Withdrawing a food group from your child’s diet should always be monitored by a health professional. Education Catering needs to be fully aware of potential symptoms and, if necessary, carry out a risk assessment. We use medical evidence for children with food allergies or intolerances so that we can provide special diet menus for those who really need it and not just to accommodate personal preferences.

We require evidence from a medical professional i.e. a GP, medical doctor, dietitian, nurse, or other qualified NHS medical professional. This is usually a letter or email and requires your child’s full name and each of the food items that need to be excluded. We will accept a screenshot from the NHS app or GP practice if it clearly states the child’s name and food items to exclude. We do not accept school composed care plans, private commercial laboratory reactivity results and homeopathic diagnoses.

If you do not have suitable medical evidence, simply contact the Food Development team for advice [email protected].

Due to the risk of contamination, unfortunately we are unable to class our school kitchens as ‘free from’. But, all our catering staff are trained in allergy awareness and food safety. So you can have complete peace of mind that your child is safe while eating a school lunch.

We prepare and serve special diet meals using different baking sheets, cooking and serving utensils. We will not use the same equipment or utensils to prepare other food items, without thoroughly cleaning them first. This will prevent cross contamination.

We do not use nuts as ingredients, or any foods labelled to ‘contain’ or ‘may contain’ nuts in our primary school menu. Children with one of the following nut allergies can safely eat meals from our standard primary menu without having to register for a special diet: peanut, almond, hazelnut, walnut, cashew, pecan, Brazil, pistachio, macadamia/Queensland nuts.

If your child requires an auto-injector for their food allergy we will need to conduct a risk assessment and discuss this with your school before progressing your application. This is to ensure that we assess the risks of managing your son/daughters’ allergies and can safely deliver the adapted menu.

As we do this in partnership with your school, this will mean that your application will take longer to process. You will be able to check the progress of your application by checking with your school.

We aim to work as fast as we can so it’s important you include the correct information that we ask for to make the process as smooth as possible for you.

We will provide the school with an orange silicon wrist band for your child to wear up to the service counter. They will be asked to hand this to the catering team member who is serving in exchange for their special diet meal. Also, we ask your school to agree to one or both of the following routes as part of our procedure to ensure your child is safe:

• A member of school staff will take them to the service counter
• A member of the Education Catering team will serve them first at the start of each sitting or year group

We are unable to accommodate personal preferences since this can cause confusion and increase the risk of error.

We will only allow food purchased from our nominated suppliers in our kitchens. This ensures that we avoid any risk of contamination across our food chain.

No, you do not need to apply for a special diet. For further information please see the carbohydrate values document.

We cater for lifestyle options including: vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, no beef, and no pork. Simply ask your school for a copy of the menu you require. There is no need to apply for a special diet menu if you are only asking for your child to eat from our lifestyle menu.

All special diet menus are developed from our primary menu and in accordance with individual dietary requirements on a twice yearly basis. Our priority is to ensure that children with special dietary requirements are fed safely and to do this, all meals prepared must strictly follow their menu. This means that our kitchens are unable to cater for theme day adaptations for special diets. We can, however, provide an alternative meal from your child’s menu, that may be the same or similar to the theme day lunch, as long as this features on their special diet menu.

If your child is not registered and you would like them to have a meal on that day, contact the food development team for information about the ingredients. [email protected].

Our special diet team focus on feeding a healthy and nutritious lunch to children who have registered as having a special diet. This means we are unable cater for specific special diets for schools that choose to offer a breakfast or morning break/tuck shop service. If you would like a full list of ingredients offered for breakfast or the tuck shop, please email our Food Development team at [email protected]