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Greenwich Council has transformed its catering service across their borough through the Jamie Oliver’s Feed Me Better Campaign. Prior to these changes, Greenwich Council had been committed to ensuring that all children across the borough were provided with a choice of meals that they would eat. All schools offered a ‘home cooked’ choice on the menu such as spaghetti bolognese or freshly prepared chicken pie, with vegetables and potatoes. Primary schools served bread and salad daily, and chips were limited to once a week. In secondary schools the canteen style service allowed a wider choice for example jacket potatoes and salads.

Progress was made by the Council and the Greenwich Primary Care Trust in developing a joint Food and Health Policy; this included the introduction of healthier menus. This progress was steady but slow, and when Jamie Oliver offered the opportunity to become involved, the Council hoped that his involvement would add impetus and impact to the local campaign to change the eating habits of school children within the borough. Jamie also visited St Peter’s School in Nottingham for inspiration.

The Greenwich Food and Health Strategy Group have a School Nutrition Working Group which coordinates support for schools, allowing them to take a ‘whole school approach’ to improving childhood nutrition across the borough.

Pupils have been involved from the start of the ‘feed me better’ programme and pupils are given the opportunity to provide feedback on new recipes and make decisions on any changes to their dining hall environment.

Many of the schools that are serving the new menus have given pupils, through their school councils, a chance to discuss the menus and their presentation. Suggestions made by the pupils have been taken up by the school and by the catering services.

This project started in one school in April 2004 and has since rolled out throughout the other schools in the borough from November 2004 at a rate of five a week.

Examples of meals available across the Borough of Greenwich

Monday	Egg & Cheese Flan & Mixed leaf salad	Sausages, Mash & Mixed leaf salad	Sweet potato and lentil korma, Fluffy white rice & Mixed leaf salad	Fruit Salad & Biscuit
Tuesday	Lamb casserole with herbs, New potatoes & Mixed leaf salad	Sweet and Sour Diced Chicken, Fluffy white rice & Mixed leaf salad	Vegetable Cannelloni, Mixed leaf, Tomato & Cucumber salad	Iced Chocolate  Sponge
Wednesday	Super Cottage pie (minced Beef), Mixed leaf salad	Herb crusted fish, New potatoes & Mixed leaf salad	Spicy cheese Tortillas & Carrot, poppy seed & lemon salad	Fruit & Biscuit
Thursday	Minced Lamb pie, Creamy Mash & Mixed leaf salad	Chilli Beef Fajitas & Mixed leaf salad	Cheesy Pasta with Leeks, Mixed leaf, tomato & cucumber salad	Creamed Rice
Friday	Cajun Chicken, Cheesy cornbread & Mixed leaf salad	Tuna Arabbiatta with Penne & Mixed leaf salad	Scone base Pizza, Mixed leaf salad &  Coleslaw	Sponge & Custard

Kidbrooke Secondary School

Kidbrooke School was selected as the pilot kitchen for this project and featured in the Channel 4 documentary ‘Jamie’s School Dinners’. Pupils designed and chose the new layout in their dining hall, even down to the colour of the paint! Further changes introduced in response to pupil suggestions include introducing ‘on-the-move’ healthy snacks for pupils involved in sports and other lunchtime activities.

Some popular ‘on-the-move’ healthy snacks include: wraps, filled pitas, sandwiches, baguettes and homemade carrot cake.

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Improvements to the catering service

Food

• All processed food has now been removed – out went the Turkey Twizzlers, Wacky Racers, Nibbly Nobblys and Sea Stars. Instead, the children are now being served dishes such as lemon roasted chicken, sweet potato and lentil korma, herb-crusted fish and vegetable cannelloni.
• The kitchen staff and the school staff have really made a commitment to encourage pupils to try different dishes.
• The way in which food is sourced has altered – the council now have an award winning butcher, a local fresh fish supplier, a supplier for dry goods and a fruit and vegetable supplier. 
• All meals are homemade.
• Fizzy drinks are not sold in the canteens, this has been in force for 4-5 years.
• Water has always been available at lunchtimes, with many schools now encouraging children to take water into the classrooms.
• Salad and fruit are available on the menu daily.
• Around 20 of the borough’s primary schools take part in the 5-a-day programme, run by the local Primary Care Trust, which encourages children to eat at least five different types of fruit and vegetables a day. This scheme runs on top of the Government-backed 'free fruit for five-year-olds' scheme and provides fruit for children at breaktimes.
• Schools participating in the 5-a-day programme are encouraged to provide support and advice to parents and pupils on preparing healthy packed lunches so that it fits into the whole healthy eating initiative. 
• Chips are no longer a regular feature on the menu in schools.
• To allow these changes, £50,000 of funding was secured for staff training and parent/pupil taster sessions.

Pupil involvement

• Greenwich Council in conjunction with the PCT opted for a Whole School Approach by involving the school, staff and pupils. Together they have begun to look at how the curriculum, the school environment and the role of pupils, staff, parents and the wider community can be brought together to support improvements to children’s diet.
• Kitchen staff have been talking to pupils in classrooms, and the issues of nutrition and healthy eating have featured in the curriculum and in school assemblies.

