School Food

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Indeed, that was the previous Labour Government’s conclusion, which was based on schemes such as those piloted in Hull by the former Labour council. That scheme was scrapped by the incoming Liberal Democrat council, which thankfully has been kicked out of office—and rightly so if those are its priorities. Such schemes were also piloted in the city of Durham. The previous Labour Government had also found my hon. Friend’s point to be true, which is why we were going to extend the provision of free school meals.

Yes, the deficit is an issue. I sometimes wish that Government Members would change the stuck record on the deficit. We knew, back when we were in office, that there was a looming deficit, which is why we had a deficit reduction plan. My right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), whom I had the great privilege of serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary when he was Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, probably knew better than anyone else the requirements of deficit reduction. The real issue is our priorities in dealing with deficit reduction. Of course, we had a credible plan to halve the deficit in this Parliament. Even with that deficit reduction plan, we were going to extend the entitlement to free school meals beyond the pilots.

At the general election, the Minister also had a plan to halve the deficit. However, her priorities changed when she entered the Government, because she has now signed up to a neo-conservative deficit reduction plan to eliminate the deficit. Of course, that raises issues of priorities in her Department. Eliminating the deficit means that those pilots for free school meals cannot now take place.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech this morning. Are we storing up trouble for the future by not investing in our young people now and making sure that they are eating healthy school meals, by not investing in the free school meals pilots and by not looking at the evidence? The long-term implications are that the health of the nation will not improve and that the educational achievement of some of our children will not improve. The Government have failed to address that issue, because of their narrow focus on deficit reduction.

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is correct, which allows me to move neatly on to the next part of my contribution. As she has rightly said, showing and informing children about nutritious and healthy meals will clearly help in the battle against childhood obesity. Education and the health of our children are hugely important. It is estimated that obesity and associated conditions such as diabetes cost the NHS £3.5 billion a year, and that figure is set to rise. This is therefore a cost worth paying to save money in the long run. Even at a time when the deficit needs to be cut, we cannot forget the social implications of the Government’s decisions. If we want to reduce the attainment gap, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) has said, we must ensure that all children at school are given an equal chance. We know that free school meals contribute enormously to reducing attainment gaps, because they help children from low-income backgrounds, who may not have good nutrition, to concentrate more in the classroom.

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[Jim Dobbin (in the Chair)]

The hon. Gentleman is trying to curry favour. [Laughter.]

[Diana Johnson]

I am listening with great interest to my hon. Friend talk about his culinary skills, but I wonder whether we should recognise in particular that being able to cook a nutritionally balanced meal is a basic life skill that everyone should have. School and education should instil such basic life skills in young people, as much as the ability to read, write and add up. Basic skills such as cooking should be on the curriculum.

[Andrew Gwynne]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Children should learn not only how to cook but about the nutritional value of the food being cooked and about where it comes from. That is not just from Morrisons in Denton—whether my Denton or the one in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), which also has a Morrisons. Food comes not only from the supermarket but from the ground. In recent years, some brilliant work in schools has meant that children have learned exactly where the food that they eat comes from. My children know only too well that eggs come from chickens, because we have five chickens at home, so we have an abundance of eggs, which comes in handy for baking.

There is an opportunity to link lunch to education about diet, nutrition and cooking. Many schools have used the extension of the meals programme to bring more parents into school, so that they and their children can learn to enjoy cooking healthy meals together. However, there are concerns about the School Food Trust, which was established in September 2005 as a non-departmental public body—I know such bodies are not fashionable these days—to monitor school food standards, to drive the uptake of free and paid-for meals and to advise local and national Government on food policy. Under the Public Bodies Bill, the trust will be hived off into a charity and community interest company, and local authorities or schools that seek advice will have to buy in its services, as indeed will the Department for Education.

A significant concern is that big cuts to local authority budgets and pressure on individual school budgets will mean that they cannot afford to pay for ongoing guidance and advice, or that they will have to prioritise other schemes. That is another worrying development about the quality of food to be served in our schools.

