3. Changes in provision with delegated budgets
The secondary schools that do buy back, we have to go through the paperwork of giving them
the money and they have to pay it all back again and that doesn’t really achieve anything for
anybody at the end of the day, just moving money backwards and forwards.
3.7 Head teachers and governors at the case study schools that bought back into existing
services through choice, mentioned several reasons for wishing to maintain the status
quo. The main incentive to stay was satisfaction with the service the school was
receiving and the quality of the meal provided.
3.8 On the other hand, head teachers and governors mentioned other less positive reasons
for remaining in the contract, particularly the additional management burden in taking
responsibility the kitchen. One governor believed that, as a volunteer, he was being
expected to take more and more responsibility for the administration of the school and
the kitchen was better left with the DSO.
At the end of the day, my suspicion is that it was going to end up with the work being done by
unpaid governors and stretched administrative staff in the school, to deal with the
administration of finances. There seems to be more and more responsibility delegated to the
governors...just Speakingfor myself Ifindit onerous, there are mountains of data that you
have to getyour head round with different legislation and regulation.
3.9 One primary head teacher of a school with a hot meal service cooked on the premises
for around 120 pupils each day summed up his reasons
One - because technically they are over staffed in the kitchen and we would have ended up with
someone losing theirjob. Two- it would have meant another level of management that I would
have had to have taken over, on top of everything else as well. It was all too big a can of worms
and there wasn’t, to my mind sufficient money there and sufficient capacity within the school in
order to make it a viable option.
3.10 The issue of staffing was raised in several schools. Schools were aware that over-
staffing in the kitchen would require the governors to undertake the unpleasant task of
making staff redundant to achieve financial viability. For other schools, the anticipated
problems were in recruiting and retaining kitchen staff together with the need to ensure
adequate training for compliance with heath and safety and environmental health
legislation. The head teacher of a rural middle school did not wish to get sidetracked
into the staffing, health and food safety issues that provision would entail.
You get waylaid by issues which have nothing to do with the education of the pupils in
school.. In a rural situation there are only a limited number ofpeople who could be
approached to do thejob. There is security in having a contractor who is responsiblefor staff
and if there is a health issue, then there is afallback in the contractorpicking up the tab not
me.
Renegotiating the contract
3.11 Some schools used the opportunity of delegation to renegotiate more advantageous
contracts from their existing supplier whether the DSO or a private contractor. Schools
were able to agree more flexible services and, more importantly for some, retain the
profits from their meals service. In some LEAs, schools had formed consortiums to
negotiate group contracts for service. One private catering company had seen a twenty-
fold increase in the number of contracts it handled with the move to individual rather
than the group and county-wide contractual agreements. One DSO had retained the
contracts with eight of the eleven secondary schools in the LEA only by renegotiating
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