On Tuesday 14^th June we (Evelyn, Ridwan and Violet, Year 5 school councillors) had a meeting with Kirsty, Mike, Suzy and Alison about school dinners.  Mike is the Chartwell’s contract manager and Kirsty is the Lewisham Council contract manager.  We talked about the food and the changes that we think should take place with school dinners.

Starting from Monday, the children that eat in the main hall will now use plates and trays rather than boxes, this is to stop our pizza base from going soggy.  Kirsty from Lewisham also said that these could now be batch cooked rather than kept hot. 

Ridwan asked why the meat is not halal as the children that eat halal meat have to take the vegetarian option.  Mike and Kirsty explained that the school kitchen must be either halal or non halal because of separate storage and preparation areas.  Kirsty suggested that we should consult our school community to see what the consensus was, so watch this space for our quick questionnaire.

All children are expected to have two portions of either vegetables or salad, and we want to encourage as many children as possible to eat healthily.

We are going back to the school council to develop a plan, some of our ideas are for each year group to create a piece of art around one food and describe it’s benefits (or not).  These will be displayed along the queuing area by the servery.

We think it would be good to have a system of reward for those who eat their healthy dinners (a sticker for the younger ones and tokens for the older ones) – Alison is starting this as soon as possible.  We also want to dress up as carrots and broccoli to encourage the younger children to eat us.