April 2009″Two Angry Moms”
Merton Parents screened the UK premeriere of the hardhitting American film detailing the struggle of some American parents to improve school food in the USA. We screened the film at Wimbledon Odeon and held a Q & A session with film director and angry mom Amy Kafala. Amy and Jackie Schneider appeared on BBC breakfast to talk about the film.
21st May 2008. Merton Parents AGM
Merton Parents held its 3rd AGM at Rutlish School. As well as hearing from the people who really matter – the students – speakers included the inspiring Prue Leith (chair of the School Food Trust, renowned cook and best-selling author) and Dave Hill (Merton Director Parents, Families and Schools), and the Managing Director of Caterhouse (the new Primary School catering contractor).
16th October 2007. Conference a huge success
Merton Parents organisied a National parents conference in North London, which brought together people from all over the country to discuss the work that still needs to be done to improve school meals. Delegates including Ed Balls (Secretary of State), Prue Leith (School Food Trust) and Zac Goldsmith (PPC Richmond, currently campaigning to improve school meals) were hugely positive about the event. They were all also very complimentary about the work of Merton Parents. A number of people went away inspired to start similar campaigns to ours.
4th September 2007. New Contractor starts work
The new catering contrator – Caterhouse – has started work today, providing meals for virtually all the primary schools and Special Schools in Merton. We wish them luck!
Parents may be concerned that the meals are somewhat basic at the moment. We are assured this is a temporary measure while the staff are undergoing training. Towards the end of the year we should see some more ambitious menus.
20th April 2007. Jackie gives a speech at Downing Street!
Jackie Schneider, Chair of Merton Parents, was at a Sheila McKechnie Award reception at 11 Downing Street on Wednesday. If you click here and then click on the video link you’ll see a 2 minute clip of her speech. Look who’s standing listening to her….
April 2007. Dining Room Experience Competition – winners announced
Our Dining Room Competition was a great sucess with some fantastic entries from the School Councils. Thanks to everyone who entered. The winners were:
28th March 2007. AGM. 15th January 2007. Competition Launch. Merton Parents have launched a borough-wide competition to help improve The Dining Room Experience in our primary schools. You can see full details here. Please ask if your school is taking part. The launch was covered on the front page of the Wimbledon Post and in the Wimbledon Guardian. January 2007. Initial changes its name. 8th January 2007. JOIN US! We’re on a recruitment drive and have produced 14,000 leaflets about our campaign so far. The Council have kindly agreed to distribute them to our 43 Primary and 3 Special schools. A PDF of the leaflet (900k) is available by clicking here. 11th December 2006. Goodbye and thanks. Vivianne Buller who has been advising Merton on how to overhaul the school meal service, comes to the end of her contract this week. Merton Parents wish to extend their thanks for the huge contribution she has made. 9th November 2006. INCREASE in numbers eating school meals. Despite stories in the media suggesting the opposite trend nationally, the number of primary school children in Merton eating school meals in October 06 had increased by 15% compared to one year earlier. This is clearly due to the improvement in quality that Merton Parents fought for, and indicates that numbers could rise even further under the new 2007 contract (see below) when quality will be further improved. November 2006. 2007 Contract. Merton Parents are currently attending regular meetings with the Council to help finalise the new contract for caterers who will produce meals in Primary Schools and Special Schools from September 2007. The Council are currently advertising for expressions of interest. We will also be involved in the decision about who eventually gets the contract. Needless to say we are pushing for healthy, appetising, freshly prepared, good quality food. If you are a company that might be interested in tendering, please see details here. October 2006. Rutlish boys go to Westminster. 9th October 2006. Merton Parents featured on ‘Teachers TV’ A program about the School Food Trust is being broadcast on Teachers TV Channel, and there’s a section about Merton Parents. For details of how to view the channel and for the various transmission times, please click here. 1st September 2006. No more Feed Me Better? Last year’s Feed Me Better trial in 6 Merton schools ceased in July and all Primary Schools will now be using the same menu. Some of the Jamie Oliver dishes have found their way onto the new standard menu, which is probably the best one Initial have produced yet. Unfortunately, past experience has told us that what’s printed on a menu can differ considerably from what is actually delivered locally. We watch with interest. Initial’s contract with Merton ends in July 07, so it will be put out to tender in the next few months. If you know of a company that you feel could do better, please let us know. 1st September 2006. School Food Trust standards. The School Food Trust has issued guidelines for standards in food, which schools are required to adhere to from this month. See details on the SFT website here, and read our press release in response here. 19th May 2006. Monitoring forms. Many Head Teachers have complained to us that whenever they have reported problems with their meals, the complaint seems to fall of deaf ears. The contractor seems to have little obligation to ensure consistency or to put things right long term. Finally our call has been heard and the borough are piloting some ‘official’ monitoring forms in Primary Schools. These are quick to fill in and require a Head Teacher or senior member of staff to confirm that the food provided was as advertised and that there was enough to go round. Please speak to your head teacher and urge them to use the forms. 