The Health Education Trust

During the 2008/9 school year, the Health Education Trust worked  together with the Cumbrian Local Authority to ensure that in-house schools across the county were serving meals compliant with the School Food and Nutrient based Standards.

We worked in partnership to pilot the nutritionally compliant Dinner Lady Autumn menu in two primary schools with a view to rolling out the menu across the county to those primary schools that provide in-house school meals.

Alison Nelson, Independent Public Health Nutritionist, who works with Cumbria LA coordinated the project and provided the first line link with the schools.

Why did Cumbria LA choose the Dinner Lady ‘Off the shelf’ menus?

Cumbria LA decided that it would be more cost effective to start the process with a set of nutritionally compliant menus rather than starting from scratch generating new recipes and menus, all of which would need analysing. By adopting this approach it would most importantly involve the cooks who know their customers, the children, to trial the recipes using fresh ingredients and to gradually encourage them to get involved with adapting the recipes to suit the local children’s needs. Adopting a ‘Whole School Approach’, which involves the Head, teachers, catering staff, children and parents, is seen to be key to the success of the programme.

All schools are different and approach new ideas in different ways. Some schools may wish to start the whole menu in one go whereas others may wish to try out a few new dishes to begin with and introduce the menu more slowly. Certainly Jeanette Orrey, who is one of our team, would promote the idea of introducing change slowly over time.

The first phase was to complete two cycles of the Dinner Lady three week menu with the two pilot schools.

The schools involved, Lowther Endowed Primary School and Stramongate Primary School, enthusiastically took on board the new menu and supported the pilot wholeheartedly. The catering staff from both schools appreciated that introducing change may be met with challenges both in the kitchen and for the children trying new dishes. However the catering staff were supported by Alison and HET and any queries or issues that arose were discussed straight away and solutions found. Any improvements made along the way were recorded so that could be passed on to all the schools that utilise the new menus.

With both schools having completed the menu cycle twice Alison continued to work closely with the schools to take on board any changes that have been suggested. HET altered the menus to meet the needs of these Cumbrian schools, which included swapping pudding; changing pork casserole to beef casserole; and reducing the meat portion due to budget constraints. The menu was then checked and altered accordingly to meet the standards.

Based on the success of the first phase of the trial, 12 new primary schools have now signed up to start the Autumn Dinner Lady menus. These new schools will be supported by Alison and HET, and many of the lessons learned through the pilot phase can be quickly and easily passed on.

The two pilot schools have since tested the Dinner Lady Spring menus, again with support from Alison & HET, they have made slight amendments to the menus to meet their needs, which will now be rolled out across the other in-house primary schools who have signed up to the service.

Training day

Several of the Cumbrian schools that have signed up to the Dinner Lady service attended Jeanette Orrey 2 day training course during the summer holidays where they prepared and tasted all dishes from the Summer menu. Jeanette & HETs nutritionist Kathryn Styles were on hand to answer any questions that the cooks had on the recipes, menus and the nutritional of the menus.

The local papers were keen to support the schools.

New Cumbrian in-house schools have continued to sign up to the Dinner Lady service as they see the benefits of the support provided by Cumbria County Council.

The prime objective of this project was for Cumbria to use the Dinner Lady menus and recipes as a starting point, with a view to developing their own county wide standalone menus for the cooks to modify and adapt over time. The County Council is now adding to the Dinner Lady recipes and menus with more of their own recipes to enhance the flexibility and by utilising their own nutritional analysis software, they are able to maintain compliance.