Dining room environment

• Some secondary schools have been able to change their dining room environment to create a more informal layout. All changes have been carried out with strong pupil involvement through their school council. Pupils have provided many practical ideas, including the addition of tablecloths and flowers on the dining tables, and in some secondary schools, a more informal café-style layout of tables and chairs.

Training

• The majority of staff received a refresher course in the preparation and cooking of ingredients from scratch. The Army and Greenwich Council worked with Jamie Oliver to set up a three-day ‘boot camp’ where staff went through a rigorous cooking programme. Also, each school was given support from a chef as the project was rolled out.

Equipment

• £95,000 of funding was secured by Greenwich Council to purchase extra equipment as the existing equipment, was of a good standard, but it was not sufficient to deal with the volumes of fruit and vegetables that were now being prepared.

Funding

• Additional investment so far from budgets under Greenwich Council’s control totals £628,850. As well as the training and equipment budgets mentioned above, this also includes an extra £284,000 for primary and nursery school meals within the Council’s annual Budget. This works out at 13p per meal, and reflects the extra time that it takes staff to prepare meals from fresh ingredients; it will also fund extra staff hours at those schools that need it.
• A further increase agreed by councillors has raised the free school meal allowance by 10p in secondary schools across the borough – this equates to £80,750.

Measuring success

• The consumption of fruit and vegetables as part of the school meal has increased four-fold as a result of the new menus. This is shown by weekly expenditure by the borough on fresh fruit and vegetables increasing from £5,000 to more than £18,000.
• In Greenwich there are three further programmes currently running to increase consumption of fruit and vegetables. These are the Grab 5 campaign, the 5-a-day campaign and the National Fruit and Vegetable Scheme. When schools were asked about the schemes there was a very positive response. Many schools included them as ‘best practice’ examples and stated that it helped to ‘make fruit and vegetables an integral part of the children’s culture’.
• Some schools now have a fruit and vegetable co-op stall running in or adjacent to the school grounds, selling fruit and vegetables at reasonable prices. The co-op operates across the whole borough as part of the Greenwich Community Food Initiative, which is a joint project between the Primary Care Trust and Greenwich Cooperative Development Agency. Parents and local community members are trained and supported to provide volunteer staffing for the stalls.
• The uptake of meals in primary schools has increased by around 2% since the introduction of the new menus. In secondary schools the uptake of free school meals has increased by around 3%.
• Parent and pupil taster sessions have been ongoing from November 2004 and have proved successful in getting parents to encourage their children to consume school meals.

Packed lunches

The 5-a-day programme running in 20 primary schools includes parent and child 'cook and eat' sessions. During these sessions advice has been provided on how to create healthy packed lunches. Schools are also in contact with good practice guidance published by the Food Standards Agency and in Jamie Oliver's Feed Me Better pack.

The School Nutrition Working Group is currently developing a local Gold Standard, to which schools will be encouraged to work towards the Healthy Schools Award. The aim is to have all Greenwich schools working towards a fully developed whole school approach to improving nutrition by 2008. A local toolkit, training and support programme based on national best practice guidance are being developed to support schools with this work.  These will cover a host of health issues including packed lunch policies, water and soft drinks, school environment, tuck shops and vending machines.

Feedback from the project

• Feedback from parents, pupils and staff has been very positive. One secondary pupil said, “It was chips and frozen food on the menu every day - now they’ve added more healthy dishes because it’s important to get children into good eating habits while they are young. It’s also better value when you buy a meal now.”
• The Head teacher of Kidbrooke School said, “Because the children aren’t being stuffed with additives they’re much less hyper in the afternoons now. It hasn’t been an easy transition as getting older children to embrace change takes time.”
• One of the primary schools in Greenwich did an evaluation of behaviour in the classroom since switching to the Jamie Oliver menus. Teachers were asked a set of questions regarding children’s behaviour and 87.5% thought that the children settled more quickly, while 94% said they seemed able to concentrate for longer periods.
• One classroom teacher commented, “Children enjoy the food and talk about it more than they did in the past. They seem to have more energy and can concentrate for longer.”

Where next?

• All schools in the borough of Greenwich that have their meals provided by Greenwich Catering should be on the programme by the end of the 2005 summer term.
• Greenwich Council has arranged further training in the summer holidays including NVQ modules for kitchen staff.
• The work that Greenwich has done with the Jamie Oliver project has helped to raise awareness of school meals and children’s health among the media and among the general population nationally - and even internationally. The Greenwich Council press office has dealt with calls from Norway, USA, France and Australia!
• The work has impacted directly on Government policy and Greenwich expects to have an input into the mechanism for distributing additional funding to schools.
• Greenwich Catering is planning a series of Open Days to allow staff from schools and local authorities in other parts of the country to find out about the Greenwich approach.
• Greenwich Council will carry out a formal evaluation of the project towards the end of 2005; included in this is a plan to look at the impact of the new menus on dietary disorders, asthma and other health issues among Greenwich pupils.
• The volume of food that is supplied across the borough makes it hard to ensure that supplies are locally sourced. However this is something that the Council is pursuing and which will feature as one of the tendering criteria in the new supply contract that is currently being tendered.
• Greenwich Council remains fully committed to the project and its long-term sustainability as it fits in with the Council’s wider objectives to promote greater social inclusion and to improve the health and educational achievement of every child in the borough.

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