Before I finish, I have a few questions for the Minister. How will the Government help parents back into work if they do not consider the need for free school meals and other such programmes? What will the Government do to improve health inequalities among children if they do not use free school meals and education to alter the behaviour of children and families? Why have the Government, who said that they are committed to fairness and to alleviating child poverty, started by attacking families on low incomes? Importantly, how do the Government propose to close the attainment gap and reduce inequality without considering nutrition in schools?

It is clear that the coalition Government are undermining the hard work done by the last Labour Government and campaigners to improve the take-up and quality of school meals. That is especially disappointing because they had previously pledged to lift children out of poverty by 2020, and little of what they have done so far has moved us closer to that pledge. I worry that that will result in long-term increases in obesity, and ever-increasing inequality in health and educational outcomes between the richest and poorest in society. Surely, no one wants that.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) for securing this debate, and for making a stunningly good speech. I want to concentrate on one aspect of school food: universal free school meals, particularly for primary school children. It is important, as my hon. Friend said, to keep the debate alive in the face of an uncaring Government, which is evidenced this morning by the complete absence of hon. Members on the Government Benches to engage in this debate. That is unfortunate, because the road that the Government are taking is likely to have an adverse impact on children’s health, particularly those from the poorest communities.

The Children’s Food Campaign notes that healthy school meals are vital to help to tackle the UK’s alarmingly high and rising levels of obesity and diet-related illness, and states clearly that good food habits are established in childhood. That is not rocket science. We know how to do that, and I draw the Minister’s attention to the experience of the universal free school meals pilot in Durham. During the two years of the pilot, 235 schools participated and, typically, around 30,000 free school meals were served daily. The average take-up against the roll was about 86%, but because of pupil absences on some days, it was actually much higher. Most schools reported 100% take-up at some stage in the process. The pilot was absolutely and hugely successful in terms of take-up.

It is interesting to consider how the pilot worked, and I want to say at the outset that Durham county council was fantastic in putting the scheme together. It committed £4 million of capital funding to upgrade the kitchens in every school so that meals were produced locally in the school. It also looked at its procurement practices so that it could source food locally, and achieved really high standards of healthy school meals because it could buy in bulk. Such aspects of universality in the provision of free school meals often do not receive much consideration. The county council did an excellent job, but so did the schools, which embraced the scheme wholeheartedly.

When my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) was a Minister, she visited Durham, and saw with me the incredible effect that universal free school meals had on schools. It changed the whole culture of the school, not just how they felt about food. The really good schools managed to integrate what was happening with free school meals into the curriculum, and ran that alongside an active sports policy.

[Diana Johnson]

I remember fondly my visit with my hon. Friend. One thing that struck me was that to engage with parents and to encourage them to embrace free school meals, there were taster evenings and taster sessions when parents could come in and see what their children would be eating. There was a real sense of the whole community being involved and seeing that the idea was a good one. Will my hon. Friend comment on how things are going now, and whether those taster sessions are continuing?

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

Indeed. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. I will say something about how parents have been involved with the process, because obviously it was important initially to get parents signed up, which is why schools had taster sessions. As the pilot progressed, what schools felt was really important. When they sorted out with children how to have a balanced and healthy diet by choosing different things on different days, and ensured that salad or vegetables and a balanced meal were always available, they decided to get the parents to sign up to whatever meals the children were choosing. That was important, because parents across the board—given that the take-up was 100%, that meant all parents—had to engage with what their children were going to eat in school, and to talk to them about the importance of a balanced meal. That required the schools to undertake work with parents.

That is what we mean about changing the culture. We know how to do it, and the evidence exists. My hon. Friend and I were able to see that before our eyes, and indeed the schools managed to develop, probably inadvertently, evangelism in the children, who were able to explain carefully to us how the food system worked in their school.

