Andrew Blench, SBM consultant at School Business Partner Limited, explains why he believes excellent catering provision is so important, and how you can look to improve yours
The days of the school dining hall serving measly portions of rice pudding are, thankfully, behind us. However, the nutrition of students remains fundamental to their learning and physical development; how can catering services seek to feed hungry stomachs, deliver gourmet meals, and skim pennies of an SBM budget?
I believe that the school catering service fulfils three main functions – nutritional, social and financial.
Nutritional
It is nutritional in that it, quite literally, provides young people with ‘brain food’. I know that I sometimes forget that the brain is part of our bodies; it doesn’t help that the media talks about ‘mental health’ and ‘physical health’ as if the two are unconnected. In my view there is no distinction; our mental health doesn’t float out there, somewhere in the ether.
How we think is influenced by what we eat – take being ‘hangry’ for example – when we are angry and irritable because we are hungry. We need good nutrition to help us think well and maintain a good emotional state. This is even more important for our young people whose brains and bodies are growing and developing at a rapid pace.
The development of cognitive ability in young people is a complex science which involves the establishment of connections in the brain and development of ways of thinking which we, as adults, take for granted sometimes. For some of our young people the food they access through school will be the only consistent and healthy food they will see. One of the good things which has come from the pandemic, thanks to Marcus Rashford and others, is an acknowledgment that child food poverty is real and still exists during the school holidays – but then, all of us who work in schools knew that already, didn’t we?
Social
The school catering service is social in that it gives us an opportunity to facilitate unstructured social contact between children and adults. Some of us are old enough to recall when school dinners were taken in family or house groups, a mixture of adults and children eating together, sitting at the same table. Now, particularly in secondary settings, this is more of a ‘grab and go’ arrangement. However we do this, we shouldn’t underestimate the educational value of practising the art of conversation and just being together.
Financial
It is financial in that it presents an opportunity for older children (who are more in charge of their food choices) to learn about budgeting and the cost of things. When run well it can also generate a surplus which can be invested back into the school.
So how as SBMs can we drive this excellence in catering?
Focus on the footfall
We are not nutritional experts, and most of us have not operated catering at high volumes – that’s why we employ catering contractors – but the bit we can influence, which is within our domain, is the communication with parents and children. The higher proportion of young people accessing the service, the more we can do with it. So, do you know what percentage of your young people access the service in a typical week? How can you influence this percentage? For those who never use it, what are the barriers and how might you address these? How do you capture parent and student voice about your catering service, and how does this filter through into changes and developments around the service?
Manage your contract
SBMs are encouraged to manage our non-staffing contracts, checking that they are delivering to KPIs and value for money, not allowing contracts to expire and simply roll over on unfavourable terms. The reality is that, within our busy roles, we can’t give all contracts the same level of attention that we would like to. In my last role my two biggest contracts (in terms of monetary value) were the catering and cleaning contracts. I had regularly termly/ half-termly meetings with the account manager where we reviewed data (uptake/income) and planned for the next term. This had the benefit of driving up the income into the service and, because of the nature of the contract, this also brought back investment into school when targets were met. It also made the contractor realise that they were not going to get away with poor standards.
In my consultancy role I am staggered to see some of the catering contracts that schools are locked into – a lot of which are heavily weighted to the benefit of the supplier of local authority catering services. With the exception of special and AP provision, it should be possible to make a catering contract financially attractive for the supplier and also to generate some investment from a surplus generated by the service back into school.
A modern contract is often referred to as a ‘no-cost contract’; technically, this isn’t correct but, in practical terms, the only charges you should see is for free school meals. So, is it time to review your contract and maybe go out to tender to get a better deal?
Choose your catering partners carefully
It can take time to get there, but the way to drive excellence is to have a manged service which has the same values as you do. Yes, it’s about making money (for a commercial contractor), but it can and should also be about giving back. The best catering partners I have worked with have been people who love children and who want to give something extra such as cooking classes for parents, or sixth form students about to head off to university, supporting the holiday clubs and attending open days/evenings.
Driving excellence is about seeing the catering service as a thread which runs through the school and supports the whole enterprise. After all, we all like to connect over a cuppa and a slice of traybake!
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