4. Looking after the kitchen
to the service and that it could be re-commissioned for use in schools that had remained
within the contract.
4.8 A primary school that converted from hot meal to sandwich service found itself with a
large kitchen requiring conversion (including the expense of removing asbestos
structures) and a great deal of obsolete kitchen equipment. The central catering service
had removed any items that could be recycled for use in other schools and paid the
school the resale value.
Taking responsibility
Some of the things the schools find difficult is that they are responsible. Once it’s delegated, then
the governing body are responsible. They do find the maintenance and replacement of equipment
difficult because if they have a couple of items of equipment that need replacing or if they’ve got
an old kitchen they ask where they can find the money to actually do this.
4.9 It was within the field of repairs, maintenance and upgrading of kitchens that many
LEAs felt that delegated budgets had created the most problems.
A spin-off from the new situation is that at the moment I am involved in selling equipment
from one school to another which is a total nightmare. You hope that schools will give their
equipment to somebody else but some are so short, they need all the money they can get.
Previously you just moved the equipment from school to school as it was required. If a school
closed down, you took the best equipment out and moved it somewhere which didn’t have quite
such good equipment. Ifyou thought it needed to be scrapped you would do that. But now....
The time that I have to spend, persuading head teachers they need an oven, they need a serving
counter, they need to do this, they need to do that. It’s aphenomenal amount of my time is
taken up trying to talk through with head teachers. In fact it’s not even school heads, it’s
governors half the time thatyou’ve got to deal with as well. I’ve had one school where the
governor reckoned she could get equipmentfrom somewhere really cheap so I had to go and
inspect that and sometimes it is a wild goose chase. You do get the oddpiece of equipment on
that basis but it is very time consuming doing that.
4.10 For some school head teachers, the kitchen equipment issue was one they had not
anticipated. A head teacher who bought back into the existing county service found that
he had not read the small print. He assumed that the contracting company would
continue to maintain the equipment in the kitchen as this had always been the case
before. He had not realised that under delegation the contractors became the food
provider and the school provided the equipment..
This didn’t become apparent until after delegation. Something went wrong and the contractor
said ‘No that’syour responsibility’, and that’s when I realised and the LEA confirmed this.
And I think this was why some schools decided not to take on the service, because of the
equipment issues.
Finding the funds
4.11 Whilst the case study schools had generally coped with minor repairs and replacing
some equipment, many were concerned that they would need to find additional funds to
cover more expensive repairs or replacements in the near future. LEAs encouraged
schools to pursue any opportunities for funding refurbishments and to be innovative in
finding capital.
We do tell schools that they have other sources. They have devolved capital. If it is apriority
then they can use that. If they can get sponsorship then they can use seed capital, you can get
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