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[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) on his tour de force on school food. By the end of his contribution, I felt as if I had been at primary and secondary school with him and knew Mrs Pomfret well. Listening to him talk about Victoria sponges and custard cream biscuits, it is clear that food is an important part of my hon. Friend’s life. We all recognise that a love of good food, and an understanding of how it helps us function well and do our best, is important.

I also pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) and for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson). They have led the way in Parliament over the past few years in ensuring that Ministers, and the Labour party more generally, are made aware of the importance of good school food, and why that fits with our agenda for improving educational attainment and addressing health issues, such as obesity. I congratulate my hon. Friends on their work, and I thank them for coming to Hull a couple of years ago to see what happened there and to talk to head teachers. They also talked to Professor Colquhoun at Hull university, who is the academic who was tasked with evaluating the scheme in Hull. It was useful and helpful for my hon. Friends to have that time in the city. We have already heard from my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham, and I am pleased that we will soon hear from the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West.

I want to say a few words about the Hull experience and about why, from the point of view of a constituency Member of Parliament, what happened there is instructive. One of my big concerns about the coalition Government is their failure to look at evidence and make policy on the back of that. I am also concerned about the renaming of the Department for Education. It used to be called the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which recognised that education does not stand on its own but is part of the whole experience that a baby, child or young person has in their family, their school and with education. The narrow approach to education taken by the Government is shown in their approach to school food. It is almost seen as something that does not have to be considered because all they are really bothered about is English, maths and the introduction of the English baccalaureate, which is a narrow approach to education. We should be concerned about that, because education is much more than just academic subjects. That is where I start from.

The reason why, in 2002-03, Hull started to look carefully at free school meals was that Hull’s children, who are as bright as children anywhere else in the country, were not achieving as much as they should have been at primary and secondary levels. The council took a far-sighted view about the measures that it could introduce to help to deal with some of the educational inequalities in the city and with health inequalities. Unfortunately, my constituents tend to suffer from diseases and medical conditions far earlier than people in other parts of the country. There is a tendency to suffer strokes and to develop obesity and cardiovascular disease much earlier than in other parts of the country. Hull made a real attempt to deal with some of those issues.

We should pay tribute to Councillor Inglis, the leader of the council at the time, who fought hard and used imaginatively the flexibilities that the Labour Government had introduced in relation to education. That allowed the council to introduce a pilot scheme in Hull to provide free school meals in all our primary schools and special schools. It was called the “Eat Well, Do Well” scheme. Young people would go into school and have a healthy breakfast and a healthy lunch. If they stayed for activities after school, healthy snacks were available then as well. The aim was to combine the whole day’s eating within a package of healthy eating and to encourage young people to see food as something positive and enjoyable.

The scheme was in place between 2004 and 2007. Of course, it was important to evaluate the scheme and find out whether it was delivering. Professor Derek Colquhoun of Hull university produced a superb report about what happened in Hull’s schools. We have heard in relation to the experience in Durham what teachers say about the willingness and readiness of young people to learn in the classroom, having had a healthy breakfast or lunch. We hear about parents being pestered when they go to the supermarket by their youngsters saying, “Oh, I tried broccoli at school today. Can we buy some broccoli at the supermarket?” Amazing stuff happened in Hull.

One effect was the development of social skills when children ate together around a table. That was especially the case when there was family service. The food was put in the centre and shared out among all the participants around the table. That facilitated interaction among the children, who talked and listened to one another, which helped them to develop good table manners as well.

Another effect was that gardening clubs were encouraged in schools. Those clubs enabled young people to see food being grown in the playground. Cooking clubs were also encouraged. I went to Thoresby school in my constituency just a few weeks ago. It has an active cooking club. The children like to cook, and they see the value in eating well and in enjoying their food. There have been positive spin-offs from the “Eat Well, Do Well” scheme.

