The Health Education Trust

St Peters Primary School, Nottinghamshire

Case study 1

HET has worked with St Peters Primary School to trial our first ever ‘Dinner Lady Menus to Go’, seasonal 3 week menu cycle. St Peters is a rural school that opted out of their local authority catering provision a number of years ago. Jeanette Orrey worked as their Catering Manager for 14 years, working closely with the staff, pupils, and parents to transform the school meals service, and has since maintained a close relationship with the school. Sarah Plumb took over from Jeanette, and with fantastic support from the Head Teacher has managed to maintain the successful meal service. The schools hard work has previously been highlighted on our Best in Class pages http://www.healthedtrust.com/pages/
st_peters.htm

St Peters had been providing a balanced and varied menu already, but were unable to justify the cost of buying nutritional analysis software and training staff to use the software in order to demonstrate compliance with the school food standards.

For this pilot at St Peter’s, Sarah was provided with wipeable recipe and menu cards in advance of the test weeks, to allow time for clarifying any queries and ordering ingredients from her usual suppliers. Sarah also agreed to provide feedback to HET on a daily basis, via a phone call from HET after the end of the service.

Together, the school cook and HET’s team discussed each dish from the point of view of preparation issues, presentation and how well it was received by the pupils, parents and staff. Additionally the school conducted a pupil questionnaire survey with the children to gauge their feedback on the new menu cycle.

There were some big hits that will remain a key feature of the Dinner Lady Menus, such as Jeanette’s irresistible onion gravy! It was also interesting to note that the Children at St Peter’s are already used to being served vegetables and/or salad as a standard part of each meal, so introducing seasonal vegetables was not as challenging as it might be. This supports the view that perseverance does pay off- bearing in mind that the transformation of school food at St Peters began in 1999, even the oldest pupils at the school have experienced balanced menus ever since their reception year.

Top tips from Sarah:

• Rename dishes to something familiar with your pupils – we changed Vegetarian bean burgers to Beany burgers; and Salmon, broccoli and potato bake into Fish pie. Both of which helped with uptake
• Children tended to eat more salad if the catering staff added it to their plates rather than offering a self service
• Persevere with new recipes and menus – we found the new menus tough at first, but they did get easier

How we used the feedback: