Transforming school lunches

By Alex Wareing, Business Manager, The Pointer School

Did your school teach you the difference between celeriac and celery? Did you learn why tomatoes taste better in the summer? Or the difference between organic and fairtrade? In most schools in the UK, children spend more time each week eating than they do studying geography, history or art, and yet remarkably little learning seems to go on in this time, and even less time and effort are spent planning for it. What a wasted opportunity. 

Attend an Open Day at any independent school, and they will tell you about their outstanding teachers, their state-of-the-art facilities. But how many of them mention the lunches? If we pride ourselves on having inspirational geography teachers, insightful historians and creative arts educators, why don’t we employ the best chefs? If our classrooms, science labs and music studios brim with the latest technology and innovations, why don’t our kitchens? In 2005, less than a mile from our school, Jamie Oliver brought nutrition in schools into the national conversation with his School Food Fight campaign. 18 years later, the turkey twizzlers may be gone but progress has stagnated. As budgets have tightened, focus has waned and the industry is increasingly looking to outsourcing as a solution. Vast trays of food are brought in from faceless industrial estates and reheated.

Is this really the best we can do for our children? At The Pointer School, we believe in a better solution. Thoughtful freshly made meals, crafted from the finest produce every day, with love and care by the best professionals. Three years ago we embarked on an ambitious journey to revolutionise our relationship with lunchtimes. Our aim was unashamedly bold: we wanted to make not simply better food, but better eaters.

We started by hiring one of the country's top chefs, who had previously held two Michelin stars at legendary restaurant Le Gavroche. He set about transforming our food, providing nutritious meals that power learning and inspire wonder, introducing our pupils to dishes such as “sole fillet veronique” and “Imam Bayildi”. In doing so no stone was left unturned - we looked at everything from equipment and techniques to ingredients and sourcing.

Ingredients matter. They are the raw resources that power children's learning. Wherever possible, we use organic ingredients. Our produce is delivered daily from some of the finest suppliers in the country. Our meat comes from the Rhug estate in Wales, one of the original all-organic meat farms in the country and holder of a royal warrant. Fish is delivered fresh from day boats in St Ives. Our fresh fruit and vegetables come direct from New Spitalfields, Europe's leading horticultural market, supplied by trusted farmers from Kent and Lancashire. 

But as every parent knows all too well, children are notoriously picky eaters! It’s all very well to serve up haddock Basquaise, or an autumn vegetable casserole, but if children push this labour of love untouched, we might as well have served them turkey twizzlers. Our solution was to launch an innovative pastoral food program, which works with children to help them expand their culinary horizons and develop a more joyous relationship with food. The aim is to encourage them to be open-minded before deciding if they like or dislike food, while accepting that we all have culinary preferences. Each week, the children are introduced to one or two new items of food that they may not have tried before. They see the food and are given the opportunity to explore and discuss the sensory stimulation of the food, from its smell to its texture. They then learn about how the food is grown and work with our Chef who demonstrates how it is prepared. Once children understand what they are eating, where it comes from and how it's prepared they are willing to engage and try new things.

Key to our success is that our food program is child-led. Menus are revised on a half-termly basis, taking account of the feedback provided by the school council and by what the pupils eat more and less of each day. We started to notice that despite being high quality and organic, pupils were not enjoying our sausages as much as we had hoped. We worked with a local sausage supplier, Heaps of Greenwich, to create a series of child-friendly recipes. Our school council then held a tasting session and selected the perfect banger. We now proudly serve our own special Pointer School sausage, which parents can even buy in the local butchers.

Making better eaters is so much wider than just ingredients and menus. Schools need a panoramic view of food and eating. Parents entrust their children to us so that we can teach them the joys of Shakespeare, the wonder of chemistry and the magic of mathematics. We should teach them to eat well, understand where our food comes from and how it is produced, so that learning about food is not isolated to the dining room. At Pointers, we weave learning about healthy eating and food through our curriculum. For example, in Year 2’s topic 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' they learn about where different food comes from, the importance of Fairtrade, and then design and produce a chocolate bar to raise money for Fairtrade. We have a gardening club that grows vegetables and herbs that the chef prepares for the children to try. Enthusiastic pupils also have the chance to work in small groups with one of our chefs in an afterschool cookery club to really hone their cookery skills.

Our approach is having profound effects. A recent ISI inspection noted that "pupils of all ages make well-informed choices and are encouraged to do so through a variety of initiatives... pupils understand the need for a healthy diet and are delighted to have the school council's recommendations realised by their chef". A parent recently contacted the school to note, "Not only does my child now love celery, he has become more open to trying new foods - and foods that he thought he didn't like, he's giving another go. Last night he proudly announced that he had tried hummus 'in my special food group' and scoffed at his brother refusing to try it.”

At The Pointer School we believe we are building a school food model for the future, where great ingredients, skilled chefs and a child-led pastoral approach to eating become the norm. After all, shouldn't learning to eat be a part of every child's education?