SCHOOL MEALS

Corporate Watch
September 2005

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1. Introduction and History

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1.1 Executive summary

The provision of school meals in Britain has been prominent in the media recently, especially since Jamie Oliver's television series in early 2005 drew attention to the poor quality of food served in many schools. Attention is linked to growing concerns with obesity amongst children and an array of physical and mental health problems associated with poor diet. Concern has been accompanied by a number of initiatives from government to grass roots to improve the quality of food, or at least moderate the worst excesses of poor quality. However, the root causes of the serious problems lie in the decision to privatise school meals provision along with other local authority services in the 1980s. It was judged that such services should be open to competition to ensure costs were kept down. Campaigners have focused on poor-quality meals resulting from underpaid and poorly trained kitchen staff, lack of kitchen facilities, reliance on wholesalers providing mass-produced pre-prepared food, and the lack of fresh ingredients. These problems can be directly related to the system under 'best value' in which driving down costs becomes the major motivating factor for local authorities obliged to run meals through a private company or to remain competitive with a privatised service.

The spotlight could be turned more strongly on the large multinationals to which many services are contracted: the Compass Group, Sodexho and Initial. This would reveal the costs of a system in which school meals are run by the private sector for profit. While these private companies are benefiting, food quality and nutrition is being undermined, with children's health the casualty. Unfortunately, what has happened to school meals can serve as a useful example to highlight the negative implications of encroaching privatisation in state education, and in public services in general.

1.2 History

School meals were provided as a charitable act from the mid-nineteenth century and expanded after the 1870 Education Act, amid rising concerns about undernourished children.[1] Manchester and Bradford began to provide school meals, and lobbied central government to legislate encouraging other local authorities to follow.[2] The Liberal government elected in 1906 introduced policies dealing with the poor health of Britain's children, with an urgency brought on by fears about the nation's capability for war and colonial conquests. These policies included the 1906 entitlement for local authorities to provide food for poor children. By 1945 1.6 million meals were being provided, 14% free and the rest charged at the cost of ingredients. [3]

School meal provision was made compulsory, by the 1944 Education Act, which made it a statutory duty rather than optional entitlement for local authorities. This was part of the wide political shift of the 1940s under Labour that involved the creation of the welfare state and the NHS. In 1945 school meals were described by the Ministry of Education as having 'a vital place in national policy for nutrition and well-being of children.'[4] A 1999 survey by the Medical Research Council suggested that despite rationing, children in 1950 had healthier diets than their counterparts in the 1990s, with more nutrients and lower levels of fat and sugar.[5] Regulated nutritional standards, having been introduced in 1906, were standardised in 1966.

These provisions were removed by the 1980 Education Act of Margaret Thatcher's government. The act removed the requirement to provide school meals of any nutritional standard and statutory requirement to provide meals other than for eligible children of families on income support. Additionally, school meals were opened up to Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT), obliging local authorities to open services to private sector competition and award contracts to the most 'competitive' offer. It 'transformed a free education service into a commercial operation.'[6] Spending cuts increased charges, and half a million children lost the right to free meals, so uptake fell rapidly.[7] Schools which had provided set meals switched to free choice cafeteria systems, with services outsourced to private companies. The Social Security Act of 1986 further ended entitlement to free meals for thousands of children.[8]

What was lost in the 1980s was not just the right to school meals, but the principle of school meals as a state-owned public service, an activity of schools, and part of children's education. The companies that stepped in, and local authorities still owning services but now needing to compete with those companies, were driven not by concerns with children's health and education, but by requirements of competition, profit and cost-cutting measures which were bound to impact on the nutritional quality and social role of school meals.

