School canteens to wage price war with takeaways to get pupils to eat healthy lunches

By
Anthony Bond

Last updated at 4:07 PM on 29th December 2011


New plans: Schools are being urged to compete with local takeaways by offering special meal deals in a bid to encourage more pupils to eat healthy lunches

New plans: Schools are being urged to compete with local takeaways by offering special meal deals in a bid to encourage more pupils to eat healthy lunches

Schools are being urged to compete with local takeaways by offering special meal deals in a bid to encourage more pupils to eat healthy lunches.

Ministers have announced that in future, schools will be able to offer price promotions on food in the hope that more youngsters will try school dinners.

Under the current system, schools in England have to charge the same price for the same item for every pupil, unless they applied for special permission to change.

Concerns have been raised that at the same time, takeaways located close to schools target pupils by offering cheap deals on lunches.

The Department for Education said that it was lifting the restrictions allowing schools to offer discounts and deals to pupils who are unlikely to eat school lunches, or year groups where take-up of dinners usually tails off, such as the start of secondary school.

Ministers said it could mean schools offering cut price meals to a different year group each day, special prices for brothers and sisters that regularly eat at school, or £1 meal deals for new students.

Judy Hargadon, chief executive of the School Food Trust, said she had been told by many parents that they would be more likely to let their child try school dinners if they were offered a discount.

‘Price promotions do increase take-up in the long term, so while a school wanting to run a really big promotion will have to invest to cover the cost it will pay back a big return.’

Bad for health: Concerns have been raised that takeaways located close to schools target pupils by offering cheap deals on lunches which can often by unhealthy

Bad for health: Concerns have been raised that takeaways located close to schools target pupils by offering cheap deals on lunches which can often be unhealthy

Schools are also keen to help struggling families that do not qualify for free school meals, she added.

Children’s Minister Sarah Teather said that the move is ‘an important step in tackling childhood obesity and will mean schools can help hard-pressed families’.

MEAL OFFER BOOSTED TOWN’S SCHOOLS

Schools run meal services out of their core budgets so it will be down to each individual school to decide how to finance and run their kitchens.

The government hopes that by bringing in the new changes, it will increase the number of pupils eating in-house, thereby raising income and lowering costs for the school.

During a free school meal offer in Bolton, the take-up levels increased to record levels of 86 per cent for the targeted year group.

This was 37.5 per cent higher than the average take-up in all year groups in Bolton primary schools.

Their subsequent £1 meal deal produced a 69.9 per cent take up, which was 21.4 per cent higher than the norm.

Bolton’s initiatives also produced a significant increase in pupils eating statutory free meals.

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at our school the food the school canteen served was awful so I did used to go to a takeaway it’s not about the price of food it’s the quality of the food

why not just stop the kids going out at break times… anyway loads of them end up back at school late and therefore decreasing their learning time.

– Jean, Blackburn, Lancs, 29/12/2011 17:11
Yep, I agree. I used to go to a school in a poor area of my city and all many of the people in that school ate was junk, because a packed lunch was too much effort. These kids would come into school with cans of pop and sweets because they’d not had breakfast, eat chips, burgers and fast food for lunch from a local shop, before buying more sweets and junk food on the way home in lieu of a nightly meal because their parents didn’t cook.
I was actually abused and called a snob because my parents actually insisted on me taking a healthy packed lunch including yoghurt, fruit and things such as salad wraps or sandwiches and actually took time and effort to make me these lunches.

Of course children are going to go off campus during lunch breaks. Eat in the school canteen and have a revolting re-heated, cooked-to-death, meal and be nagged by teachers and school dinner ladies or go out to a local take away and have a bag of chips and some peace? No contest really.

i notice the word lazy parents is used several times here, its not lazy, its that most parents dont know how to cook a real meal.
you need to start at the begining and introduce domestic sience back into schools and then in around 20 years time we might have parents cooking real food again

what do you expect with the horrid re heated, un-nutritional, over priced garbage that serves as food in schools? It’s cheaper to eat ANYWHERE but in a school and you get more. £1.70 for a thinly cut slice of pizza? That’s what we had to pay so guess what? We went elsewhere.

A friend of mine was the school cook and cooked fab home made food but the kids just wouldn’t eat it. It had nothing to do with price. It was because most of them are the kids of single parents who had them for the benefit money and send them out to the chip shop with a quid to buy a bag of chips for their dinner. Most of these kids didn’t even know what a basic meal such as pasta + tuna+ tomato sauce was, as they had never seen a can of tuna or a tomato. Their basic diet was/is chips. Pizza and chips. Chinese and chips. Pie and chips. Lazy Mummy feeds them the minimum so that she has enough leftover for her hair extensions,manicures and push up bra so that she can look sexy and “pull” when she’s down the pub. The kids don’t really come into it – they’re just the meal ticket.

Why not Healthy Meals Free, pay through the nose for unhealthy one’s.

Our school has a huge variety of healthy foods but because we are allowed off school premises at lunch time, many students find their way to the local fast food restaurants. So there is a clue on how to stop it.

Why not try making school food TASTE nicer then kids might actually want to eat it

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