Free school meals - what's happening at your school?

[KatieMumsnet]

Hi there

The BBC is reporting the challenges many schools are facing in the run up to introducing free school meals for infants (in England).

Nearly three thousand schools will have to improve their kitchens, while 1,700 schools currently have no kitchens at all.

We at MNHQ were just wondering what is happening at your kids' school? Is anything changing in the run up to free school meals being introduced in September? Are new buildings having to be added or changes made to where the school meals come from? Will the time your children have lunch or what they eat change? Is the school worried about the change or is it something being positively welcomed? Are you looking forward to the change?

Any thoughts - do let us know.

Thanks

KatieMumsnet

It won't make any difference as kids are seated together whether they eat school lunch or packed lunch.

It will make a difference as to how long children have to queue for food, though, which will have a knock on effect on how long they spend in the dining room. At least, it will at ours. There will be another hundred and ten children to be served.

My school took part in the original pilots (2009 - 2011) offering universal free meals for all primary aged children, reception to Y6. We already had staggered sittings so organised it so that one group of children went straight for lunch and the second group had a short break time while they were being served and eating. It worked successfully for us for two years with double the children participating.

That's good to hear, mrz. There is already a lot of pressure on our small hall and limited staff so it is nice to hear that it can work.

added bonus for us was infants have 2 shorter lunchtime play times one before eating and one after rather than one long session

mrz ours are going up to £1.85 according to the school newsletter starting after the Easter holidays. Also Durham :)

Typically dsd1 started school just after the free school meals for all ended and is going into KS2 when they start being free for KS1 now. Still, at least dd will be getting them.

I remember the head telling us when we visited the school with ds1 that under the free school meals the quality had vastly improved because with the economies of scale brought on by pretty much all the children having meals they could cook higher quality meals. They have seemed to have a pretty good and varied menu the past few years so I hope that continues now. Tbh my main concern is the pricing. I am grateful that meals have been so well subsidised but it will cause financial problems for many if they continue to go up in price. Yes of course the free meals for KS1 will be great but it would be a bad thing if prices go up so much that pretty much only KS1 are eating the meals.

Our school has been quiet on this too.

I imagine that lunchtime will need to be extended time wise as the packed lunch children don't always eat in the hall - often outside (weather depending) or in the mobile. The Hall is not big enough to seat everyone eating at the same time and KS1 are possibly slower eaters than KS2.

Sorry, £1.95

We are an exceptionally large primary with a 4 class entry, so this will potentially mean 360 KS1 having hot lunch plus KS2 which already has around a 50% take-up. We have an on-site kitchen and funding has been made available to expand the facilities and to provide a second serving point. But a lot of changes will have to be made to manage this. We only have one smallish Victorian hall for lunches so the school timetable is being altered for all year groups to stagger the sittings from 11.50 till 12.40, to allow for the time taken to serve and to eat. We currently use an external caterer, but with such scale we plan to cook in-house at the end of this contract as it should make financial sense.
Those who have mentioned pupil premium, we have anticipated an increase in pupil premium as we are asking all parents to fill in a form regarding these FSMs from which we should be able to tell which would be our traditional FSM pupils.

I'm on the approved list (architect) for our council and have been given 8 commissions to redesign kitchens to cater for the increase in demand (ouch sorry for the pun)! I'm not alone and the council's own surveyors and engineers are overwhelmed with this programme.

There is insufficient funding, insufficient time and - from what I hear from the council's engineers - insufficient electrical supply in many schools to allow for all the increase in electrical loads from the new cookers, freezers, fridges, mixers etc.

To make matters worse, all across England hundreds of councils, 'academy' schools and church schools will be fighting each other for delivery of the equipment.

I believe it will be absolute chaos....

Going up to £1.85 ?
My youngest dc is in Yr7 now, but we were paying £2 for some time before she left Primary.

Really can't understand how anyone things giving all Infant children free school meals at a time when services are being cut left, right and centre, can be a good idea

Parents are starting to panic. Me included. It won't affect me till next September when ds will start school and whilst I welcome a free school meal I also dread it.
Currently my dd aged 8 has a school meal occasionally. I pay £2.05 for this privilege. She comes home reporting a lunch of bread peas and pasta more often than I like. She has missed puddings as not enough have been supplied and all in all school dinners is a last resort for us because of these reasons!
The main issue is our school has no kitchen and the hall space is so small dinners are done in 4 sittings giving each sitting 20mins to eat.
Dinners are cooked at the local high school and bought by bus at 11:30. Not enough portions are sent and dinner ladies serve portions that are too large which mean children go without or have strange combinations.
There is also a massive issue with cross contamination and that scares me. My ds is 3 and due to start school September. He has CMPI so has a totally dairy free diet. A friend whose son already attends the school has to send a lunchbox to ensure her son eats safely but has been told he HAS to have cooked in sept but the school have yet to answer questions about cross contamination etc.

Where I work there will be fsm from sept. Hope to god the standard improves because its a constant battle to pursuade the kids to eat food that the staff won't eat as its so bad. Salad bar they help themselves from where they often use hands as easier than spoon provided, also sneeze and cough over. Bread and cold pasta provided daily even if meal is pasta. Have seen a child with potato waffle, mash bread and pasta for lunch. Also do not agree with pudding being served at same time, children used to eat meal and get pud when adult said they had eaten enough. Will not be allowing my chils fsm as you have no control over what they eat, mind you a lot of the packed lunches go straight in the bin.

