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Parents included in school meals plan

Plans to improve school meals include measures to ensure parents remain an integral part of the process.            

Proposals are currently be prepared to enable parents to work with schools and the new School Food Trust which has the backing of £60 million from the Department for Education and Skills and the Big Lottery Fund. 

The School Food Trust will give independent support and advice to schools and parents about improving the standard of school meals and a dedicated ‘toolkit’ for parents is to be published in May.

The measures are part plans recently announced by Education Secretary Ruth Kelly to provide schools and local authorities with £220 million in new funding grants to ensure they can transform school meals from this September and over the next three years.

Healthy food will prepared fresh on the premises by trained school cooks, which would follow tough minimum nutrition standards underpinned by Ofsted inspection.

Schools will have to ensure that the minimum spent on ingredients is 50p per pupil per day for all primary schools, and 60p per pupil per day for all secondary schools, as well as providing increased training and working hours for school cooks.

The measures were welcomed by the British Dietetic Association, who also listed parental input as an important part of the plans.

A spokesperson for the association said whilst the efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver have clearly been instrumental in raising awareness of meals served in some schools, it is also clear that to help improve children’s nutritional health, more needs to be done than simply change lunchtime menus.  

We strongly support the need to engage parents, teachers, governors, schools inspectors, as well as caterers and the food industry, together with a sustainable commitment from Government to provide the necessary infrastructure that underpins the planned improvements.

In order to do this, from April, a new vocational qualification will be available for school caterers to help them promote healthy food, and ensure they are high status school cooks who are as integral to the whole-school team as teachers and classroom assistants.

And by July the Department for Education & Skills will publish more help for schools and local education authorities in drawing up catering contracts to source healthy school meals’ services and healthy food in vending machines, tuck shops, or breakfast clubs.

Parents can find further information on the Food in Schools website at http://www.foodinschools.org which goes live in April. It provides a ‘one-stop’ resource for information on school food including school meals and food and nutrition in the curriculum.