Almost a generation has actually passed since Jamie Oliver’s four-part Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners exposed the unhealthy truth of the food served to students at lunch break, consisting of– infamously– fat-heavy, meat-light Turkey Twizzlers. It showed a shaming and reliable intervention. His occurring Feed Me Better campaign led the then prime minister, Tony Blair, to pledge to make school lunches more nutritious and hand schools more cash to do that, offered the typical lunch at that time cost just 45p to make.Problem fixed? Sadly not.School food has suffered at the hands of politics and economics for almost 50 years. Margaret Thatcher’s Education Act in 1980 eliminated the minimum dietary requirements on school lunches. From 1988, public services, consisting of schools, were required to put agreements out to compulsory competitive tendering, which caused economics being prioritised over the quality of food provided.Nutritional requirements were restored under Labour, as exemplified by school food standards
in 2009. But shorter breaktimes from 1995, conversion because 2000 of many state schools to academies– which are exempt from the requirements– and abolition of the school lunch grant in 2011 all made it more difficult to offer healthy food to pupils.The Covid pandemic led 77 %of England’s schools to truncate lunch breaks even more and 44 %to offer less healthy food.
More recently, rampant food expense inflation and increased staffing costs have actually made some private sector suppliers supply more affordable dishes, which are often less nutritious. The growing appeal of food eaten on the relocation, the truth that regional councils are cash-strapped, and the difficulties school have in guaranteeing students can access healthy food at lunchtime look really daunting.Fortunately, Labour ministers appreciate the problems included– as well as the fact that for more deprived pupils, school lunches are a particularly important source of food. The Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care are collectively reviewing the school food requirements– the very first such refresh in a decade. Their objective: make sure that what students eat is nutritious, given the federal government’s guarantee to” raise the healthiest generation of kids ever”. Ministers are under pressure to do something else too: to make sure the requirements– whatever they say about the quality of school food– are in fact implemented. D’Arcy Williams, the president of Jamie Oliver-founded
food charity Bite Back, said:”The genuine issue here is that no one is plainly responsible for implementing school food standards– and in practice, that indicates they’re not being implemented at all.”That helps explain the obvious rise in popularity of students using”grab-and-go”tactics at lunch break: scooping up often-unhealthy portable food, like pizza and sausage rolls, to consume on the move while hanging out with friends.Various concepts are in the mix. Expand Ofsted’s remit so that inspectors going to schools evaluate food provision as well as education quality? Give the Food Standards Company some oversight? Trust school guvs to make sure excellent practice? Whatever approach of compliance is selected should help guarantee schools offer pupils healthy
food, not junk.