Schools should do more to help parents on low incomes who do not qualify for free meals for their children and who struggle to pay for a healthy packed lunch, according to Ofsted.
The inspectors’ report on school dinners is the first since all schools were required to meet minimum health standards for food and monitor the quality of meals. Two in five schools in deprived areas were failing to meet the requirements for a balanced diet and primary schools were particularly weak at giving children fruit at lunch.
Five years after Jamie Oliver drew attention to the problem and the Labour Government vowed to act, the report said that schools’ new food policies were being undermined by pupils bringing in unhealthy packed lunches. “This did not necessarily reflect a lack of care and interest from parents,” the report said. “Their circumstances sometimes made it difficult for them to make sure that packed lunches were healthy.”
Schools, families, councils and retailers should encourage local shops to stock healthy options and advice should be given to parents on what to include in a packed lunch, inspectors said. But Justine Roberts, of Mumsnet, said that pressure from children for “doughnuts and crisps” was the problem.
“To create nutritious options that aren’t expensive takes a lot of time and effort. The problem is that your children are pressurising you to buy the bad things and saying ’everyone else has got this’,” she said.
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“You can fill kids up with doughnuts and crisps but the healthy options take more time and can be more expensive.”
The report also said that parents from families on low incomes but not eligible for free school meals told inspectors that they often could not afford to pay for a school lunch especially if they had more than one child.
It found one family whose two children had to take turns and eat a school meal.
This month ministers scrapped plans to extend free school meal provision to 500,000 of the lowest-paid families next term.The decision will cost families earning less than £307 a week about £600 a year, equivalent to a penny rise in their income tax for each child.
Ofsted found that pupils from these families were falling through the gap in healthy eating and not getting enough support from their schools.
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“Less thought had been given to providing support and advice for families who were not entitled to free school meals but whose incomes were low. Discussions with some of these parents indicated that they had to budget very carefully if they were to pay for a school meal.”
Other parents said that intervention from a school about healthy packed lunches was “interfering” and “bossy”, the report added.
“A common complaint among these parents was that the schools were not sufficiently sensitive to their personal circumstances and the cost of providing a healthy packed lunch,” the inspectors said.
The survey of 39 schools in 20 of the most deprived areas in England between September 2009 and January 2010 found that 23 of the primary and secondary schools were fully compliant or close to complying with the final food-based and nutrient-based standards for school lunches.
“Parents, particularly of very young children, recognised that the packed lunches they prepared did not accord with advice. However, they felt that it was more important to provide food that they knew that their children would eat rather than risk the possibility that they might eat nothing all day,” the report said.
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Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that money was not the only issue for parents when providing packed lunches. “These children are often coming from backgrounds which have a pretty narrow experience of food. But it is not my colleagues’ responsibilty to be lunch box inspectors,” he said.