It’s been 16 years since Jamie Oliver made a public enemy of Turkey Twizzlers and sparked a school dinners revolution.

But it is still a common perception - despite attempts at imposing standards - that under-par meals are being made for the masses in schools.

Is this because a health revolution in school food has gone unrecognised? Or have those standards failed to deliver?

The most recent research into compliance with the School Food Standards suggests the latter: it found that 60 per cent of secondary schools were failing to meet them.

“In other words,” reads a report, “the School Food Standards exist on paper, but not on plates.”

So, is that the fault of the standards or the implementation of them? It’s a complex question to answer.

Difficulties with School Food Standards

The current School Food Standards were introduced in 2014, as part of the School Food Plan, written by Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

Susan Jebb, professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford and chair of the Food Standards Agency (FSA), was project manager of the standards panel that introduced those guidelines.

“The big change was this move from nutrient-based standards to food-based standards,” she tells Tes.

Nutrient-based standards were introduced from 2008, largely due to the pressure of Oliver’s television campaign. They meant that caterers had to “run their menus through nutritional calculators”, Jebb says.

“That’s not practical,” she explains.

The idea in 2014 was to come up with standards that “provided more flexibility” for caterers, she says. “My vision was for anybody to be able to see if the standards are being met.”

The standards now outline how often certain food types should be served - such as “at least three different fruits and three different vegetables each week” and “no more than two portions of food that have been deep-fried, batter-coated or breadcrumb-coated each week”.

Making sure pupils eat

But as the research mentioned above points out, schools are struggling to make the standards work.

David Bowles, chief finance and operations officer at Turner Schools, a Kent-based multi-academy trust, says one reason is the difficulty of balancing the need to comply with the need to ensure that pupils are fed.

“Our goal is to make sure as many pupils eat our food as possible,” he explains.

Bowles says the trust is “pretty much fully compliant” with the School Food Standards in its primary schools. But “when we get to the secondary stage, the pupils want a say in what they eat. So the guidance is applied in a more broad-brush point of view, in order to make sure that we serve as many meals as we can”.

Bowles adds that Turner secondaries serve the “traditional school meals option, which is a well-balanced meal”. They also offer a “deli-style option” of sandwiches and baguettes, and a “street food option”, typically themed to an international cuisine.

All the food is made in-house “with fresh ingredients”, Bowles says. But he acknowledges that “if pupils decided to eat the deli option every day, they would not technically be following the school food guidance”, which states that schools should serve at least three different types of starchy food (including bread) each week.

Bowles says that among the trust’s students on free school meals, there is currently a school lunch uptake of 70 per cent. He estimates that if the trust only offered the “traditional option”, uptake would drop to between 40 and 50 per cent - “because the pupils just don’t want to eat it”.

The alternatives to the food provided by the trust, he adds, are for parents to provide a packed lunch - and research shows that less than 2 per cent of packed lunches meet the School Food Standards - or for students to visit the McDonald’s that lies “100 yards away” from one Turner academy.

Cooking ‘with deceit’

Other school leaders agree that the objective of ensuring that young people are fed often clashes with the standards, which skew choices to meals that students don’t want to eat or are not as inclusive as they could be.

For example, at Dixons Academies Trust, which has schools in the North of England, a spokesperson says: “While the standards are ambitious, they can be challenging...For example, there may not be wholegrain options available for all the bread products used in the international cuisines we offer.”

They concur with Bowles regarding the first priority being that children are full. “For any student...our priority must be ensuring they have something they are happy to eat.”

Meanwhile, Sarah Wallace, catering manager at Pioneer Educational Trust in Berkshire, says her team follow the standards closely - though with some “deceit”.

“I spend a lot of time hiding certain foods,” she says, explaining that she blends vegetables into pasta sauce and pizza dough to make sure the students meet the recommended intake.

This, Wallace explains, means that while she is following the standards, she isn’t helping students’ long-term relationship with food.

“I’m making them healthier, but if they’re only eating broccoli without realising it, maybe they do actually like it but they’re never going to choose it because they don’t know that they like it,” she says.

The problem with fish

In the special and alternative provision sector, there are similar problems.

Harriet Stirrup, lead chef at Phoenix School, a primary and secondary for autistic children and children with additional needs in East London, says her team is “pretty good with meeting the School Food Standards”.

But, she says, the main thing her team finds difficult is satisfying the requirement to serve oily fish once every three weeks “because the smell, the taste, the sight of it… it is a very sensory food. We struggle to get them to engage with it”.

She adds that it is also “really difficult” to serve wholegrain foods because the children are used to white bread or pasta.

“We have 50/50 bread sometimes,” she says, “but most of the time we don’t do anything wholemeal because it’s hard to get them to engage with something that doesn’t look completely white.”

Stirrup’s priority has to be getting the children to eat, she says. “The School Food Standards expect every child to eat everything every day, and it’s just not possible.”

The need for monitoring

Compliance with the School Food Standards is mandatory but it is not monitored in England - which Stephanie Slater, founder and chief executive of School Food Matters, says is a major problem.

“It means we’re seeing a wide inconsistency in quality,” she explains. “There are lots of examples of schools serving incredible food made by passionate and skilled catering teams every day. But this needs to be the standard in all schools.”

Jebb at the FSA agrees: “If you don’t monitor standards effectively, they’re just guidance.”

She adds that in 2014 her committee “was very clear that we needed to check these were being enforced. Sadly, that hasn’t happened. In reality, the impression is that [compliance] is patchy”.

There is a precedent for school food monitoring in Scotland, explains Jayne Jones, a former senior manager at Argyll and Bute Council, where she oversaw school food.

