School food: An uncertain future
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2013, The School Food Plan was published aiming to revolutionise food in schools across England, and to show countries around the world what providing good food in schools could look like. Out of the policy came 'universal infant free school meals', dubbed by the Government as "good news" for any family with small children at infant school. A £600 million commitment to giving children a hot meal at lunchtime.
But in this programme, one of the authors of the School Food Plan says the Government failed to listen to the advice it asked for. Now thousands of primary schools across England face funding cuts which could see them struggling to provide school lunches to tens of thousands of pupils.
Sheila Dillon hears how a Government report on funding food in small schools was never published and asks what the future holds for school food across the UK in an uncertain political climate.
Presented by Sheila Dillon Produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program. |
| 0:05.0 | Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. |
| 0:10.0 | We hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:12.0 | I do know how to cook a few meals. |
| 0:15.0 | I know how to cook eggy bread. |
| 0:18.0 | I do have a... |
| 0:20.0 | When I was a kid and I think often when you're a child you look at what grown-ups do and you |
| 0:24.0 | presume that grown-ups do things really well and then you become a grown-up and you realize |
| 0:28.3 | that unfortunately for some strange reasons a lot of what grown-ups do they don't do very well. of what grown-ups do, they don't do very well. |
| 0:34.0 | What the grown-ups didn't do very well for a long time was food in schools, providing it or teaching about it. |
| 0:41.0 | Then everything changed. |
| 0:43.0 | Jamie Oliver and the revelation of Turkey Twizzlers, the school food plan, the food for life program. |
| 0:49.0 | It wasn't perfect, but all over the UK food in schools was transformed. It was put on the curriculum. |
| 0:56.0 | Lunches aspired to be about taste, localness and health. |
| 1:00.0 | Vegets were planted in school grounds, cooking classes were reinstated. |
| 1:05.0 | But now that astonishingly rapid change with its knock-on effects on public health, |
| 1:11.0 | education and rural food production is under threat. |
| 1:14.6 | I was furious. |
| 1:16.5 | And I knew then that was 10,000 pounds wiped from my combined four schools budget. |
| 1:23.2 | In this program we're going to be revealing the impact |
| 1:25.8 | that a little-known Whitehall decision is going to have |
| 1:28.6 | on thousands of schools and tens of thousands of children and families, a decision that could |
... |
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