Jamie Oliver’s TV programme calling for healthy food in schools
may have ended, but for the school kitchen staff the battle has only just
begun
The school meals revolution
“People now realise you can’t just feed children junk food,”
says UNISON member Doris Stedman, who has become one of Jamie Oliver’s
pioneers for healthy eating in schools.
“Everyone was fed up with all the processed stuff, it all just looked
and tasted the same.”
Stedman works as a unit manager at Brooklands School in Greenwich and
the celebrity chef’s mission to improve school dinners in her borough
has turned her job upside down. But it’s a change she has welcomed
wholeheartedly. Oliver’s attempts to introduce healthy eating to
all the schools in the Greenwich borough have been documented in a Channel
4 series that ended on 16 March.
Huge audiences have tuned in on Wednesday evenings to watch Jamie swear
in the kitchen, despair at the children and coax the council to come on
board.
It’s been an uphill battle, with the children initially rejecting
the food he cooks and demanding a return to the burger, chips and pizza
diet they have become used to.
But he was never going to give in easily – too much is at stake.
School meals provide one third of children’s daily nutritional intake,
but cost-cutting means most of the meals are based on processed, factory-made
food such as the notorious turkey twizzlers.
The TV programme has succeeded in getting the general public passionate
about what we give our children to eat, but very obvious that the project
would not have got off the ground without the support of the school kitchen
staff.
In the first school, Oliver worked alongside the formidable head cook
Nora Sands, who was at first dubious about his plans but soon became indispensable
to his campaign.
Oliver has been working and filming in Greenwich schools since May 2004
– initially at Kidbrooke secondary school with Sands and then, from
October 2004, with an increasing number of schools across the borough.
The new menus have been rolled out to Stedman’s school in the past
four weeks.
“It’s been a total change, we knew it would be difficult and
it has been a lot of hard work,” she says. “The new menus
have turned our days upside down. We’re no longer using pre-prepared
meals, we’re having to do lots more preparation and prepare a day
ahead and deal with twice as many suppliers.”
In order to get Stedman and all the other kitchen staff in Greenwich on
board Oliver arranged for them all to spend three days out of their half-term
holiday at a boot camp in Aldershot. It was here that he showed them the
new menus he wanted served and got them to do trial runs on the soldiers.
In the first week of cooking to the new menus, Stedman had a chef to support
her and in the second week one of the army sergeant’s from Aldershot
came to assist.
“The quality of the ingredients is so much better, we’re now
serving lots of fruit and veg,” she said. “Everyone in the
kitchen is on board and we’re all really keen to make it work.”
By the end of this summer term, virtually all of the 80 schools that use
Greenwich council’s in-house catering contractor will be serving
the new menus.
But Oliver’s crusade has not convinced government to let him take
the campaign nationwide and many wider issues still need to be addressed.
“We’ve been banging our head against a brick wall with school
meals,” said UNISON member and school meals worker Jenny Hogg.
Fortunately her local authority, Nottinghamshire County Council, has decided
to return to traditional meals that were available before compulsive competitive
tendering was introduced. But Hogg points out that many schools will struggle
to make the changes as they no longer have proper kitchen facilities and
the school day does not always allow for a proper lunch hour.
“Local authorities have to think about what they are going to do,
we need to catch these children when they’re young as their diet
can ruin their health.
“Watching the programme made me realise how frightening the situation
is, sometimes we have children here who don’t know how to use a
knife and fork.”
Hogg points out that if real change is to be achieved the food itself
is only one factor out of many that needs to be tackled.
Cost came up as a major issue in Oliver’s TV programme and he spent
much time calling for funding in the borough to rise from 37p a day per
pupil to 50p.
UNISON’s chair of the school meal forum Christine Bailey agrees
that in many areas across the country funding is inadequate for providing
a proper school meal and staff need to be given proper training.
“We need to bring back proper cooking which means cooking from scratch,
“ she says. “In the past, we had proper training for staff
but cooks who come in now have such minimal training that they don’t
know how to put a balanced meal together – they just don’t
have enough experience,” explains Bailey.
Oliver’s ‘Feed Me Better’ campaign backs the call for
training staff and has made it a key part of its manifesto.
Low pay is also recognised, with Oliver’s website stating 110,000
people work in school kitchens and each earns an average of £82
a week.
“In his programme, you see the intense work the kitchen staff have
to put in, how badly paid they are and how they receive inadequate training,”
said UNISON national officer Christine Lewis.
Lewis says privatisation is responsible for much of the decline in the
quality of school meals.
“Private contractors have been allowed to cut costs at the expense
of the meals provided,” she says. “A best value regime must
be based on quality and, up to now, this hasn’t been a major criterion.
“You just need to look at France and Italy, where they spend a lot
more on school food, and in these countries contractors wouldn’t
dare serve up the food they serve here.”
Oliver may have succeeded in getting turkey twizzlers off the menu, but
there’s clearly still a long way to go.
A seminar is being held for UNISON members who work in school
catering services on the 1 June 2005 . Contact your branch secretary for
further details or email UNISON's
education unit.
Story by Nathalie Towner
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