In Scotland, school food monitoring is “undertaken as part of the school inspection system”, Jones tells Tes, explaining that “health and nutrition inspectors are employed specifically to look at not just the food provision but the whole school approach to food” - which involves inspecting compliance with the school food standards.

Might a similar approach be possible in England to lift standards?

This year the FSA ran a pilot scheme to test whether food safety officers - who already carry out hygiene inspections - could also monitor the School Food Standards. The pilot “mostly seemed to work”, Jebb says, but more work needs to be done on what happens to schools that are not meeting the standards.

“People say, ‘What gets measured gets done,’ but that’s not necessarily the case. You could measure and monitor it, but unless there’s some ramification, so what?”

Jebb adds that “the Food Standards Agency would welcome the opportunity to work with government to think about how best we do this”.

Meanwhile, this week the National Governance Association, in partnership with the DfE, launched a free online module to advise governing boards on their role in terms of meeting the standards. This should include “developing a policy and monitoring the offer”.

The DfE would not comment specifically on the introduction of monitoring, but a spokesperson said: “We encourage all schools to promote healthy eating and provide nutritious food and drink, and all maintained schools and academies must comply with the School Food Standards.”

They added: “As with all government programmes, we will keep our approach under review.”

But would holding schools to account on the standards be fair? As those above have said, at secondary getting students to eat at all must be the priority.

And many argue that the standards themselves need closer attention.

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A decade on from their introduction, the standards have not been evaluated, although “the committee were very clear that they needed to be”, Jebb says.

Shona Goudie, policy and advocacy manager at the Food Foundation, explains that since 2014 the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition has changed its guidance to recommend that we eat less sugar and more fibre.

Goudie says this should be reflected in the standards, adding that lowering the sugar content of school food is “really important because we’re seeing incredibly high levels of dental decay in children”.

And Greta Defeyter, professor of developmental psychology at Northumbria University, echoes many of the trusts cited above, arguing that the standards should be updated to “ensure a vast variety of dietary preferences; for example, to make sure halal, kosher and vegan food is included”.

She says she is currently researching how inclusive the standards are for students with special educational needs and disabilities, and suggests that new guidelines on how food is presented may help autistic pupils, for example.

Rising food costs

But even if the standards were fit for purpose, there is plenty of evidence that schools would still struggle to meet them - not just because of pupil preference but also because of funding.

In a survey carried out by the Local Authority Caterers Association (LACA) in 2023, 77 per cent of respondents said they had to change their menus because of price increases and food shortages, while 19 per cent were concerned that meeting the School Food Standards was becoming increasingly difficult.

Anita Brown, LACA’s immediate past chair and service manager at Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council, tells Tes that a more recent survey shows the situation is now worse.

“The majority of respondents have said they’re really concerned that they may not be able to maintain the standards over the next three to six months,” Brown says.

“A lot of them are saying, ‘Yes, we are still meeting the standards but by the skin of our teeth.’”

“It’s an incredibly difficult balancing act of trying to get healthy, nutritional food at a cost point that’s affordable”

And it’s not just rising food costs that affect budgets. With new pay rates for local government employees announced in October (as well as an increase in the minimum wage and employer National Insurance contributions announced in the autumn Budget), overall catering costs continue to climb.

Using data on these increases from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, school food campaigner Andy Jolley has calculated that an average primary school will see catering costs rise by at least £4,000 per year.

“It’s an incredibly difficult balancing act of trying to get healthy, nutritional food to children at a cost point that’s affordable for schools and for parents,” Jolley says.

Brown concurs: “If your overall budget isn’t getting bigger but you have to pay staff more, something else has to give. We need action on funding to avoid a decline in school food quality.”

Currently school food is funded at £2.53 per meal (a figure that includes the raw ingredients as well as staffing and overheads).

LACA is calling on the government to increase this to £3. Meanwhile, School Food Matters recently found that the “true cost” of a school meal is £3.16.

Increasing food prices are part of the reason why Stirrup, of Phoenix School, struggles to fulfil the standards to the letter, she says. “Salmon and mackerel are the accepted oily fish. But salmon is extortionate. And mackerel? Very few students will eat it.”

So the challenge is “managing how much money you waste versus how much the children actually engage with it”, she says.

Stirrup explains that in the past academic year she was £10,000 over budget on food, because “food costs went up 30 per cent last October”.

To avoid that in future, she says she must compromise on quality: “If you’re having to look at budgets really hard, then you’re going to be spending more on cheaper carbohydrates just to make sure that the children are eating enough to keep them full in the afternoon.”

‘Unsustainable’ subsidies

Bowles, of Turner Schools, tells Tes that because of a shortage of funding for meals, the trust subsidises them from elsewhere in its budget to avoid having to pass on increasing meal costs to parents.

“We subsidise the catering company to ensure that the quality is still there,” he says, adding that the money comes from the trust’s general annual grant or the pupil premium fund.

This subsidising is “unsustainable”, says Brown at LACA - and it threatens to row back any progress that caterers have made since the School Food Standards were introduced a decade ago.

Put this all together and it appears that we have School Food Standards that are mandatory yet not checked, that most agree need tweaking at best, and that secondary schools in particular are unable to deliver on.

This comes on top of financial pressures in primary causing issues for catering (as well as leaving kitchen facilities struggling) and at a time when Labour is pushing breakfast clubs, expanding the catering that schools are expected to provide.

The government’s Budget announcements last week offered hope that more attention would be given to school buildings. But it would appear that there needs to be a similar focus on helping schools to get the right guidelines, with the right funding, to deliver the vital meals young people eat inside those buildings.

Ellen Peirson-Hagger is senior writer at Tes

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