6. Monitoring school meals
LEAs with no monitoring service
6.11 However not all LEAs were able to offer a monitoring service. A catering officer in one
authority sent guidance leaflets and fact sheets about nutritional standards to all the
schools in the authority and was always available in an advisory role. As catering officer,
he received all environmental health school kitchen inspection reports and these he
copied to head teachers outside the central contract, highlighting any important issues
raised. How much schools decided to take up his advice was not his decision and he
felt that schools would not see his monitoring of their service as disinterested.
Because I am a provider and if I go to the school and say the contractor is not doing very well,
they think that I’m not being.....I,ve got an interest. So all I can do is make them aware of
the nutritional standards and the directives. The governing body should monitor that but I
don’t know if or how well they do that. I can only highlight it to them. ..at the end of the
day, we don’t have that power.
6.12 The issue of the impartiality of the catering officer or the client officer to monitor
provision was mentioned in several LEAs offering no standard monitoring package to
schools outside the main contract. Often, the only officers within the LEA with the
expertise to conduct monitoring were employed within the catering sector in the DSO.
LEAs were concerned that if DSO personnel were to monitor the meal service of both
the DSO and private suppliers, this would involve a conflict of interests and such
appointments would be seen as inappropriate.
They are concerned about lack of support to schools when they take up these contracts. But the
LEA doesn’t have expertise except through the catering service and as they are in direct
competition, the catering service cannot have a role in that process. The Education Catering
Client Officer who should have that role perhaps but again, the line managerfor that post is
within the catering service so that is causing a problem.
6.13 Similarly in another authority:
Now I would have been the person to have done [monitoring], when I was in Education but
there is a bit of controversy over whether I should be doing it, or my manager should be doing it
or who should. That needs to be sorted before the [Ofsted] inspector comes.. Now because
I’m employed in the Regeneration and Neighourhood Services, which is more the direct services,
I’m part of the school meals service so I’m not so independent as I was. I am happy to go and
do it, but it is a political issue.
6.14 Officers interviewed who were in the situation of not providing monitoring, while being
perceived to be in posts which would conflict with the role, believed that they would be
able to undertake the task of monitoring schools outside the contract objectively.
Other monitoring options
6.15 The annual cost of full SLA packages was sometimes substantial and, perhaps, not
unsurprisingly, not all schools took up agreements. LEA officers reported little formal
knowledge of the quality of meal provision in schools that were outside the main
contract and without a SLA. Some schools were known to have opted to use private
consultants to undertake monitoring and there were conflicting reports of how well
these had worked. In other schools, governors were known to conduct monitoring.
6.16 One case study middle school had opted to use a web-based monitoring service.
Although the LEA offered a SLA, the governors felt that the ethos of the private
service was more in tune with the meal service they were aspiring to offer. They
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