School dinners? Bring em on!

School dinner ladies know better than anyone how hard it is to get children to eat healthily. Responsible for an annual budget of £1 billion, they cook around three million meals every day and, as a study by the consumer group Which? revealed last year, most of their customers would prefer them to dish up pizza, chips and chicken nuggets than salad and fruit. However, many schools are trying to explore healthier options — and when Kidbrooke School in Greenwich decided that it was time to unplug the deep fat fryer, they found that they had an unexpected ally.

Nearly two years after he attempted to turn 15 unemployed young people into gourmet chefs in the series Jamie's Kitchen, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is spending a term in Kidbrooke's kitchens to bring about a similar revolution in the menu. Jamie's experiences at Kidbrooke will form the basis of his latest series, Jamie's School Dinners, to be broadcast in spring 2005. An in-depth look at school meals, Jamie argues it is more than just the latest in a long line of celebrity chef programmes.

"It's a serious issue," he says. "Maybe it's something to do with having kids — my oldest starts nursery in September — but as you learn more about the subject, you start to realise that many kids around the country don't really get great cooking when they come home. For some kids, school lunch is potentially their only hot meal of the day, and too much of the food that gets served is turkey burgers and spicy wings."

Changing the menu has not been easy. Jamie has had to find a balance between healthy eating and children's conservative tastes — "If they see vegetables, they go mad," he says — but he has already started to work out a basic solution to the problem. "They don't notice the veg if it's mixed up in something like a tomato ragout," he continues. "I want them to eat better stuff. Whether they know it or not is another thing."

One of the biggest problems Jamie is likely to face is adapting to a stringent budget. According to a survey from the Local Authority Caterers' Association, the average cost of a school dinner in England is £1.37. This leaves little room for manoeuvre for a chef who says that he's used to spending £17 on a bottle of olive oil and £2 on a single scallop.

Despite the financial restrictions and the fear and loathing which normally greets fresh vegetables, however, Jamie says that he is making good progress. And he insists that his attempt to makeover Kidbrooke's menu is not an implicit criticism of the dinner ladies or the school.

"The dinner ladies have astounded me," he says. "They've been really open-minded, and they run a tight ship and a massively busy service. What I've got to do is to find out what else they can do."

Staff at many other schools have already found that out for themselves. Five years ago, school chef Jeanette Orrey decided to change the menu at East Bridgford St Peter's Church of England Primary School in Nottinghamshire after becoming disillusioned with her job and with the food that she was cooking. "I felt that the food we were serving the children was not what I would have served to my own children," she says. "I knew that we could do better."

Jeanette's response was to source the food herself from local suppliers. "I started with the meat," she remembers. "I went round speaking to the farmers and visiting farm shops to see if they were interested in supplying us." By April 2000, Jeanette was in full control of food being supplied to the school. The quality of the meals began to improve, and the number of children eating school dinners rather than bringing in a packed lunch rose by 25 per cent.

Healthy eating has become part of the curriculum, too. "When the children designed a healthy yoghurt last year, they filled it with Smarties. This year, it was full of fruit," says Jeanette. "It's amazing how much their attitudes have changed."

Jeanette estimates that St Peter's spends around 70p per child each day. Although the school receives no financial help beyond the dinner money children bring from home, there are grants available to support schools who want to offer healthier food.

Blackawton Primary School in Devon received £4,000 last year from the Soil Association after head Jenny Kinder decided it was time the school started offering better food. The school consulted with parents to devise healthier menus, cancelled its contract with its supplier and struck out on its own.

"The Soil Association heard about what we were doing and gave us the grant," explains Mrs Kinder. "They stipulate that meals must provide 50 per cent of the nutritional needs of the children, 50 per cent must be produced within 50 miles of the school, 30 per cent of it is organic and 75 per cent unprocessed, so we worked with a local organic food supplier. We can't afford organic meat but we do use locally produced meat, and we cut down on processed food as much as possible."

Between 70 and 90 of Blackawton's 120 pupils now eat school dinner each day, and Mrs Kinder says that now the school isn't tied to a single supplier, the catering staff are free to be more creative. "We're in a rural area," she explains, "so we say to parents that if they've got a glut of carrots or windfall apples, bring them in so we can use them."

Jamie Oliver would be proud — but back at Kidbrooke, he admits that he's having a few sleepless nights, not least because part of his brief is to get his new-look school dinners adopted across the whole of Greenwich LEA. "I've done some mental stuff, like cooking for the royal family, but nothing has ever stolen my sleep like this has," he laughs.

"I want this to be a memo that goes round the country to show people what's going on with school dinners and what we can do — but the only way it can happen is through the kids."

Only time will tell whether those same kids are prepared to forego chips for chick peas and tuck into Thai curry rather than spicy wings, but the next time you collect your lunch from the canteen, take a closer look at your plate — you might be surprised by what you find.

Healthy eating

The Government recommends that everyone should eat at least five portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables each day. A good diet, rich in fruit and vegetables, can help protect against cancer and heart disease, which account for 60 per cent of all early deaths in England. For more information, visit www.nutrition.org.uk

All Government advice about healthy eating in schools will be brought together in one place later this year when a new Healthy Eating Blueprint is made available. The initiative, recently announced by Schools Minister Stephen Twigg, will bring together all of the Government's work on a healthy diet for children. The Blueprint will outline the issues schools should be addressing, give advice on the best ways to deal with these and direct schools to further information.

This content was published in July 2004 and may not reflect current policy