Evidence to the Education, Culture and Sport Committee on the School Meals (Scot

We wish to provide the following evidence.

1) We recognise and support the intentions of this Bill. We also recognise the value of a universal provision in removing stigma and in encouraging everyone who has need of the service to take it up. However, whilst supporting the aims, we have reservations about whether this is the right way to proceed or whether it is practicable.

2) The uptake of school meals varies from school to school. In general it's higher in special and primary schools than in secondary schools. However, even within secondary schools there is variation depending on the location of the school. City centre schools have a lower uptake than schools in more rural areas.

Pupil Choice

3) In most cases, the uptake level represents pupil choice. In primary schools, the option is between school meals and a packed lunch. In urban secondary schools (as well as in a few primary schools) there is often an additional option of leaving the school and purchasing lunch from one of the many sandwich/snack providers, which spring up around such schools in order to make the necessary provision.

4) Where parents pay for the cost of a school meal, there is no economic pressure on them not to allow their children choice over packed lunch or even a sandwich at the local shop. Clearly, the provision of free school meals would put economic pressure on children to eat in school. The divisions between the "haves" and "have-nots" would not be eliminated, but would be moved up the scale. However, this area of freedom is very important to youngsters, particularly in their teenage years.

5) The economic pressure would not merely apply to purchased lunches; it would also apply to packed lunches. Children would continue to pressurise their parents to allow them to bring in their own food, and many parents would accede to such pressure.

Nutritious Food

6) One of the aims of the Bill is to ensure that all children are provided with nutritious lunches. However, in children's terms, "nutritious" and "edible" are not the same thing. Some authorities have gone to a lot of trouble to make their school meal provision attractive to youngsters only to be criticised for offering fast food options.

7) Decisions have to be made as to whether it is better for children to eat good food, albeit chips, or whether they should only eat what purists regard as nutritious food. Given that fashions on "good" food change over generations, this is not clear-cut. In the past carbohydrates were deemed bad, but they have recently been reinstated. We are currently in a "low fat" mode, but there are arguments about whether skimmed, 2% or full cream milk is best. Fat levels that are good for adults can be inadequate for growing children and there is a concept of "muesli belt starvation".

8) The current prevailing orthodoxy is for fruit and vegetables. However, whilst good, these do not necessarily provide growing youngsters with enough of the right food.

9) Medical research can and does result in changed views about what constitutes "nutritious food". This is quite apart from debates about GM food and the problems that arose with BSE in beef. If schools/authorities claimed that they were providing "nutritious" food, they could be held accountable if subsequent research showed that this had not been the case.

10) Moreover, there would be a heavy duty on the providers to take account of special dietary requirements regardless of whether these requirements were the product of religious belief or personal preference. There are also problems with allergies - e.g. nut allergies. It is a feature of mass produced food that absolute guarantees cannot be given that the food is not in some way contaminated with other foods. Would the authorities be under a duty to provide people who, for whatever reason, could not eat school meals with a cash alternative?

Quality of Food

11) It is very difficult to provide interesting and generally attractive food cheaply for a large number of people. The Fuel Zone and fast food approach of some authorities has been an attempt to overcome the general pupil antipathy to "school dinners". As there is more food variety so it is increasingly difficult to cater for everyone's tastes.

Practical Considerations

12) It is true that school meal facilities have been reduced as a result of low uptake but they never were adequate to deal easily with the number of pupils. Even in the days of more universal school meal provision, the actual facilities were not as large as the numbers might require in the outside world, because they were used only once a day and it would have been inefficient and costly to make more generous provision. The result meant that eating school meals always involved multiple sittings and queuing. Both these factors are unattractive to youngsters and often a reason why they "choose" to find their food elsewhere.

13) Nowadays, many school facilities could not cope with a large increase in uptake of meals and schools would have to lengthen lunchtimes in order to allow everyone to get through the system. However, many schools have chosen to shorten lunch breaks as they have found that there is an optimum length of time for such breaks and that if they become too long, youngsters get restless, badly behaved and there is an increase in bullying. This problem is made worse in bad weather when youngsters have to stay in their classrooms and it is a constant problem for inner city schools which do not have adequate playground facilities for the number of pupils on their roles.

Cost

14) Cost cannot be ignored. We started by acknowledging the benefits of universal provision, but such provision is normally offered either in monetary form e.g. child allowance, old age pension or in the form of a service to meet a specific need e.g. health care. But providing school meals universally is a different type of universal provision. It is the state determining what is good for children in an area where people normally expect to be able to make choices.

15) Moreover, despite the enthusiasm of those who advocate this change, parents have not been convinced that this is the right way to spend money from the limited education budget. They do accept the need to provide free meals for children who live in considerable poverty. They do not accept that children who are not living in poverty should similarly have this subsidy. They do recognise that school meals should be improved so that children who enjoy free school meals can really "enjoy" them and not feel stigmatised.

16) A number of authorities have taken considerable efforts to address these problems. Swipe cards credited - whether by parent or local authority - with money to pay for the meals are proving very successful. Different efforts by different authorities to make their meal provision attractive are paying off. We support all these developments as do the majority of parents.

Analogy with Free Transport

17) It is interesting to compare free meals with free transport which parents do feel should be provided to all those who are entitled to it. However, this is a hugely expensive service and one much fraught with problems arising from pupil behaviour and safety. It does not provide a good exemplar, as the poorest quality buses are the ones most commonly used. The trouble with a universal provision is that it does have a captive audience. The lack of choice allows standards to decline whereas the imaginative work which authorities have done to make their meals attractive and to overcome payment problems have been a direct results of the authorities' desire to get youngsters to "choose" school meals for positive reasons. We feel that this is the right way forward and that it would be better to provide extra money to support this type of approach rather than provide universal free school meals.