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Public Sector Sustainable Food Procurement Initiative - Greenwich school meals

Case Study: Greenwich School Meals

Region: South London

Organisation: Greenwich Council

Description: Many people in the UK are familiar with the television series portraying Jamie Oliver’s attempts to transform the school meals service in a small number of schools in Greenwich in 2004. This series was the first to seriously showcase the issues facing caterers in their challenge to encourage healthy eating habits in school dining rooms across the UK. It helped millions understand the complexity of issues and the massive level of change in attitudes and behaviours needed to drive school food provision and pupil intake patterns in a healthier direction.

More than 15,000 schoolchildren in Greenwich are now eating healthy school meals cooked each day from fresh ingredients. In a presentation to the Local Authority Catering Association National Conference in Birmingham, Greenwich Council’s catering service confirmed that virtually all of the 80 schools in Greenwich that use the Council’s in-house catering service are now serving the freshly-cooked meals developed with Jamie Oliver.

Benefits

  • The results are slow to emerge but recent figures show that primary meal uptake has increased by 2.4% and free school meal uptake in secondary schools has increased by 3.2%.
  • There have been numerous teacher reports of improved concentration and classroom performance following the introduction of ‘wholesome’ meals.
  • The publicity has also had a positive impact on the profile and image of school cooks in Greenwich. Recently 500 applications were received for 60 vacancies in school catering.
  • As a result of the new menus, the schools now use no packaged foods in their school meals other than tinned tomatoes for sauces and the occasional serving of frozen peas.
  • The improvements have been made within existing budgets for ingredients of 38-40p for primary schools and 48p for secondary schools.
Lessons learned during implementation

The main challenges to driving services in a healthier direction were:

  • Budget constraints. The council invested more than £600,000.
  • The need for new equipment. £95,000 spent on new equipment.
  • Re-training needs and in particular a short fall in craft skills. £50,000 was spent on training, including sending school cooks to army catering units to learn about food preparation.
  • Attitudes to food amongst children, parents and catering staff.
  • Perceived risk to uptake and the viability of the catering service.

Future developments

The council is now working hard to integrate these changes in school lunch provision within a whole school approach. Specifically work is in hand to involve the curriculum and mirror these changes within the wider school environment. In the future the main challenges for this health eating initiative are perceived to be its long term sustainability. Evaluation and ongoing training are seen as the key elements of this project’s ability to grow and thrive.

Further information

For more information, particularly a breakdown of the investment needed to deliver this transformed meals service, see:

 

Page published: 16 February 2006

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs