rocure lan CATERING
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i treat every boy at my school as if he was my son.
Would i serve up food that wasn’t good enough for my son? Absolutely not
chain of health, seasonal and locally sourced restaurants. The duo is taking on the takeaways again, this time it’s the grease joints that sit outside school gates. Last year, the Department for education
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commissioned the guys behind Leon to compile its school Food Plan, which would examine eating habits in British school canteens, in a bid to break the “terrible cycle” in which children gorge on cheap, “crowd-pleasing” food as youngsters, only to fall ill with diabetes and heart disease later in life – thus putting pressure on an already strugglingnHs. Furthermore, it hoped to boost academic performance by way of healthier eating (a proven method). The results showed that only one per cent of
packed lunches actually meet nutritional standards, despite parents spending a whopping £1bn per year on the sandwiches, snacks and drinks that go into them, since too often, these packed lunches are made up of bad goodies like crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks. The Leon duo’s conclusion was that canteen
meals were the healthiest option for noshing pupils (thanks to the legacy of Jamie’s school Dinners) – and that schools should ban packed lunches and stop children from leaving school premises to visit the local chip shop on school breaks – pointing to a sharp turnaround from the days of Turkey Twizzlers. For schools, the pressure is on. The onus will
be on them to provide the kind of food children want to eat – and make it accessible enough to be quicker and easier than a tuck-shop run. This is no small task: 57% of pupils take a packed lunch or buy food outside school. While the plan is for £11.8m to be made
available by the Dfe to increase the take-up of school food, and £3.15m to be provided to ensure pupils are eating breakfast, ofsted has also committed to directing inspectors to consider the way a school promotes healthy eating when deciding a school’s rating. in short, schools will have to take responsibility, in a big way, to keep kids in the canteen.
WORST TO BEST eight years ago, Carshalton Boys sports College in sutton, south London showed particularly problematic examples of the kind of noshing
hen restaurateurs Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent took on Britain’s bad eating habits once before, it was to challenge the fast food giants by launching Leon, a
tendancies the school Food Plan is targeting. set in the middle of one of europe’s largest housing estates, meal take-up was a dire 20%, despite 40% of its 1,300 pupils being eligible for free school meals. The impact was felt academically – with only four per cent of pupils achieving five GCses at A* to C grades – and pupil behaviour was equally challenging. When principal simon Barber started in his
role a decade ago, he had the idea that the key to turning around school life lay in the lunch room. By focusing on creating a positive culture around food, he has managed to bring school meal take- up to 90% and boost the GCse pass rate to 100%.
CULTURAL SHIFT While this is a jaw-dropping turnaround, Barber doesn’t claim to have done anything extraordinary. He’s increased meal take-up by thinking like a teenager – and really, that’s no different than thinking like an adult. “You have to give good quality food at a cheap price and you have to empathise with youngsters,” he tellseducation executive. “if you’ve got an hour’s lunch today, what you wouldn’t do is queue up for half-an-hour for poor quality food that is quite expensive.” He’s managed to offer good, affordable food
by taking a number of different approaches. The first thing he did was hire a professional chef, who was able to quickly form good relationships with local suppliers to source better food at a cheaper
price.now, for example, the school is top of the local butcher’s call list if there’s good meat on offer. The chefs (now there are two) also teach
cooking classes to the boys. To facilitate this, the school has started to grow its own food, installed chicken coops and built what Barber calls a “top qualitymasterChef kitchen”. These factors provide a strong emphasis on local and organic food and aim to provide skills for pupils, culminating in Carshalton’smud Club, a student-run group that leads trips to farms and will be selling produce to the local community at a farmers’ market this month. He also reiterates that cooking healthy meals
is half the battle – stopping pupils from leaving the premises is a major challenge Carshalton has also overcome. “i’ll stop youngsters going out at lunch and break time,” he explains. “They don’t go down and spend their money on crisps, blue drinks, chicken and chips and pizzas when they have good quality food available.”
SPACE TO EXPAND Where once Carshalton’s canteen was a place
www.edexec.co.uk / september 2013
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