Jamie on school meals

Published by Paul O'Brien on Thursday, July 12th, 2012 at 06:07 am

The local authority caterer’s association conference (laca) was a chance to
reflect on how much change has taken place in school meals over the past few
years.

A video link to Jamie Oliver allowed the audience to hear
his views on how much progress has been made on embedding nutritional standards
into everyday school life and some of the threats that may exist to what has
been achieved to date.

He highlighted that Britain is the unhealthiest country in
Europe and that levels of childhood obesity are scandalously high, with 1 in 4
kids going to primary school already obese and this figure rising to 1 in 3 by
the time they go onto secondary education. With 3m kids eating school lunch
daily this is a great opportunity for society to intervene at an early age to
improve public health and educational attainment. It’s the ultimate invest to
save scheme as it costs so much more to deal with the problems of ill health in
later life than it does to address these issues in early life. Of course this
requires joined up thinking at central government level between the Education
and Health Ministers.

As well as strategic policy matters Jamie gave advice on
more operational issues like improving school meal uptake. His view was that
those involved in the delivery of school meals should be trying every trick in
the book to communicate with parents and attempting to build partnerships with
Head teachers.

Jamie expressed concerns around the exclusion of free
schools and academies from compliance with nutritional standards and Michael
Gove’s recent announcement of a new review into school meals. His view was that
we already know what the issues are and are making progress on resolving them
so why waste time with another review.

Toby Young gave a talk on how he has established the West
London free school, whilst he was an interesting speaker his story left me
wondering how fair and equitable a fragmented system would be if replicated on a large scale across
the country.