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The
Health Education Trust (HET) is a registered
charity dedicated to initiating and supporting work with
young people to encourage the growth
of healthy lifestyles.
The Health Education Trust (HET) is
the managing organisation for SNAGNewsOnline and www.healthedtrust.com.
These services
are made available for the benefit of those with concerns
about food in schools across the UK. The underlying message
is always the same: children need and are entitled to a healthy,
high quality food service at school and there are always
ways each of us can help progress towards achieving that
for them.
SNAGNewsOnline
allows a broad range of views to be expressed and therefore
they are not necessarily the views of HET, it's individual
staff, or SNAG (UK).
| We
welcome contributions for the newsletter and website,
so please email your ideas or suggestions to: het@joeharvey.fsnet.co.uk
or jennette@healthedtrust.com; or call Joe direct
to discuss further on 01789 773915. |
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Joe
Harvey Has His Say!
Has there ever been such
a time of opportunity and threat for food services in
our schools? We can all recognise the huge increase in
concern over food and nutrition issues in schools, which
is reflected in a flood of media articles and interviews.
Why are so many children content with a diet so lacking
in fruit and vegetables? Why are the menus in our schools
so clearly reliant on pre-prepared, poor quality ingredients?
The government knows the cost of the growing levels of
childhood obesity and the early onset on Type 2 Diabetes
to the nation's economy and is making concerned noises,
but what is actually being done to improve the situation
and is it likely to be effective?
In April 2001 a raft of
powerful new initiatives came into force. The most important
of which were:
• Minimum nutritional standards - For the first time since 1980 there are
universal requirements that insist on an appropriate balance and variety in the
offer to children in all schools in England and Wales.
• A Duty to Provide - renewing the obligation, removed in 1980, on the
school meals budget holder to provide not just a free school meals service (FSM)
but also a paid service too.
• Delegation of Budgets - that is delegation direct to the schools, giving
them accountability for the provision and quality of the food service.
So two years on and what difference have these changes made? Have they answered
the questions or posed new ones? I would argue that while there have been some
remarkable localised and individual examples of good practice, the package
from government was incomplete, lacked rigour and commitment, and failed to
understand the underlying reason why the school food service has always struggled
to deliver satisfaction. Let’s take a closer look at the chaos and confusion
that is schools catering right now!
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| Minimum
Nutritional Standards are 'a good thing ' but were only
ever meant to be the minimum standard below which no
one should fall. In order for them to provide their inherent
promise they need to be strictly monitored. Such a monitoring
system you would expect to be an integral part of the
regulations but sadly the reverse is the case. There
is no national monitoring system overseen by government
to check and keep data on the impact of their own initiatives.
Under delegation of budgets it is illegal for local education
departments (LEA's) to retain money for a monitoring
role, and so it is left to schools themselves, or the
caterers delivering the service to self-police the standards.
Such arrangements have no credibility and mean that it
is impossible to judge success or failure of the standards.
Ofsted
Primary Monitoring Programme 2003 Autumn However there
is the sound - better late than never - of the cavalry
coming over the hill. This autumn Ofsted are conducting
a survey of a selection of primary schools to examine
broad issues of principle...has the school adopted a
'whole school approach'? Is what is taught in the classroom
reflected in the food service provision? Are the messages
to the children consistent? Good questions to ask, and
ones that every school should have been asking of themselves
for some time. Perhaps asking such questions would have
stopped some of them becoming involved in thinly disguised
marketing programmes for Walker's crisps and more recently
for Cadbury’s. It is hard to believe that head
teachers who sanction the collection of chocolate wrappers
in school time did not see that their actions are a tacit
endorsement of the products. Cadbury's with a multi-million
pound marketing budget and massive branding power, do
not need, and should not get, the support of schools.
One might ask why there is not clear govt/LEA guidance
on avoiding damaging involvement in inappropriate campaigns,
which so clearly cut across Department of Health funded
'Healthy School Standards Scheme ' programmes and the
'free fruit scheme' for 4-6 yr olds.
DfES
Secondary Schools Monitoring Programme 2003 Autumn A
more detailed and comprehensive assessment of practice
in secondary schools will be undertaken by DfES later
this year and it is only to be regretted that no baseline
data was collected in 2001 so a comparison could be made.
However it is still likely to be the most important report
in recent times and one which I expect to show a very
wide range of quality and practice from excellent to
disgraceful!
That these surveys are taking place is encouraging and, if they are a beginning
rather than an end in themselves, should concentrate minds, and raise the profile
and importance of a high quality food service in schools, not only for improving
health (and education potential) but also as part of the broader aim of valuing
children through the whole operation of the school. |
|
Delegation
of Budgets It was never the intention of government when delegating
meals budgets to improve the service. It was a part of the political
strategy to increase the overall level of delegation to the mythical
figure of 90%. As a result the degree of planning that went into
it was totally inadequate and a number of the outcomes now visible
were entirely predictable. The benefits of delegation are the
transfer of accountability to the school, which effectively removes
their option to blame someone else if the service is poor. In
reality there never was much justification for such a stance,
now there is even less. Many schools are using their delegated
powers with great skill and to improve both menus and the environment
in which their children eat. However there are LEA's and individual
schools who are cynically running down their services, creating
such a poor service and allowing such easy identification of
a FSM child (so stigmatising them) that they minimise even the
uptake of meals to those families on benefit. It
was never the intention of David Blunkett (then Secretary of
State for Education) that this government should preside
over the fragmentation
of the school
meals service when he announced five years ago his intention to shore
up standards and safeguard the service against decay, but there is
an urgent need for action if that is not to become the reality.
In a number
of counties small schools with services that are not commercially
viable are becoming threatened as the cross subsidy that
used to operate within
the contract from larger secondary/primary schools is lost as the
latter leave to do their own thing or demand a greater return
for their business.
Investment,
investment, investment Who first said there is no such
thing as a free lunch? It was King Lear who declared 'nothing
will come of nothing...speak again!' Both, in different
ways spell out the real reason we are in this unnecessary,
unhappy situation. For as long as I have been in education,
teaching or advising, it has been a Cinderella service
with some questioning its importance and most demanding
that it make economies while improving quality. Investment
in equipment and facilities has been so far below the acceptable
minimum that thousands of kitchens have kit that is inappropriate
and obsolete and dining rooms with furniture that is damaged
and decor that is decaying. The
problem of delegation exacerbates the situation of course
because while some schools are well equipped others are
close to derelict. Few small schools could possibly deal
with a repairs and renewal programme - the costs would
be prohibitive. It would have been logical to upgrade the
worst kitchens prior to delegating responsibility, that
can and should still be done if we do not want to see a
steady succession of kitchen closures. The amount of money
allowed for a free school meal is inadequate, it should
be increased to allow for the provision of good quality
ingredients and a minimum value fixed by government. It
is strange to realise that this is a benefit yet has a
widely varying value - that can't be right!
In
conclusion, I believe that there is time to save what we
have and with political courage, to substantially improve
it. If the government wants children’s diets to improve,
if it believes 'five-a-day' really does matter, then it
must move quickly and decisively to stop its well-intended,
but badly executed, poorly financed plans for food in schools
from going disastrously wrong! |
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Joe
Harvey,
Director of the Health Education Trust
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In
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Summer
2003 Newsletter Page One
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