COLIN MCINTOSH, HEAD OF SCHOOL MEALS, READING BOROUGH COUNCIL The Big Interview
Colin McIntosh wins Local Authority Caterer of the Year at the EDUcatering Excellence Awards
service on Reading Council’s website. The media attention the win gave wasn’t just a quick news piece either. BBC South Today recorded seven minutes with Colin and a local school.
“The journalist who came along was fascinated,” Colin recalls. “He spent a long time filming in the school and my mother still has it on Sky! EDUcatering did a lot to give us that PR and we wouldn’t have had that exposure otherwise.”
While the coverage promoted the school meals service, it also reinforced confidence in parents who already signed up to the service that meals in Reading are some of the best in the country.
“I think it gives you a prestige that normally you wouldn’t have. It reaffirms it for those that take meals and draws in those that have always been a bit sceptical.” Then, there are those children in Reading who are entitled to free school meals, which currently stands at around 16.2%. When figures showed that Reading had the highest level of free school meal eligibility in the south-east of England – about 6% higher than any other local authority – Colin went on Radio Berkshire to encourage more parents to sign up. Within a week, numbers
had surged and now Reading has 80% of children entitled to free school meals taking them up. This was also partly down to making the system more accessible through measures such as ParentPay and interactive sign up. Parent involvement and awareness is an obvious passion for Colin and in the last year he has successfully got more parents into schools to eat and cook with their children for special events. He even reports of taster sessions that have been so successful the cooks have had to serve people in the playground because the dining hall has been so full. “And we see the impact the next day because numbers go up,” he remarks. One carvery evening, where parents are encouraged to sit down and eat with their children, Colin recalls a woman who thanked him as she had never eaten with her children because she rushes in from work to make them a meal before heading out to her next job. “It warms your heart and it makes me incredibly proud of what we do.” Through strategic boards, made up of headteachers, governors, parent groups and cooks, Reading Council has developed a number of ways to improve the school meals service. Tell the chef cards, a school meals website, cookery demonstrations, dining
room refurbishments and lunch supervisor training are just some examples. Colin calls the boards a “powerful force” and also credits the influence of school councils for turning Reading into a national example of best practice. But he also claims that it has been a natural process requiring little effort. Really, though, Colin has put a huge amount of effort into school meals over the past seven years. In 2006 he set up a conference called My Meal Matters. Fifty people were registered to attend, but over 500 turned up to hear presentations from the likes of Jeanette Orrey and Pru Leith. “We had children, politicians and members and there wasn’t a single person who was just sat listening; they were all writing,” Colin remarks. “The landscape has moved in the last seven years so I’d love to do another one.” Colin has great ambitions for
Reading’s school meals service. He believes that there is still a long way to go to increase free school meals take-up and he is a huge advocate for summer feeding programmes like those in the US. “You see children who are so happy in
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