28th April 2006. Headteachers School Meal Development Day. Five members of the Merton Parents committee were part of an all day meeting hosted by Jan Martin (Merton Head of Education) and attended by the Headteachers of around 50% of the local Primary Schools. Presentations were given by Vivianne Buller (School Meal Consultant), Jackie Schneider (Merton Parents), Pawan Lall (PCT nutritionist) and Sian Rowland (Healthy School Co-ordinator). The meeting was extremely positive and productive and it was clear that there was a strong desire to be cooking better quality food on site, from fresh ingredients. Opinions about what schools wanted to see included in the next Catering contract (from Sept 2007) were sought. It was also agreed that regular monitoring of meals by the schools was an essential factor that shouldn’t necessarily wait until 2007. 30th March 2006. Merton Parents AGM. The meeting had an excellent turnout of over 100 parents. Speakers included Katharine Quarmby, (journalist – author of the New Statesman article quoted below), Jenny Jones (Chair of London Food Unit set up by Ken Livingstone), Richard Watts from Sustain, (organisation supporting children’s food bill) and Vivianne Buller (Merton School Meal Consultant). See an article in the local Guardian. 28th March 2006. Congratulations to Jackie Schneider who has just WON a Sheila McKechnie Award! The organisation invite applications from all sorts of emerging campaigners, who have to give a presentation to a panel from the Foundation. Last night, Jackie attended a prestigious award ceremony at the South Bank attended by the great and the good – from Terry Waite to Geoffrey Howe to Gordon Brown. Her category was “Consumer Action” for her work with Merton Parents and she won! She even managed to bend Gordon’s ear about the topic! The win will enable Jackie to receive all sorts of training, support, mentoring and advice to help continue running the campaign. March 2006. School Meal Survey. You may recall the school meal survey filled in by Primary parents at the end of last year. We finally have a full copy of the results. You can view it as a webpage or download a pdf here. The top 5 issues raised were: more fresh fruit and veg; fresh food to be prepared at every school; provide menu for parents; bigger portions; parents are prepared to pay more for better quality ingredients. There were 1,479 forms returned. 3rd February 2006. We haven’t gone away! The committee have been very busy working with the authority to make sure we get the changes that the kids deserve. Here is a summary of recent developments. 17th November 05. It looks like the Jamie Oliver menus may have had a stay of execution! Priory were indeed going to stop serving them, but are now going to continue in tandem with the interim menus. The Head of one of the other schools in the trial had heard from a reliable source that Initial were withdrawing them elsewhere too, but the deluge of messages sent by parents to the Council, obviously had some effect. According to Merton, the trials will continue at FIVE other schools, and reassuring commitments were reiterated by the Council Leader and by the Director for Parents Schools and Families. 15th November 05. Reports from ‘reliable sources’ told us that Feed me Better menus were to be withdrawn from all the pilot schools, following complaints from a handful of children that the food was too spicy. Merton Parents suspected this may be Initial or Merton trying to wriggle out of serving the better quality food, and urged parents to contact the Council to protest. 3rd October 05. From today all primary schools in Merton should be serving the slightly improved, interim menus. See a copy here. These should not be confused with the Feed Me Better menus which are being tried out in only 4 schools at this time. Other schools in the Borough will only be in a position to receive this excellent food when their kitchens have been given a long overdue upgrade. Please speak to your child’s Head Teacher and Email Merton Council to ask when your school will be able to serve the Feed Me Better menus. 15th September 05. Four Primary schools in Merton will be trialling Jamie Oliver’s “Feed Me Better” menus starting in the next couple of weeks. The schools – Gorringe Park, Priory, Bishop Gilpin and Wimbledon Park – were selected because their kitchens were suitably equipped. We need to keep the pressure on the Council to complete all necessary upgrading of kitchens so that other schools in the borough can use these menus too. Until then the rest will be using some slightly improved interim menus. 12th September 05. Some schools have been sent new plates and bowls to replace the old ‘prison’ style trays. Others should receive them in due course. 12th September 05. Clarification has been received from Initial regarding the meat being used in the interim menus. They say: 12th September 05. Some schools have been sent new plates and bowls to replace the old ‘prison’ style trays. Others should receive them in due course. 9th September 05. The Head Teacher at Gorringe School, along with Jackie and Angus (Merton Parents) have received a letter from Initial Catering who are unhappy about the photos on the Gorringe website (link below). Read the letter here, along with Angus’s reply to it. 8th September 05. Not a good start to term!
