A QUIET revolution is gently bubbling away in school kitchens and classrooms. Students feel the effects from desk to dining table — and some Church of England schools are part of this nutritional “new wave”.
Many people still remember school dinners of the 1960s and ’70s — for some, like a Hammer horror encounter — leaving them with a fear of cabbage. The ’80s and ’90s turned school canteens into fast-food outlets offering pizza, fries, and fizzy drinks. A 1999 medical survey suggested that children in the ’50s had more nutrious diets — even during rationing.
Since then, we have had Jamie Oliver, the School Food Plan, and Marcus Rashford intervening on behalf of school nutrition. This month, the Government has named and claimed its own “school cooking revolution”, in its recent White Paper Levelling Up the United Kingdom.
To deal with two of the biggest contributors to ill health, poor diet, and obesity, Westminster is taking up some of the recommendations from Henry Dimbleby’s independent review of the food chain in the UK, the National Food Strategy, published last July, which included five recommendations for changing school food.
Policy announcements that the Government has made include: schools to share food “statements” on their websites; brand new content for the curriculum; a pilot of new training for governors and academy trusts on a “whole-school approach to food”; an aim for every child leaving secondary school “to know at least six basic recipes that will support healthy living into adulthood”: and a joint project between the DfE and Food Standards Agency to “test a new approach for local authorities in assuring and supporting compliance with school food standards”.
ALREADY leading a humble part of school food subversion is Hans Louis. Coming from the beaches and lagoons of Mauritius — a place that offers its own multi-cultural culinary experiences — he learned his craft in the kitchens of top London hotels. Now he is executive chef at eight C of E schools for the London Diocesan Board for Schools (Holy Trinity, St Ann’s, St Paul’s and All Hallows, and St Michael’s, in Haringey; Millbrook Park, in Barnet; St Andrew and St Francis, in Brent; St Richard’s, and Stanwell Fields, in Hounslow).
Hans Louis, executive chef at eight C of E schools for the London Diocesan Board for Schools
He oversees the catering teams, and produces the menus, costings, and food curriculum. “It’s quite busy,” he said, “but quite rewarding.” He believes that the Church of England schools in his care have adopted the right approach in delivering distinctive dishes to the children.
“We run the school kitchens like hotel kitchens: with a brigade of head chefs and kitchen porters,” Mr Louis said, speaking with the professional air of a former hotel chef. “We make fresh food and fresh bread every single day, using fresh ingredients.”
Mr Louis and his teams tune everything to restaurant pitch. They use the same food sources as the hotels — even down to a fishmonger in Devon. “We get our fish weekly from them for our Friday fish; so we can do fish and chips or baked fish,” he said. “To be using the same product as a five-star hotel, and giving that to our children, is good for them.”
He is well aware that, for many children, the plate of food that they receive at school is the only plate of food that they will consume that day; so cooking and teaching about food becomes a sacred task.
Mr Louis finds himself amid life-changing experiences in schools, as children taste such food as fresh tomatoes that they have even helped to grow in the kitchen garden. “It’s amazing to see,” he said.
CHURCH of England schoolchildren in Hackney have also joined this growing movement. Pupils from St John and St James C of E Primary School have visited Hackney School of Food: a food education hub set up by LEAP Federation of Schools with the national charity Chefs in Schools.
The School of Food head food educator, Thomas Walker, is fervent about his work. His commentary brims over with enthusiasm. A former head teaching chef at the Jamie Oliver Cookery School, he guides children on food’s journey “from soil to spoon”.
He runs the School of Food from a redundant caretaker’s cottage that has been stripped out and converted into a vast “cathedral” of cooking. From floor to exposed rafters, the building has everything from professional-grade ovens and induction hobs to height-adjustable worktops — and even a simple rainwater, harvesting system.
Surrounding the centre are beautiful gardens, orchards, growing beds, a wild-flower meadow, four chickens in a coop, and nearly 8000 bees in a hive. The complex is on the edge of two housing estates. For visitors, it’s a revelation; for him, “It’s my farm,” he says.
His temple of taste helps schools to engage with food rather than treat it as a “tick-box” on the curriculum. He welcomes groups of up to 30 students at a time — mostly from primary schools — but he is also starting to host secondary schools.
Like Mr Louis, Mr Walker has the privilege of watching children experience transformative moments daily. “We have a lesson where we bake brownies,” he explained. “But we explain they’re a treat, and we reduce the amount of sugar and replace it with beetroot.”
