3. Changes in provision with delegated budgets
3. Changes in provision with delegated budgets
3.1 This section looks at how schools took up their delegated funding and the extent to
which delegation led to changes in the suppliers of meals in schools. Interest groups,
consulted as part of Strand 1 work, believed that one of the key advantages of
delegation would be to highlight the clear accountability of schools for their meals
service. Historically, school meals were perceived to be an LEA problem and an LEA
responsibility. The LEA wrote the contract and the caterers delivered the service,
providing schools with the opportunity to deny any responsibility for poor quality. With
delegation, it was expected that schools would become more involved with the kitchens
and dining rooms. Even schools that bought back into existing services would feel
increased ownership of the service.
3.2 Interest groups were pessimistic, however, about the impact of delegation on smaller
schools especially those in rural locations, believing that some schools would not receive
an adequate budget to cover the costs of meals provision. A further concern was that
larger schools, aware of the commercial value of their catering contract, might be
unwilling to continue to subsidise less profitable schools within a central contract, a
widespread practice before delegation.
3.3 The study found that in two of the four sampled LEAs that did not delegate
automatically to primary schools, no primary school had opted to take meals budgets. In
the remaining two LEAs, a total of seven primary schools had taken the delegation
option. This suggests little enthusiasm on the part of primary schools that had a choice
in delegation to take up the opportunities it offered.
3.4 LEAs reported a range of changes when delegation was implemented, almost certainly
reflecting the diversity of meal provision in operation at the time. In some, there had
been minimal changes. For example, in one authority only one secondary school had
left the central service. Other LEAs reported more substantial changes. In one
authority, over half the primary schools and most secondary schools had taken the
opportunity to effect some fundamental change in provision, either by a complete
change of supplier or by renegotiating agreements with the central service. In another
LEA, delegation had coincided with a change in the central contract, with a new private
contractor replacing a hot meal service with a sandwich and hot soup provision
intended to conform to nutritional standards.
Buying back in
3.5 Many schools received their budgets and returned them straight back into the central
pre-delegation contract with meals supplied by the DSO or a private contractor. For
some schools, this was a matter of choice, for others there was little room to terminate
existing agreements that still had several years to run.
3.6 For one LEA officer in an authority where almost all schools had returned their budgets
to the central contract, the whole exercise was an unwanted and fruitless administrative
task.
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