Q: When Jamie Oliver started his school meals campaign five years ago, what made you think ‘I have to do something’?
A: At that time school meals were pretty industrial and didn’t have much nutritional value and weren’t what one would want for one’s child. As a parent governor I felt that we weren’t ensuring our children were properly nourished while they were at school. Yet here was an opportunity to feed children well, to use fresh ingredients, local produce, to train the cooks and skill them so they had a much more rewarding and fulfilled role, and also to choose local suppliers and therefore support the local economy. All of that was crying out to be done and I couldn’t see a reason not to do it.
Q: What was it that you most wanted to change?
A: It was entirely unregulated and almost entirely separate from the school. Although the school might have felt dissatisfied with it, they couldn’t influence it. And I did have a choice at that point. I could have campaigned for better standards, but actually what you need to do – and caterers aren’t going to want to hear this - is to take control of a service which is so important to the children of the school. Their motivation was not to nourish children. There was a business model, and at the heart of it – I’ll argue it with anybody – it was not nourishing children. For me the very best option is that the school community has control over that service and the quality it delivers. So by creating this business and having the schools own the majority of the shares, they were getting control of the service but they didn’t have the day to day burden of managing it. The upshot is that Whole School Meals is majority owned by the schools that were involved at the beginning, and the school community is the most motivated to make sure that the company never loses sight of its founding principles.
Q: How easy was it to get people to help set up the social enterprise?
A: I did two things. I wrote to the head teachers and governors of all the schools in our area, but I also wrote a letter to our local paper asking for people to come forward. I thought it would run on the letters page, but the time was right and they liked it, so they ran it as a front page story, and people did respond to that. People seemed to like the core principles I’d proposed and they wanted to join in and collaborate. People were inspired by it, wanted it, and were prepared to put in the effort and energy and time to make it happen.
Q: Why was it important to include the local community?
A: Because it matters to everybody, doesn’t it? Children are at the heart of the school so you have to involve them, and I’m a parent so it’s natural to open it up for other parents to get involved, because it comes down to who cares the most. And it really was a uniting force. And now we’re really representative, not just of the school community, but of the wider community. We have grandparents on the board and local business. It was great they brought their business heads with them, but also their passion for nourishing children. There’s something about food and children that brings people together from all walks of life.
Q: Why was it important to be commercially viable and financially independent?
A: If we weren’t commercially viable we could be vulnerable to not surviving and that remains with us. We don’t want to have to be going cap in hand to get support. And it seems to me the big caterers do it so there must be a profit to be made. So that was a big motivation because profit is power; it enables you to do what you want. I always thought we should operate on a level playing field with the other caterers, generate profits so we’re secure, we’re self reliant, we’re independent, and then we can apply those profits back to the things that we as a community value, like teaching people to cook, or helping people to eat well.
Q: Were you surprised when the council accepted your bid?
A: We’d put so much work into it, and all of it not knowing whether we had a chance of succeeding, so when I got the e-mail I was so thrilled, but also thinking ‘crikey!’ So at that point we really got into gear, we had to raise money and three months after hearing we’d won the bid, we took on 60 staff under TUPE regulations, so we went from employing nobody to employing 60 people. Just before they came over we managed to recruit an operations manager and a finance and admin manager so we were really well positioned then to take on staff.
Q: Your background isn’t in catering. It must have been a steep learning curve?
A: It was. And I did realise that I could lead this, but I couldn’t actually do it. They won’t let me in the kitchen. But early on we knew we had to get a really good, experienced professional staff team on board. And they came forward because they were up for a challenge and they really valued what we were proposing, and we wouldn’t have managed it if we hadn’t got them.
Q: How important is locally-sourced food?
A: We’re rural here in this part of Kent so why wouldn’t we want to? It’s better quality, it’s fresher and we value having a successful local community, and part of that is economic. If it’s a choice between spending money with an anonymous national supplier or with a local supplier who is going to reinvest in the local economy and with whom we can have a direct relationship and really good service, it’s an easy choice to make. And East Kent is economically quite disadvantaged; we’re coastal and rural. So as a business of a decent size we’ve a responsibility to support our local community, and that includes trying to keep some of the wealth in the community.
Q: Were there any unexpected stumbling blocks?
A: One big change we had to make was to ask our cooks to work in quite a different way from what they were used to – apart from one cook who’s worked for 30 plus years, so she’s seen it go round and come back again. School cooks used to be much better valued. Their training used to be much better. So we knew we had to help them make the transition from opening packets to cooking with fresh ingredients, and we did several training days over the summer to help them prepare for the big change. The biggest struggle was financial and we made losses in the first couple of years, but we managed to get through that and now we’re on a good footing making a small surplus each year. All school caterers are vulnerable to political will - or lack of will - to support school dinners. So even though we have got ourselves onto a good financial footing I worry about political change.
Q: Did nutritional standards present any problems to you?
A: In principle they didn’t because that was what we were doing anyway, but there was a certain amount of bureaucracy around it which meant it was costly at the outset. We had to pay someone quite a lot of money to demonstrate that our menus were nutritionally balanced, so that was an issue in the early days when we were struggling to make ends meet, but we’ve resolved that now and our own staff are trained to do that analysis.
Q: What do you do with the profits?
A: A mixture of things. The secondary schools have really good teaching facilities for cooking, and so we’ve had years five and six from primary school going for cooking classes once a week for up to 10 weeks, and also holiday clubs. Many of the children are visiting the secondary school they will be moving to, so it helps with the transition, but they also learn fantastic cookery. At the end the children produce this big supper for all their families to come and dine together. We’ve also recently opened a cafe in a new community centre in north Deal, the more deprived part of the town, and we’ve had to invest in that. We want to use it as a community hub and a way of reaching and providing lunches and other activities for young parents and isolated older people. We’re also working on another project to get dads cooking with their kids. We’re trying to use some of our resources to reach further out into the community and to help people access good food and cooking skills, as well as the social aspect and pure pleasure of dining together. It’s early days, but so far so good.
Q: What would you like to see happen to school meals?
A: I think the school lunch subsidy has got to stay. And there is an unfairness built in around free school meals. The entitlement is that families have to be unemployed, so people who are working but have a low income are not eligible, and yet their family income could be less than someone who is purely on benefits. That’s not right, especially if you have more than one child. I really think there’s value in subsidising those families to have a school meal and that needs looking at. I’d also like to see more emphasis on the culture of communal dining in school, and more respect for that. There’s so much to be gained from sharing a meal and the interaction you can have. Culturally it’s really important and we’ve lost that. I’d really like to see more emphasis and an understanding of that. Some schools are recognising it more and reorganising their dining halls so kids can sit in smaller groups and are encouraged to enjoy the meal rather than just get through it and get out.
Q: What’s next for your social enterprise model?
A: I know there are some other social enterprise projects that include school meals and I would like to take social enterprise models out to the rest of the country so that other schools and communities can have a look, choose the one they like, adapt and take inspiration from them, and adjust them to their local circumstances. There is a model there, we’ve demonstrated it can be done with huge benefits, and I’d like to offer it to any other schools to adopt it.