Learning to love lunch:
The tale of school dinners at Stoke Row Primary School.

Steve McTegart, Headmaster of Stoke Row Primary School, used to actively discourage parents from letting their children eat school dinners. Now he is telling everyone how wonderful the food is.

The turnaround is down to the combined efforts of the school, Ann Gass, one of its Governors, and Paul Clerehugh, chef/proprietor of one of the village pub/restaurants, the widely acclaimed The Crooked Billet.

“When I first came here in January 2003, I was appalled by the school lunches,” says Steve McTegart. “It was also clear that the children and parents weren’t keen on them either.” In those bad old days, Stoke Row School used to serve just 40 school dinners a week.

In spite of months spent negotiating with County Facilities Management, the arm of Oxfordshire County Council which used to provide Stoke Row School with its lunches, the school felt that it had got nowhere. Steve, his staff and the School’s Governors, felt that they had no choice but to start looking at alternative options.

With two children already at the school, Parent Governor, Ann Gass, was aware of the poor quality of the lunches being provided and had stopped her children eating them. The food was dried up and congealed and often there wasn’t enough of it to feed the few children prepared to try.

When Ann did finally persuade someone from the suppliers to visit the school and see what they were providing, the response came back that the food was fine. “Apparently it ‘ticked all the right boxes’”, she recalls. The problem was that it didn’t tick the most important box of all - it was practically inedible.

That was when she decided to go and speak to The Crooked Billet’s Paul Clerehugh. “When Paul said, ‘Yes, I can do that’,” recalls Ann, “I almost fell off my chair. I was really, really excited.”

As a result of that conversation, the school now serves up to 70 meals a day - in a school with 87 children. The project has been more successful than anyone involved could have believed possible.

“What we are giving the children now is a proper ‘dining experience’,” says Steve. Whereas before, the children ate off plastic trays similar to those used in prisons, the school has invested in proper crockery and cutlery and the children now sit in mixed age groups and eat a wide variety of foods, many of which they have never experienced at home. While chips and sausages are still favourites, cheesey polenta and oriental vegetables, for example, have been unexpected successes.

Not all meals go down equally well: one child excuses himself from eating anything that looks too suspicious by explaining “I’m vegetarian to that.” On the whole however, new foods are cautiously welcomed and a strategy of placing children who actively like a dish near those who need convincing has been a success.

“No child is made to eat the food,” explains Ann Gass, “They are given the opportunity to try and the best incentive to try something different is when one of the child’s own peers is saying to them: ‘This is really nice.’” In addition, the teaching staff often eat with the children, acting as role models for good manners and providing further encouragement for the more timid gourmets.

For Paul Clerehugh of the Crooked Billet, the responsibility of educating the taste buds of the next generation has been hugely rewarding: though not without its problems. From his perspective, the ball started rolling when Ann Gass called on him in early 2005 to ask him to come and see the children’s lunches and give his comments.

“When I got there,” says Paul, “there were six children eating their lunch and the food was really poor.” He took one look at the food and thought: “There’s no way I would feed my daughters that rubbish.”

It was an emotional response, recalls Paul: “I don’t know if that’s the way Ann planned it but that’s the way it worked.” Before he knew it, he was knee deep in the paperwork required to allow him to proceed.

There has been so much bureaucracy involved that Paul has had to hire a consultant to help ensure that The Crooked Billet meets all its obligations. “We have been in business in Stoke Row for sixteen years, and we meet or exceed all of the environmental health regulations,” he says, “but this process reduced some of my staff to tears.”

An indication of the size of the problem is the fact that each ingredient used in a meal has to be analysed in a laboratory before it can be fed to the children. Paul has deliberately kept ingredients as close to nature as possible, but at one point he says, officials were asking him to have the carrots he was proposing to use sent for analysis. He points out that this is the reason that many school meal providers use so much tinned food. By doing so, the responsibility for providing the sourcing information is passed on to the manufacturers.

The Crooked Billet managed to win the argument about the absurdity of sending carrots for analysis, but it still has to provide information on the sort of carrot, the sort of pan it is cooked in and the water used to cook it – imagine having to do that before you could feed your family. . . .

What has made the Stoke Row School project worthwhile for Paul (whose children don’t actually live in the School’s catchment area), is going up to the school to see the children having their lunch. “I’ve taken my chefs to see the children eating and looking so happy. It’s so motivating for us,” he says. It’s an experience that is guaranteed to provoke tears of a different kind.

This piece was originally published in The Oxford Times earlier this year http://www.theoxfordtimes.net/limitededition/