Of course, one child said that they hated beetroot. But, eventually, they took a bite, had a little taste, and said, “That’s not too bad.” That child ended up eating a beetroot like an apple. It was just another breakthrough — the kind they see all the time in Hackney.
Mr Walker’s young guests experience more than cookery. They are developing their reading skills as they get absorbed in recipes, using mathematics as they calculate the correct weights of ingredients, and learning the art of following instructions.
Although it is just one site, it is hoped that the School of Food could be replicated around the country. They are putting together a “toolkit” to help others learn from their journey.
SUPPORTING both Mr Louis’ and Mr Walker’s work is the charity Chefs in Schools – not surprisingly, co-founded by Mr Dimbleby. Chefs in Schools developed a model to boost school kitchens and curricula after the former Soho chef Nicole Pisani retrained a team of school cooks using the restaurant “brigade” system (a hierarchical structure featuring a head chef in command, a sous-chef as second, and an assortment of specialised chefs and assistants).
Ms Pisani taught kitchen staff to cook everything from scratch, and bake bread daily. She encouraged them to cook their favourite recipes. She took charge of the cooking curriculum, teaching children to butcher chickens and cook over fire pits.
From those origins, Chefs in Schools now reaches more than 20,000 pupils a day. It helps school kitchens to serve up “clean, healthy, inexpensive, generation-powering, mind-opening, society-changing food”. It has worked with nearly 60 schools since starting three years ago, and, in addition to London, it also works in Sheffield and Bournemouth, and is expanding into the south-west.
The chief executive of Chefs in Schools, Naomi Duncan, says, however, that their work is not about “parachuting in new chefs” like a cookery version of International Rescue. It’s about training those already on the front line, and treating them with respect. “We’ve got this incredible workforce of people who work in our school kitchens,” she said.
Ms Duncan believes that many schools are engaging with food, but there’s a long way to go. She referred to data in the 2019 Food for Life report, from the Soil Association, suggesting that 60 per cent of secondary schools were not meeting mandatory school-food standards.
“There are a lot of primary schools where standards are not being met,” she said. There is a lack of monitoring, and still a need for more schools to accept the idea of “a culture of food”. It’s not all bad, she continued, “but [there are] still too many schools where children are not being taught about food”.
THE National Food Strategy states: “Since the publication of The School Food Plan in 2014, schools have had a legal requirement to teach cookery and nutrition to all children up to the age of 14. . . By 14, all pupils should be able to ‘understand the source, seasonality and characteristics of a broad range of ingredients’ and ‘cook a repertoire of predominantly savoury dishes’. In too many schools, this is still not happening.”
Some of the inspiring food on offer through chefs working in partnership with Chefs in Schools
And, in the national curriculum for primary schools, cooking and nutrition largely sit in the Design and Technology curriculum; so schools often don’t think of food as a subject in its own right.
Chefs in Schools clearly sees a long road. They enlisted the support of culinary stars and food campaigners — from the Food And Drink TV presenter Tom Kerridge to the Bake Off judge Dame Prue Leith — to back their campaign “Give A Sausage”, highlighting the importance of quality school meals and supporting kitchen staff.
Ms Duncan shares her own memories of school meals on the charity’s website. “School food has come on a significant journey since I was in school,” she writes, highlighting the many schools who offer “excellent, quality food, made with love and care by an army of dedicated chefs, caterers and cooks”.
But she feels that there are too many schools where that same dedicated army — the people who helped to keep the country’s children fed during the pandemic — are being handed menus, recipes, and ingredients for “bland, beige, bad-for-you food”.
Ms Duncan points out that, in many secondary schools, children can eat a bacon roll for breakfast, a panini at break, and a slice of pizza at lunch, without ever coming face to face with a vegetable. One of her most striking comments to us about food was: “It’s not just about eating it — it’s about seeing it, smelling it, and hearing it”.
A look at the web of Church of England schools shows that aspirations and experiences vary. Grove C of E Primary School, in Wantage, declares simply on its website: “A hot, two-course lunch provides the essential physical and mental energy to get through the demands of a school day”, while at Newland St John’s C of E Academy, in Hull, efforts to create a healthy and sustainable food culture in the school mean that it has excelled in the Soil Association’s Food for Life awards scheme (see panel).
Ms Duncan’s words need to echo down the corridors of the 30,000 schools in the UK: “Everything children do in school is about learning. The dining room should be as much about that.”
nationalfoodstrategy.org
chefsinschools.org.uk
hackneyschooloffood.com
Clive Price is a writer, editor, PR consultant, and communications manager for the Methodist Ministers’ Housing Society. He has worked as a storyteller in schools.
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