Summary
Schools outside of central contracts were able to buy into LEA services or to use a private
consultancy service to provide monitoring. Case study schools expressed satisfaction with the
LEA or private services to which they subscribed, and believed that external monitoring was
worthwhile.
Some schools were receiving no external monitoring, having decided against buying into a
service. In some schools, governors were diligent in their own internal monitoring, aware of the
required nutritional standards and regularly eating meals with pupils to check provision.
However at other schools, where the meal service had a lower priority for governors,
monitoring of nutritional standards and free school meals was lacking.
Delegation and central catering services
All six of the LEAs in the study using LA in-house provision (DSOs) had seen some reduction
in the number of schools for which they were providing meals. The degree to which they had
lost business almost certainly reflected the level of satisfaction with the central service or the
prospective profitability to schools of opting for an alternative supplier.
Some DSOs had experienced a substantial loss of schools from the central contract and this
was reflected in their capacity to develop the services they offered. There was concern that with
more profitable schools lost to their contract, DSOs would have difficulties providing smaller
or less profitable schools with a meal service without introducing a differential pricing system.
This would have implications for the delegation of future budgets for free school meals.
DSOs acknowledged that delegation had provided an impetus for them to review the service
they provided. Schools were more aware of the costs of services and were working more closely
with DSOs to tailor services to their specific requirements
Quality and provision of meals
In many LEAs, delegation had coincided with the introduction of nutritional standards and a
number of related initiatives to improve the quality of school meals.
The shift of responsibility for meals to schools and governing bodies had encouraged some
schools, even those within central contracts, to negotiate at individual school level for the
supply of healthier meals. The case studies included examples of schools that had found new
suppliers or embarked on in-house services to offer meals that exceeded the nutritional
standards required by law. These schools stressed the need for a whole school approach to
meals and to healthy eating, with emphasis on gaining the support of pupils and parents to
ensure a commercially sustainable meal service.
However, delegation has resulted in an increased emphasis on the commercial viability of meal
services at individual schools. This had been achieved, in some schools, by offering popular,
but not necessarily nutritionally well-balanced meals. This has had serious implications for the
quality of the meals offered and in the range of choices available.
In other schools, the response has been to raise prices with serious implications for the take up
of meals and particularly for the provision of free school meals. In schools offering a set meal,
the price of the meal may well be above the value of the free school meal so that schools have
covered the additional cost by either selling paid meals at a profit or subsidy from the general
school budget. In schools with cash cafeterias, the burden of this mismatch between free