Nicky Gillhespy, chief operations officer at LEO Academy Trust, discusses why, after a year that has brought school meals to the forefront, now is the perfect time to reconsider how you do catering in your school
COVID-19, and the resulting lockdowns, have brought children’s deprivation, food poverty and the increasing need to improve healthy eating to the attention of us all.
Marcus Rashford’s campaign, free school meal vouchers (including the Edenred lockdown one fiasco) and the pitiful ‘food hampers’ provided by some catering companies in lockdown three has undoubtedly led to most school leaders questioning whether the food they provide in their schools is actually good enough for the children who need it most. It seems to me that it is our moral duty as school leaders to do our best to improve things where we can, and this includes the provision of catering.
Many schools are in larger contracts organised by local authorities (LA) and perhaps until now felt it was not necessary – or even possible – to move away. The easiest answer is to tick ‘yes’ and carry on with the LA contract already in place – which then ties the school in for another three-to-five years. The additional effort it takes to move away may be off-putting, but surely those schools that have been unhappy with their provider over the various lockdowns must now feel obliged to look into this.
My own experience
Back in 2014 I was an SBM at Cheam Fields Primary, a maintained two-form entry primary school. We were part of the LA catering contract but had a low take up of paid meals of less than 25%, and about 50% of those eligible for free meals didn’t even take up the offer! The school kitchen was old and small, and hot meals were cooked off site at a larger kitchen and transported over daily. Many of the meals did not travel well and had to be cooked by 9.30am in order to be packaged up and delivered. They looked awful, and tasted pretty bad too; the aim of the contract was to provide food as cheaply as possible, and presentation was just not deemed important.
When it was announced that free school meals for all infants pupils (UIFSM) was to be introduced from September 2015 funding became available to increase the size of our school kitchen, and that was the start of my involvement in school meals.
Like any SBM, if I am going to do a job I aim to do the best I can, so I threw myself into becoming as much of an expert on school meals as I could. With a supportive head teacher and board of governors we used an ESPO framework and catering specialist advisor to procure a bespoke contract with a catering contractor. The head and I visited other schools, and sampled their food to how it was presented, and met various contractors and sampled their food too.
This gave us a real insight into what could be achieved, as well as showing us what we didn’t want. Promotion of the new, improved catering provision – plus the introduction of UIFSM – saw our meal numbers increase from 100 to 300 a day, which was amazing.
When the contract was coming up for renewal we decided to go the next step and take it on ourselves and run an in-house service. Most of the staff decided to TUPE and, using information from parental surveys and focus groups, we designed menus around what our children would eat, and what the parents wanted them to eat all, of course, meeting the healthy food standards.
In 2017 the school joined the LEO Academy Trust and I found myself as COO having the responsibility for catering across all six of the trust schools; we inherited a mix of three in-house and three schools using external catering companies. We set up LEO Catering for the three in-house schools straight away; two others joined in 2019 and, as of September 2020, all six schools now use this centralised service.
We have control over what we provide, take parent and pupil’s opinions on board, have an emphasis on choice and quality is key. We have been able to obtain a 28% discount on food costs via a joint procurement partnership arrangement with a local SAT. The most important thing is children eating healthy, home-cooked food that they enjoy. LEO Catering staff provide recipes for children to try at home as part of our LEO distance learning offer and our next step is to run cookery clubs and lessons in schools once we are able to fully open again. We are also looking to employ catering apprentices through the government’s kickstart scheme so that our staff’s knowledge can be used to help young people gain employment elsewhere.
Moving away from a catering contract is not as scary as schools may think. There are specialist advisors who can help with the process, and approved frameworks in place. Personally, moving to a bespoke contract was a good stepping stone which helped us to be prepared for moving to an in-house service. There are also many companies like LEO Catering that can offer help and support should a school decide to take the step.
The worst thing you can do is to stay with your current arrangements even if your school hasn’t been happy with them. Take the leap of faith!
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