Contact: Terry Rath, Education Officer, ext 01962 846457, [email protected]

1 Summary

1.1 This report is divided into three sections. This first section covers the background and summarises the proposed School Meal Strategy for 2005-2008. The Schools Meals Strategy is set out in Appendix I and there is a detailed financial analysis attached as Appendix II.

1.2 This section of the report also highlights the decisions which will need to be made for the strategy to be implemented.

1.3 This School Meals Strategy supports the aims 1, 5 and 6 of the Corporate Strategy, maximising Life Opportunities, improving Services and Developing councillors and staff by providing school meals with an improved nutritional content supported by additional staff training.

1.4 The School Meals Strategy supports Aims 1 and 3 of the Children Act, be healthy and enjoy and achieve through learning by providing healthy meals to help children learn at school.

2 Background

2.1 The Schools Forum considered a report at its meeting on 27 September 2005 which described the two school meals grants that had been announced by the DfES in August. Grant 5B has been allocated to schools using the required formula. This grant is intended to assist schools in transforming school meals, although the grant is not ring fenced. Guidance for schools in some uses of the grant to help transform school meals was attached to the schools communication issued on 17 October 2005 telling them of this allocation. The overall allocation for schools in Hampshire for 2005/6 is £700,000. Similar amounts will be made available in 2006/7 and 2007/8.

2.2 This report sets out how Grant 5A, the Targeted School Meals Grant, will be used to meet the requirements to transform school meals in Hampshire. The allocation to the County Council for 2005/6 is £651,000 and it is estimated that the grant for 2006/7 and 2007/8 will be around £977,000 in each year. These are the figures that have been used in developing the strategy.

2.3 The grant has been provided to Hampshire to develop a strategy to transform school meals within the County. The grant is conditional on plans to begin the re-introduction of universal hot meals provision, where it does not exist already, by September 2008.

2.4 Suppliers of school meals, both the County Council via HC3S and other contractors, will need to meet the new national nutritional standards which will be introduced. The DfES is currently consulting on these standards. The strategy developed in this report is based on meeting the nutritional standards set out in the report "Turning the Tables : Transforming School Food" which was published in September 2005.

2.5 HC3S, the County Council's catering operator supplies meals for a large majority of primary and special schools and around a third of secondary schools. HC3S has provided enhanced food content in its primary/special meals from September 2005. Meal numbers are lower than last year but there are strong indications from surveys that Headteachers, following the changes to the meals, are more willing to promote school meals. This, plus the added focus in the Healthy Schools programme, the importance of health in the Children's Act agenda and the inclusion of questions about school meals in the new OFSTED framework all suggest there is opportunity for increasing meal take-up.

3 The Strategy

3.1 There are only ten schools in Hampshire which either do not have any meals provision (2 schools) or have no hot meals provision (8 schools). One of these schools (Kings Copse Primary) is being rebuilt with a kitchen provided. The Strategy identifies funding to be used to work with schools to provide the facilities to serve hot food.

3.2 The major use of the funding will be to raise the food content in school meals to ensure that nutritional standards are met. The grant will not itself be sufficient to meet all the costs of the possible uses of the grant suggested by the DfES in their grant letter. In "Turning the Tables" it is estimated that the cost of improvements will be £167 million nationally in year 1 and £154 million in subsequent years. However, only £220 million is being made available for the whole three year period. The Strategy document (Appendix I) outlines how grant and price increases will need to be brought together to meet the nutritional standards and also ensure that, as far as possible, the position once the grant is withdrawn is sustainable. It is anticipated that by improving the food content of the meals it will encourage more paid meals but also more pupils entitled to free meals will want to take them. This will impact on disadvantaged areas.

3.3 The Strategy envisages the use of some of the grant money in the second financial year being used to train school catering staff. It is anticipated that this will mainly take place during summer terms of 2006 and 2007. The Strategy also identifies some grant in 2006/7 to be used to contribute towards the capital costs of providing hot school meals in every school.

3.4 Promotion of school meals and the encouragement of parents to choose school meals will form a substantial part of the Strategy. Marketing and promotional activities have been implemented and will be further developed. These will also be linked into the work on the Healthy Schools programme and also links with the work of the PCTs in focusing on childhood obesity. This will also be linked to providing further opportunities for schools to purchase advice and support from the funding they have been allocated through Grant 5B. More details are set out in Section 4 of Appendix I to this report.

3.5 It is clear that all the funding available from Grant 5A will need to be devoted to the activities outlined above.

4 Allocations - Grant 5A

4.1 It is proposed to allocate to all schools funds to support the increased food costs for free meals and staff training and in addition to provide further funds to HC3S and to schools using other contractors or producing the meals themselves to cover the increased food costs of paid meals. It is part of the strategy that this subsidy to paid meals is reduced during the 3 year period so that school meal provision is self sustaining with a higher level of food content after 2008/9 without needing a large price increase during that year.

4.2 The proposed annual allocations are set out below:

4.3 The grant allocations reflect the increases in food content over the years of the strategy, which differ between primary/special and secondary schools, and the differential levels of allocation for training of school meal staff. Further details can be found in the financial appendix to this report.

5 Legal implications

5.1 None.

6 Financial implications

6.1 These are set-out in this report and in Appendix II.

7 Personnel implications

7.1 As part of this strategy additional training will be funded for catering staff working in schools.

8 Impact assessment

8.1 Race and equality impact assessments have been considered in the development of this report and assumptions have been included about increased take-up by entitled children of free school meals.

9 Crime prevention issues

9.1 No issues have been identified.

10 Views of the Local County Councillor

10.1 This School Meals Strategy is to be implemented across Hampshire.

11 Consultations

11.1 This proposed strategy has been discussed by the Primary and Secondary Headteachers Resources and Planning Standing Committees and by the Schools Forum at its meeting on 22 November. The strategy was agreed by all these meetings.

Recommendations

1 That the Children's Services Policy Review Committee advise the Executive Member on the proposed School Meal Strategy 2006-2008.

Section 100 D - Local Government Act 1972 - background documents

The following documents discuss facts or matters on which this report, or an important part of it, is based and have been relied upon to a material extent in the preparation of this report.

NB: the list excludes

1. Published works

2. Documents which disclose exempt or confidential information as defined in the Act.

None.