The Great School Lunch Decision! (School Lunches)

Member Name: wendybull

Product:	School Lunches
Date:	30/10/06 (589 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Swings...

Disadvantages: and roundabouts

I decided to write this review for a very strange reason. My son has suddenly declared his liking for Tuna. I was extremely shocked as he is a fairly straightforward eater – meat and potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and sweets. He eats other foods that I make him eat, like carrots and peas but would usually leave them alone if he could get away with it. He was never a pasta lover either really, so it was my craziest dream come true when he asked for cold tuna pasta with mayonnaise in his lunch box. I nearly fainted, and promptly put the pasta on to cook!

The rather strange link to my son’s eating habits and school dinners is due to the fact that no schools in West Sussex offer school dinners. They do not have kitchens or kitchen staff and West Sussex, after some delving on the Internet had to make a saving on £500,000 about five years ago and school catering facilities were axed, along with all the cooks and dinner ladies.

We now have two options in primary schools. We can either pack our children lunch boxes at home which they bring in with them in the morning, leave in an area of the class-room till lunch, then consume. Or we can order and pay for a packed lunch to be supplied from a private company called Sodexho. They offer a nutritional and healthy packed lunch, which is delivered freshly made that morning and kept refrigerated until delivery. This obviously comes at a price, which depends on how far in advance you order the meals. The most cost effective option would be to order 10 weeks in advance and then you pay £1.10 per meal, or £5.50 per week.

My son has been at school for just over a year now and I have always packed a lunch at home for him. The two main reasons being that I never actually got round to completing the form to order the packed meals from Sodexho and the other being that I was quite limited to what he would actually eat as mentioned above. Reading the menu options from Sodexho, there were lots of things like tuna sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches etc that I knew he would end up being hungry, as he would not eat the offerings.

The lunch boxes I supplied to him were made up of very plain things, like ham sandwiches, cheese sandwiches, crackers/crisps and a chocolate covered biscuit like Penguin. He loves Cheesestrings and I always include a Frube or small yoghurt. I always added an apple (the only fruit he liked) although he never ate this at lunch. The difference between what I was supplying and what Sodexho offered was enormous.

However since being at school, my son has really widened his taste for different foods and I attribute this entirely to the efforts of the teachers and the school system. In his school, they offer all children in Years R, 1 & 2 a free break time snack of either fruit or vegetable. My son now eats bananas, satsumas, raw carrots, grapes occasionally and this week fresh pineapple. I am overwhelmed sometimes by the attitudes he comes home with. Attitudes of acceptance and trying things out that I have been trying to instil in him since he was a baby and to a large extent failing. After he had been at school for less than a year, they managed to break through the barrier and now he has a varied taste, which I am ever thankful for.

His lunch boxes from home have now become more diverse, and I enclose different forms of fruit and vegetable, along with the aforementioned tuna pasta. Tuna sandwiches and other sandwich fillings that I never dreamed he would eat, like egg and lettuce. I am satisfied his lunch boxes from home are offering a healthy, nutritional and filling lunch, however sitting and working out the cost of what I provide I was shocked that it comes to around £1.86 per day. As an added piece of information the National Foundation for Educational Research carry out lunch box surveys at my son’s school, where they arrange to study a particular classes lunch box contents. I feel this does encourage parents to make healthier contents available for their children, simply due to a pressure to be providing the best for their child.

If I were to switch to the Catering Contractors for the school I would be saving myself nearly £20 on a five-week month! Looking at the menu now I am a lot more confident about my son’s chances of filling up at lunch if I were to buy a school packed lunch for him and would be satisfied that the ingredients and contents were healthy and nutritional for his needs. In fact the company that provide them have been awarded with the Heartbeat Award for nutritional excellence over the last three years.

I do find it a huge shame that West Sussex does not provide a hot meal at lunchtime for their schools, although in my personal circumstances it doesn’t really affect my son’s health at all as we always have a filling hot dinner in the evening. There are children out there though who’s only hot meal may well come from their lunch at school and five years ago when West Sussex closed all the kitchens they stopped providing that small nutritional benefit to these kids. I don’t believe it is the Education Authority or local council’s responsibility to ensure that thee kids get a hot meal at lunch but the facilities were there to begin with and I am sure they could have found the funds to make up their deficit from other means, without affecting the school dinners. With the introduction of Jamie Oliver’s campaign on school dinners it does seem to be a waste of a great opportunity to include some great menus for the kids.

The schools do work hard to educate the children on healthy eating and healthy living in general though. My son’s school have a contract with Cool Milk Ltd, who provides the school with a fridge, and milk cartons to the children. Under 5 year olds get this service for free and my son has only recently had to start paying for his. Over 5’s get a subsidised rate, which is paid by the parents direct to Cool Milk for every term or half term. I have just stopped paying for this for my son, as he drinks milk at home and does need the extra boost from school milk that even at a subsidised rate, still adds up per term on top of lunch boxes. You are however entitled to free milk alongside your lunches if you qualify for the free school meals scheme. Cool Milk have stated that since September 2004 the uptake on milk has gone from under 13% to nearly 70% in one term in West Sussex. This is great news obviously and the main reason being is that Cool Milk support and run all the administration and organisation of the milk scheme. All the schools need to do is find a place for the fridge and hand out the milk instructed by a guidance sheet from Cool Milk.

Overall, I am becoming more and more confident in my son’s lunches at school and have made the decision to begin buying the packed lunches supplied by the catering contract and see what my son’s verdict is. I am happy they are healthy enough but my only reservation now is that I cannot see how much my son has eaten as the boxes would be cleared away at school. I would rather they were allowed to bring them home somehow so I could monitor the quantity of the contents if there was any left. After all I would rather pay £1.86 per day and know what my son was eating than £1.10 per day and he was going hungry, as he didn’t like the contents. It will be a trial and error process and I will have a go for a half term I think. My son should be honest enough with me if he knows I am just testing it out.

To be honest my views on this topic have changed quite a lot as my review has progressed. In the initial thought process I was sure I would be straight down the line – I am angry my council does not provide hot school dinners – but the more I have thought and the more I have written I realised that I am happy with the packed lunches that my son consumes. He is not hungry and is eating healthily.

My initial reactions came from my own experiences. We had free school meals as kids and it was always a hot filling meal. Maybe not quite backed by Jamie Oliver but we’re talking 20 years ago or more. When we got home we usually had soup or something like that for tea and I am sure this helped my mum budget better with the limited resources we had. If she had had to pay out for a full hot dinner for us every night we may not have eaten as well as we did and for that reason I was happy with my school dinners. They were tasty and I really enjoyed them. This premise will still apply to lots of families today and it is a shame that they cannot benefit from this. For me personally, if hot school meals were supplied, I would choose them for my son to have, but on the other side of the coin his packed lunch is sufficient for us as long as he has another healthy hot meal at night.

Summary: I would be happy either way.