Getting the contract right: East Sheen Primary School
19 Mar 2013
Seven years ago, the lunch service at East Sheen Primary was truly dreadful. Our school, in south west London, was locked into a contract with a substandard local authority caterer. The food was awful, and take-up correspondingly low: only 40 of our pupils out of 400 ate school meals, even though nearly 60 children were entitled to them free of charge.
Helen Colbert, our head teacher, set up a working party of teachers, governors and parents to turn things around. With the help of a parent with legal expertise, we managed to serve notice on our catering contract without incurring a penalty. We then drafted a “request for proposal” for the school’s next contract – in other words, a highly specific, legally-binding list of all the things we wanted from our caterer.
Our request was ambitious. As well as cooking healthy, delicious food, our new contractor would have to source ingredients locally, help raise funds to refit the kitchen and support our school’s kitchen garden. The contract was won by Pride Catering from Surrey, and the result was dramatic.
Within the first year, take-up shot up to 70%. Today, 320 of our 400 children eat school lunches. The food service makes a tidy profit, which is ploughed back in to help keep prices low and quality high. Our vegetable patch is thriving, and our school chef, Will, uses its produce to make fresh, seasonal, imaginative food. Although strictly speaking Will is employed by a private contractor, he is hugely popular with East Sheen Primary school pupils and he is a valued member of staff.
The transformation didn’t stop there. The work of Helen and her team caught the attention of School Food Matters, a local charity, which used the lessons learned to transform the food at thirty more primary schools in Richmond. These schools made the switch from serving food cooked off-site and then reheated to cooking everything from scratch. Take-up of the resulting menus – that also meet the Silver Food for Life Catering Mark – doubled.