2nd September 2005. Further significant progress with the menus is hampered until the Council can identify where it will find the £431k it has agreed to spend on kitchen refurbishments. These were due to begin in September 2005 and be complete by July 2006. We need to pressurise the Council to ensure that work begins and improvements remain on schedule. Several million pounds will also need to be spent on building kitchens from scratch for some of the schools that are currently without. So, in summary: Improvements so far Still required August 05. People who signed our petition earlier in the year have received a letter from Andrew Judge (Council Leader) thanking them, and setting out how the Council plans to improve school meals. We’re delighted that Mr Judge is now supporting this issue. We look forward to see actions that support the words. See how things are going on the progress page. 8th August 2005. Finally, a major blow announced to the meeting was the news that although the Cabinet agreed the spend of £431k on school kitchens, these funds do not appear to be available! This means that the planned refurbishment of 23 kitchens over the next 12 months cannot start until (at least some of) the money has been found. 27th July 2005. Rachel, the nutritionist said she believed that the “dirty dozen” additives listed in our Aims and Objectives were absent from the menus and would check for sure. Also, Initial’s suppliers have ‘guaranteed’ that no meat is mechanically recovered (MRM) (BBC report on MRM). We will attend another meeting in mid-August. 19th July 2005. 7th July 2005. 7th July 2005. 5th July 2005.The principles (as agreed with Council Leader Andrew Judge) upon which the Council is working to improve school food, are as follows:1. Our support for Jamie’s Oliver’s publicity in raising the profile of schools meals. We would also wish to support the long term aims espoused by Jeanette Orrey in terms of freshness and quality of food served. 2. Our belief that balanced food is vital to children and that as part of our work to fulfil the 5 outcomes of Every Child Matters we are seeking to improve the quality of food. 3. That we wish to work with the Parents’ campaign group and also with our contractors, to secure improvement, and that we have evidence of doing that in, for example, the rise in the amount of fresh food now available, but that we are not complacent and know that there are many more improvements to be made in Merton and across the country. 4. That we will work with the contractors to ensure that staff are well trained and supported and that both cooking quality and quality of presentation are emphasised. 5. That we will give continue to give the resources we have available to managing contracts and will follow up on all complaints – and that we would welcome feedback on progress on improvement. 6. That we will bring to Cabinet in July a draft improvement strategy that explains the costs and implications of moving to plates for all chidlren, developing more schools with kitchens so less food ‘travels’, how we can work with schools on agreed protocols to ensure that the lunchtime experience is part of the overall education experience, and the issues surrounding raising the overall cost of a meal and how that would affect all groups? 17th June 2005. 27th May 2005. 23rd May 2005. Merton Parents meeting with the Council. Several members of our steering group met with the council (including Leader Andrew Judge and Director of Education, Sue Evans) on Friday 20th May. See some notes from the meeting here. You can also see the joint press release agreed by Merton Council and the steering group. 12th May 2005 (Claire Davies) Early May 2005 29th April 2005 14th April 2005 |
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