Health Education Trust
Health Education Trust
The Health Education Trust (HET) celebrates its 10th birthday this year, but who wants to celebrate the fact that despite a decade of work and campaigning for better school meals and a higher priority for health education for our kids,there has still not been the necessary investment to make it happen big time. We have worked with many schools that have made dramatic changes and with excellent results, pioneering a whole school approach via School Nutrition Action Groups– all these schools have recognised the importance of school food and drink for their pupils' health and wellbeing and many have been prepared to invest out of school funds to improve their catering services – but at what cost elsewhere in the school?
This investment should be from the top. What has not happened is a national level recognition that quality school food and drink provision should be part of the backbone of each and every school. Furthermore, in order to equip our kids to be able to feed themselves a nutritious and enjoyable diet for life we need to see cooking skills back as part of the core curriculum too.
Only Jamie can do dinners at 37p. When cooking school dinners on a budget, it helps if you are a celebrity TV chef.
More than 2,000 headteachers have already requested the recipes used in Jamie's School Dinners. The series shows Jamie Oliver turning around the kitchens at Kidbrooke comprehensive school in south–east London, eventually providing healthy, tasty school lunches – within the government budget of 37p a head.
However, even if Oliver does publish his recipes, they are unlikely to be of much use to other schools: he has admitted that it would be impossible for a normal school to do the same unless funding is increased to at least 50p a pupil.
The celebrity chef says he had to use his existing relationships with suppliers, was able to retrain staff, and had plenty of time to experiment with different meals.
"Realistically, cooking healthily for children in schools can't be done[if things stay as they are]," he said. "We've done it and Nora [Sands,dinner lady at Kidbrooke] maintained it, but she was very good in the first place.
"The 37p point doesn't give the dinner ladies the chance to try and taste different things or to offer up different things and it doesn't pay for the amount of working time it takes to do this."
Oliver also pointed to the fact that the number of dinner ladies has halved over the past 20 years and that many school kitchens are not equipped to provide anything more than fried and processed foods.
"In Nora's kitchen there used to be 28 people, now there are 12," he said. Where have they all gone? In any case, what's the point of training people if there isn't the money to follow through and put it all on the plate? We need 50p a head at least. It's not much to ask for."
[Kidbrooke] is in London, where the infrastructure is there to make something like this happen. But in more rural areas it just is not going to happen. But while Oliver is keen to share the meal plan packs he created for the series, he is unable to publish them until he finds a sponsor willing to publish them.
The ringbinder packs include enough laminated recipes for two weeks, with three main meal options each day and different ways of providing carbohydrates and salads. The photographs were taken by David Loftus, who produces the food pictures for Oliver's own best-selling cook books.
"Our objective is to be able to give a pack of recipes to every school in the country which wants one," said Fiona Gately, programme manager for Jamie's School Dinners, which ran on Channel 4 on Wednesdays.
"We have already had over 2,000 requests from headteachers for help and advice, but unless we find a sponsor we can't do it.
"Jamie put these recipes together during the dinner ladies" training course at Aldershot army barracks. They are divided into kitchen tips and teaching stuff. This includes ideas for classroom lessons, food diaries for children and a pack of cards with facts about fruit and vegetables."