Since 1997, changes have come in very slowly, but the principle of privatised service has remained intact. 'Best Value' has replaced the system of CCT. Value is often interpreted in narrowly financial terms, and money spent on managing centralised supplies of food that can be easily assembled by cheap labour, rather than on good quality ingredients or on labour. 'Best Value' is open to an interpretation that promotes health, environmental and social concerns, but this is not how it is generally used.[9] Nutritional standards were reintroduced in 2001, but these were not considered to be sufficient by nutrition experts (see section 2.1 below)[10] and came with insufficient measures for enforcement,[11] so have not had such a high impact. In the words of the Soil Association, a lot more is needed to reverse the damage caused by 'twenty years of savage under-investment.'[12]

Another recent change has been the fragmentation of services - in 2002 80% of Local education authorities (LEAs) provided an authority-wide service, compared with nearly all in 1995. The amount of authorities with in-house providers ell from 70% to 55% in these years. 23% of LEAs now have a fully privatised service.[13]

In the last few years, attention has been refocused on health issues, in particular obesity. Public interest in the nutritional quality of meals served to children was sparked off in February 2005 by the television programme of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, bringing the issue into the May 2005 general election.[14] With this came a new set of government initiatives, including a pledge of 50p per day per primary child (60p per secondary child) for ingredients; a new School Food Trust; new minimum nutritional standards; and powers for OFSTED to inspect school meals.[15]

Recent public concern has called for new initiatives and regulation, but has not sufficiently challenged the very structure of provision, which has seen school meals open to commercialisation and often taken over by multinational companies.

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References
[1] www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/9f788a2d1160a9e580256a71002a3d2b/65a3b4988446e96280256db400380e4c/$FILE/Healthy%20local%20organic%20school%20meals.pdf (viewed 09.09.2005)
[2] Derek Gillard, 'Food for Thought: child nutrition, the school dinner and the food industry', www.dg.dial.pipex.com/educ25.shtml (viewed 09.09.2005)
[3] ibid.
[4] The Soil Association, 'Food for Life: Do our children need healthy food?' 2003 p.36
www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/9f788a2d1160a9e580256a71002a3d2b/65a3b4988446e96280256db400380e4c/$FILE/Healthy%20local%20organic%20school%20meals.pdf (viewed 09.09.2005)
[5] Derek Gillard, 'Food for Thought: child nutrition, the school dinner and the food industry', www.dg.dial.pipex.com/educ25.shtml (viewed 09.09.2005)
[6] The Soil Association, 'Food for Life: Do our children need healthy food?' 2003 p.5
www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/9f788a2d1160a9e580256a71002a3d2b/65a3b4988446e96280256db400380e4c/$FILE/Healthy%20local%20organic%20school%20meals.pdf (viewed 09.09.2005)
[7] ibid. p.36
[8] Derek Gillard, 'Food for Thought: child nutrition, the school dinner and the food industry', www.dg.dial.pipex.com/educ25.shtml (viewed 09.09.2005)
[9] Kevin Morgan & Adrian Morley, 'Relocalising the food chain: the role of creative public procurement' The Regeneration Unit, Cardiff University www.organic.aber.ac.uk/library/RelocalisingProcurement.pdf (viewed 03.08.2005)
[10] The Soil Association, 'Food for Life: Do our children need healthy food?' 2003 p.37
www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/9f788a2d1160a9e580256a71002a3d2b/65a3b4988446e96280256db400380e4c/$FILE/Healthy%20local%20organic%20school%20meals.pdf (viewed 09.09.2005)
[11] ibid. p.39
[12] ibid. p.37
[13] UNISON, 'School meals in the 21st century', Unison Education Services, London 2002 www.unison.org.uk/acrobat/12416.pdf (viewed 09.09.2005)
[14] Mike Baker, 'Second helping of school dinners,' BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4474753.stm (viewed 15.06.2005)
[15] Tania Branigan, Felicity Lawrence, Matthew Taylor, 'Kelly passes school dinner test,' The Guardian 31.03.2005 http://education.guardian.co.uk/schoolmeals/story/0,15643,1448855,00.html (viewed 15.06.2005)