Minutes:
Question
School meals are chosen by pupils from a menu produced by Caterlink on behalf of Wokingham Borough Council who manages the contract.
Could the relevant Councillors and Officers, please, insist on two small but important changes to the menu?
Firstly:
Secondly:
For many children, school lunch is the only solid meal of the day. It needs to be nutritious and balanced.
In the past it was believed that children needed regular meat to provide protein and iron, but research shows that lentils, beans and quorn provide these and other nutrients in abundance and without saturated fat. Therefore, I am asking for a healthier menu, not an impoverished one.
It is also vital that, every day of the week, every child can select a meal which respects their ethics, religion, culture and food allergies.
Meat has a big carbon footprint. This change will make a small but significant contribution to the Borough’s carbon reduction target.
Answer
I absolutely agree that school dinners are an important meal to keep pupils sustained.
The catering company and WBC agree a menu which is submitted to the schools to consider at the beginning of each year. Each school understands the demographics of its children. Therefore, it is they who can make changes, taking into account their children’s ethics, religion, culture and food allergies. We will pass on your suggestions to the schools to extend meat free Mondays and daily vegan choice. Schools do promote healthy dieting and now have much about climate control in their curriculums. Children today, like many other things, have a better awareness of these subjects than their parents and it is the children who will choose what they consume, hopefully healthily.
I would also just add that earlier this month there was the first Schools’ Council and I would say for anyone that witnessed it, including the ex-Prime Minister Teresa May, they were a very erudite and eloquent bunch of people and they were very forthright in their ideas going forward.
Supplementary Question
At present under the National Food Standards for school children schools are obliged to offer meat three times a week, fish once a week and diary every day. In view of what you were just saying about pupils, schools and the Council making the choices will the Council please lobby the Government to remove these rules and give councils and individual schools autonomy as academies have?
Supplementary Answer
I think it is within your power, within your national vote, to lobby your MPs to get national Government to change its policies. We have certain powers over schools. Schools are academies which are independent of the local authority in this respect, and we don’t quite have that command and control that we used to have in the past. Certainly, we can mention it to Government in the future.