Interesting about the form, NotQuiteSoOnEdge - how was that worded? It would be great if this ill- thought- out shenanigans didn't stuff up pupil premium alongside everything else.

Heard nothing from our school. The Head has just left, so am guessing they have been focused on other things. DS will be in Y2.

The school is constantly 'marketing' FSM. I guess the uptake isn't very good. It is a naice area so I wonder if people feel embarressed etc, so this policy will hopefully help those that need it the most.

In Redbridge (East London) school meal prices have been frozen at £2 for a couple if years. I appreciate the sentiment but I question what happens to the quality from the supplier when prices are capped. Wasn't the horse meat issue a result (in part) of consumer demand for cheaper food etc.

The school my son is due to start this September say they will have outside caterers deliver food, and the children have 20 minutes to eat it.

Unless a miracle happens my son will only eat 2 mouthfuls because he takes forever to eat!

I only know this because I asked when being shown around the school. There is no information on their website.

I don't know what the plan is at our school. The school meals are delivered from another school kitchen as it is a small village school.
It won't make any difference to me as I like the children to have a cooked family meal with me in the evening, where we sit down together at the table and discuss the day. I think 2 hot meals in a day is excessive. They occasionally have a school dinner if I think we are going to be home late in the evening eg if they need to go to teatime club at school.

I am a governor, so I hear all the behind the scenes issues on this for us.

we are small Victorian building, bursting at the seams. We have one hall, which is quite small. Currently all the packed lunches eat in classrooms and the hot dinners just fit through the hall in staggered sittings. Dinners are cooked on site in a tiny kitchen pod which eats into our tiny playground space.

We had a letter sent home before Easter asking who would take up the new free meals, to get some idea of numbers.

One of our problems is that the kitchen will need to be enlarged, there is no space, and no money (as I understand it) to do this.

The other big problem is that most of our mid day assistants are also TAs. It is clear that we are going to have to change the timetable to stagger lunch hour in order to fit in all the sittings needed for hot meals. This means that the TAs would have to come out of class early/return to class later to be mid day assistants. Therefore the TAs can't do the job, and we need to recruit more midday people. We have had a midday vacancy for 6 months this year, which has just finally been filled. I don't know where the new assistants will come from, and I don't know what that means for those TAs who will loose mid day hours as they can no longer do it.

The hall is also used for PE, so our PE time is reduced. The KS2 classrooms all open off the hall, so the noise and disruption to their learning will also be an issue.

There is some suggestion that if KS1 child has a dinner, then parents are more likely to pay for KS2 child to eat, so our increase in numbers could be more than just KS1.

Current dinners cost £2:18, it goes up by about 5-10p every year. The dinners are OK, but not brilliant, my year 6 ds says the portions are too small for year 6. They don't like the cheap fish fingers or sausages for example. I really don't get why a mediocre school dinner is better than a packed lunch. Our packed lunches are pretty healthy.

The other massive issue for our school is the knock-on effect on pupil premium. if you no longer have to register as FSM to get a free dinner, then most people won't register. For a single class entry school in our area, in September, £66,000 of our budget will be pupil premium. £1,300 per child (in Sept) The school is working really hard to get parents to register as loosing this money would be a major issue. I know of one school which has a free prize draw for every child registered for pupil premium, the first prize, paid for by the school is a family holiday for 4. ( and it is a decent holiday too). The school has sent out a letter detailing this.

Sounds like it's going o be very hard with huge disruption steppe

Everyone so behind this has no idea the additional costs involved in pulling it off and the fact that this will mean greatly reduced resources for the children. All for a dinner many parents are quite happy to provide themselves

Be soooo much easier if the criteria were just changes so it covered the children who currently miss out yet are still in poverty.

The government should be aware of the costs and any problems because pilot studies were carried out in schools across 3 LEAs

Our school does excellent school dinners and there's a reasonably high uptake- when I say excellent, though, I mean the main meals are ok. What is not ok is the huge stodgy sweet pudding offered every single day- one day it's a large cookie (three times the size of a normal biscuit), steamed pudding another, huge portions of cake another, sticky bun etc.

There is a fruit or yoghurt option, but my dd2 who adores sweet things can't resist, and so has one of these options every day.

I am going against the tide and taking her off school dinners. I would prefer to have them as I like the convenience, but I don't think many parents realise just how large and stodgy these puddings are and what the consequences might be in terms of childhood obesity (my dd2 is overweight).

Even if the kitchens cope, I don't think the quality of the food will be high enough to justify this as a public health measure.

One of the things that I find frustrating, is that we eat together as a family every evening, a good homecooked healthy meal.

If mine eat school dinners it means two cooked meals per day, which, if they include stodgy puddings and high carb content, is not doing anything to increase their health.

dd2 will be eligible. She will have 2 meals per week, as she does now.

School meals have to meet certain nutritional standards and you will probably find the huge stidgy "sweet" pudding has no sugar content at all.

Interestingly the DfE has just launched a help line for schools to support the implimentation of the free infant meals

Yes the meals may have to but the combos left may not.