhealthy the meals are. They would really like to eat them but they understand why they can only have them very rarely as a treat.

It would have been much better to provide proper healthy food and really reeducate kids about what they are eating

Or provide proper healthy meals for the poorest families and implement strict guidelines in schools about packed lunches.

With school lunches ban crisps, chocolate, biscuits, fruit bars, fizzy drinks, crap fillings. Directly request parents pack fruit/veg, whole grain, some protein (cheese fish egg peanuts meat)

Nuts not peanuts

I would like theopto answer just how social and useful it is when there's an hour to feed four hundred children and give time for a play/run around.

Is telepathy going to become part of curriculum so they can talk while shovelling in food like the Simpson?