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Those damned statistics…
It’s a pretty basic question. How many children eat school meals? But back in 2005, when Jamie’s School Dinners first aired and the nation woke up to what many had been saying for years, it was...
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Why should pupils love good school food?
Catering Manager Kevin McHugh has been head chef at Towers School in Kent for seven years. To mark the season of love in Cook for Success magazine, he’s blogging about why he thinks pupils and...
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School food contracts ‘driving down food quality’? I don’t think so.
So, as the horsemeat scandal continues to unfold, Iceland boss Malcolm Walker reckons local authorities contracting for school food are partly to blame for the wider issue of the poor quality of some...
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Is your catering like the proverbial dripping tap?
So, how long have school meals been on your ‘to-do’ list? 6 months? 6 years? Do they figure on your list at all? Like anything that can be complicated to work on, what I hear so often when I’m out...
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Stories to make your sweet tooth ache
After a long weekend which for so many kids (and adults, too!) will have been chock-full of sugar in the form of chocolate eggs, this should be a good time to get a few facts straight about the sweet...
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Do we still need school dinners?
Writer Susan Elkin posed this question today in a blog for the Independent. No points for guessing what our answer is! And some of you seem to agree – there are already some great posts in the comments...
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‘Good food: why it should be a no-brainer for every school’
Well why not ? Long gone are the days of overcooked cabbage and lumpy custard served in silver tureens… At Manchester Health Academy we strive to ensure our students are equipped for the future by...
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Enough on your plate…
Enough on your plate… So, how many are you spinning as a business manager? Enough to fill your school dishwasher more than once, I’d guess – that is, if you’ve got one and it’s working ok. Because if...
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Kitchen nightmares?
They say a bad workman blames his tools. Always springs to mind when your new patio’s been botched or your other half has left you with water coming through the kitchen ceiling, after trying to fix...
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Get what you want….what you really, really want from your school food
This week, I’m attending a fantastic workshop to launch a Food Partnership for Lambeth conference called ‘Who Feeds Lambeth?’ In this borough – the fifth most deprived in London, where around a third...
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When the chips are down…
The funny thing about teenagers’ down time on a school day is that it’s anything but. They tell us their journeys to and from school, their breaks, their lunchtimes are taken up with their...
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Ready for action?
If I had a pound for every time someone’s asked me the question in the last few months: “So, what’s going to be in the new School Food Plan then?”, I’d be retiring to the Bahamas. I’m sure most of...
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How to eat…
I’ve talked at length about the kinds of foods I feel schools should offer – but what about how these foods are served? With the School Food Plan due to be published very soon, here’s my menu of the...
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Why I’m an e-learning convert
I guess when you’ve trained and worked as a teacher, you never stop being interested in how we learn. Whether you learn by seeing, hearing or doing, what works for some of us definitely doesn’t work...
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What is it about headteachers who get stuck in on school food?
Do they all share certain character traits? Are they ‘foodies’ at home? Do they simply have more time on their hands than other heads? Nope, not necessarily, and definitely not. But all of the heads...
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A watershed moment for school food?
Being completely honest, there are a lot of people who’ve asked me over the last year whether the government’s school food review would come up with anything ‘new’. Was there a silver bullet that no...
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Why don’t more schools use pre-ordering?
If ever there was a case for more primary schools to introduce simple pre-ordering systems for school meals, the story of Alison Waldcock, a school cook in Cambridge, has to be it. According to media...
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Are universal free school meals the way to make sure all children who most...
Jo Nicholas, our Head of Evaluation, blogs for Society Central: “…..there are two gaps which need addressing here: getting families to register for free school meals in the first place, then getting...
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Why kitchens have been such an important part of the school food jigsaw in...
It was time for a change. A big change to how we were providing a food service to our children and we just had to do something about it. But how? We were coming up to a re-tender of our school...
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“A good kitchen may not be the only ingredient for great school food, but...
For any school serving great school meals, there are always a number of factors at play. Enthusiastic headteachers, passionate cooks, supportive staff, engaged parents… The list goes on. There are also...
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