12 The Sunday Times November 14, 2021
NEWS
their school only “sometimes” served
vegetables, and 13 per cent said children
were given none at all. Schools have also
returned to selling fizzy drinks and
sweets, while Starbucks has set up fran-
chises in some schools selling paninis
and cakes. In some schools the only
greenery on offer was the cucumber in a
sandwich filling.
“Kids don’t want more chips, cheap
chicken and white bread sandwiches,”
Oliver says. “They want decent food at
school, not a return to the beige days.”
Back in those “beige days” of 2005, the
television series Jamie’s School Dinners
triggered a national debate. It exposed
how children were routinely served fizzydrinks and deep-fried food, with catering
companies spending as little as 37p per
meal on ingredients. Oliver campaigned
for salad bars, dishes to be cooked from
scratch and for children to grow vegeta-
bles in school gardens. He shamed minis-
ters into bringing in legally enforceable
standards for school food, while catering
companies such as Scolarest banned
Turkey Twizzlers — with their 37 per cent
turkey content — from school dinners.
Now, though, Oliver fears that Covid is
being cited as an excuse for limited
choice, a lack of hot-food options and a
reliance on pre-packed sandwiches.
Anisha Rahman, 18, an A-level student
at a state secondary school in Camden,north London, says the portions in the
canteen have been getting smaller since
the start of the pandemic, and that there
is often little left if she is given a late “slot”
for the canteen. “Today I just had plain
pasta; there were no main meals left, no
sandwiches left. I felt really hungry by the
end of the school day.”
Jacob Rosenberg, 17, a pupil at Cheam
High School in south London, cam-
paigned for a salad bar at his school
because he was so fed up of the
unhealthy options. When it finally
opened, however, it served only “two
types of lettuce leaves in a little pot” and
pupils boycotted it, forcing its closure.
Complaints about school food havebeen growing on the parenting website
Mumsnet, with parents saying that poor-
quality meals and snacks are costing up
to £5 a day. Caterers say they are having
to put prices up because of shortages
linked to post-Brexit supply issues.
As a result, more parents are sending
children in with packed lunches. Teach-
ers are again having to police lunch boxes
for forbidden chocolate and crisps, with
one saying he had to confiscate cold chips
left over from the family’s takeaway din-
ner the night before.
Carmen Palmer, head teacher at St
Richard’s Church of England primary
school in Richmond, southwest London,
banned packed lunches for children up
to seven, leading to arguments with
parents who said their children had a
right to bring in a lunchbox.
“When we first brought in the policy a
dad came to me and was really
aggrieved,” she says. “It was as though it
was against his civil liberties.” He was
later stunned, she says, when his child
started to eat dishes such as curry.
Ministers did not tell schools to scrap
hot meals during the pandemic but gov-
ernment advice to work from home,
combined with staff shortages, left many
schools struggling to operate kitchens.
The pandemic “did push school
kitchens back towards poor habits”,
Palmer accepts. Her caterers stopped
supplying fresh fruit, offering only fruit
yoghurt. Similar catering problems were
experienced by Nick Capstick, chief exec-
utive of the White Horse Federation of 32
schools in southwest England. He
claimed that Caterlink, which supplied
his schools, was providing cheap pro-
cessed sandwiches and rotting bananas.
“The fresh fruit — bananas mainly — were
not fresh. They were black. The sand-
wiches were cheap cheese or ham —
sometimes on white sliced bread — the
cheapest thing,” says Capstick.
He complained to the supplier and
says that “through a degree of negotia-
tion it improved quickly”.
He adds: “What it showed me was the
need for government intervention in
school food. In the wake of Covid this is a
call to arms. We need a reset of school
dinners, and if that does not happen, we
will have new problems to deal with.”
School dinners are, in his view, an
urgent health issue. He says he has seen
pupils return after lockdown overweight
and with “appalling” teeth as a result of
eating too many sugary foods. He is so
worried that he has agreed to chair a
review of school dinners to try to head off
what he believes is a looming crisis.
The working party includes head
teachers, charities backed by stars
including the footballer Marcus Rash-
ford, and caterers and suppliers.
Oliver says that efforts to tackle the
problem are too patchy to make a differ-
ence nationally, and that all children
deserve the same high standard of school
food. He wants the government to autho-
rise checks on what schools are serving
and an army of inspectors to hold schools
to account. “What gets measured gets
done,” he says. “Right now, it’s nobody’s
job to monitor and enforce school food
standards.”
Henry Dimbleby, the government’s
food tsar, has published his national food
strategy containing proposals to extend
free school meals to more children and to
inspect the quality of school dinners. The
government is due to respond to the
recommendations in January.
He is determined that the progress
made is not lost. “We have come too far to
go back to the bad old days of Turkey
Twizzlers,” he says.Fifteen years after he raised the alarm
over Turkey Twizzlers, Jamie Oliver is on
the warpath again.
The chef says a new crisis is looming
over school dinners, which since the pan-
demic began have gone back to the bad
old days. School canteens are again
dishing up burgers, American-style pizza
slices, chicken wings, chips and cakes, a
report from Bite Back, Oliver’s food
charity, will reveal this week.
Only 40 per cent of schools are meet-
ing the food standards Oliver cam-
paigned so hard for, the report reveals.
More than 30 per cent of families saidSchools are using the Sian Griffiths Education Editor
pandemic as an excuse
to once again dish up
processed food and fizzy
drinks, the chef warns
Kids
don’t
want
chips
and
white
bread
Jamie Oliver
wants an army
of inspectors to
police food
standards in
schools after a
report by his
charity found
that the quality
of meals has
declined since
the start of the
pandemicOliver bites back
as Covid brings
return of ‘beige’
school dinners
ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMESGove: I’ll listen to
Grenfell families
Michael Gove, the newly
appointed housing secretary,
has backed down over plans
to demolish Grenfell Tower
after an outcry from bereaved
families.
In the first major act in his
new role, he has promised to
take a “different approach”
from his predecessor Robert
Jenrick, whose department
was poised to announce the
demolition. A fire at the block
of flats in west London in 2017
killed 72 people.
In a letter to The Sunday
Times, Gove writes: “I am
determined to hear directly
from the community before
any decision about the future
of the tower is taken, and I
have begun that process of
engagement. Any decision on
the future of the tower will be
communicated not through
anonymous briefings, but
directly and respectfully to
those affected.”
In September, senior
Whitehall sources told thisnewspaper that the decision
to demolish the charred
remains of the building was a
“fait accompli” amid fears its
continued presence posed a
safety risk to the local
community, particularly to
the Kensington Aldridge
Academy — a secondary
school for 1,200 children in
the shadow of the tower.
Gove writes: “I make no
criticism of The Sunday
Times’s decision to report
this story, which came from
government sources.
However, the news caused
tremendous and justified
upset to many of those
bereaved by the Grenfell
tragedy, many who survived
it and many who live in the
local area.
“I am truly sorry on behalf
of the government that it ever
should have occurred. As the
new secretary of state for
housing, I write to make clear
that I will take a different
approach.”Letters, page 26Caroline Wheeler