Almost a generation has passed since Jamie Oliver’s four-part Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners exposed the unhealthy reality of the food served to pupils at lunchtime, including – notoriously – fat-heavy, meat-light Turkey Twizzlers. It proved a shaming and effective intervention. His ensuing Feed Me Better campaign led the then prime minister, Tony Blair, to pledge to make school lunches more nutritious and hand schools more money to do that, given the average lunch at that time cost just 45p to make.
Problem solved? Unfortunately not.
School food has suffered at the hands of politics and economics for almost 50 years. Margaret Thatcher’s Education Act in 1980 removed the minimum nutritional requirements on school lunches. From 1988, public services, including schools, were forced to put contracts out to compulsory competitive tendering, which led to economics being prioritised over the quality of food provided.
Nutritional standards were restored under Labour, as exemplified by school food standards in 2009. But shorter breaktimes from 1995, conversion since 2000 of many state schools to academies – which are exempt from the standards – and abolition of the school lunch grant in 2011 all made it harder to provide healthy food to pupils.
The Covid pandemic led 77% of England’s schools to truncate lunch breaks further and 44% to offer less healthy food. More recently, rampant food cost inflation and increased staffing costs have made some private sector suppliers provide cheaper dishes, which are often less nutritious. Add in the growing popularity of food eaten on the move and fact that local councils are cash-strapped and the difficulties school have in ensuring pupils can access at lunchtime look very daunting.
Fortunately, Labour ministers appreciate the problems involved – 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 jointly reviewing the school food standards – the first such refresh in a decade. Their mission: ensure that what pupils eat is nutritious, given the government’s promise to “raise the healthiest generation of children ever”.
Ministers are under pressure to do something else too: to ensure the standards – whatever they say about the quality of school food – are actually enforced. D’Arcy Williams, the chief executive of Jamie Oliver-founded food charity Bite Back, said: “The real problem here is that no one is clearly responsible for enforcing school food standards – and in practice, that means they’re not being enforced at all.”
That helps explain the apparent rise in popularity of pupils using “grab-and-go” tactics at lunchtime: scooping up often-unhealthy portable food, like pizza and sausage rolls, to eat on the move while socialising with friends.
Various ideas are in the mix. Expand Ofsted’s remit so that inspectors visiting schools assess food provision as well as education quality? Give the Food Standards Agency some oversight? Trust school governors to ensure good practice? Whatever method of compliance is chosen should help ensure schools offer pupils healthy food, not junk.