[Lilian Greenwood]

I am delighted that my hon. Friend has mentioned gardening clubs, because I have visited a number of schools in my constituency where there are community gardens or the school has a garden. I am referring to Southwold school, which is in Radford, and to Greenfields school and Riverside school, which are both in The Meadows. The children are involved in growing salads and vegetables, which they incorporate into school meals. That encourages them to try fresh produce. Perhaps they would never normally want to look at it, but because they have grown it themselves, they are excited about it and they are trying new things. I also want to mention the importance of introducing fresh fruit into nurseries, which was another thing that the Labour Government did. I know from going into school with my own daughter that children were trying fresh fruit that they had never tried before, which encouraged them to take a much healthier approach to eating.

[Diana Johnson]

My hon. Friend has made an important point. There was a proud history over the past 13 years of what was achieved in relation to food in schools and encouraging our young people to eat well.

I pay tribute to the trade unions. Unison and the GMB worked very hard to ensure that the pilot scheme that we ran in Hull worked well. Their members were involved as dinner ladies and cooks, and they were passionate about what the scheme was doing for children in Hull. The unions really embraced the scheme.

As my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham has said, when, unfortunately, the Liberal Democrats took control of the council in Hull in 2006, the first thing they did was to say, “Right. We’re not going to wait for the evaluation of the scheme; we’re just going to scrap it. We’re telling you that in 12 months’ time, it will just end.” That was very disappointing, and it was an act of political vandalism that will come back to haunt them. Having read today’s newspapers, I say to the Minister that that was a foretaste of the way in which the Liberal Democrats were to act in government, because we see today that the policy that they introduced on the education maintenance allowance—suddenly saying that they were scrapping EMA without looking properly at evidence and considering their options—is, unfortunately, the way in which the present Government seem to make policy.

That happened in Hull in 2006. It was very disappointing, but what came out of it, which was heartening, was the recognition by the Labour Government that what had happened in Hull was special and that further evidence was needed to see whether it would provide a basis for rolling out free school meals around the country. As a result, we had the pilots.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point about how decisions are being made by the Liberal Democrats in councils and in government without evidence being taken on board. Does that not show that what is happening is ideologically driven? They did not wait for the evidence in Hull or from the two pilots in Newham and Durham before deciding to scrap the whole scheme.

[Diana Johnson]

My hon. Friend has made an important point. The situation is very disappointing. I remember appearing before a Select Committee in the previous Parliament as a Minister and being heavily criticised for decisions having been made on policy development without evidence to back them up. I am passionate about getting the evidence and seeing where it leads us in making our policy. We are talking about what happened in Hull and in Durham and Newham. I was lucky enough to visit both those pilots as well to see what happened in those primary schools and to look at the evidence and the evaluation. It would be criminal not to consider that fully and to take a view about how the Government can best use that information and evidence for the future.

My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham talked about Durham, and I take my hat off to the people of Durham for the way in which they fully embraced the scheme. The same applies to the people of Newham, the mayor of Newham and my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), who was a keen advocate of free school meals in her constituency. Also relevant is Wolverhampton, where we were trying something different. As my hon. Friends have said, that was about raising the eligibility level so that more young people were eligible for free school meals.

I want to finish on what is happening in Hull now, because this is a little more positive. Unfortunately, there was the decision by the Lib-Dem council just to scrap the scheme. The Labour council that took control in May this year knew very well that the policy that it had from 2004 to 2006 was working and was delivering for local children. It came in on a manifesto promise that it wanted to reduce the school meal price to 50p. The aim is to get rid of any charge at all, but obviously we are in difficult financial circumstances and Hull has taken a major cut in the money coming from central Government. We have seen the ring-fencing come off the school lunch grant, and we see the coalition’s obsession with schools operating independently and not having a wider connection with the community and the local education authority. The previous Lib-Dem council administration decided to increase the price of school meals to £1.60 from the autumn; the price was £1.30. Labour came in and said that it wanted to reduce the price to 50p, but because of the funding issue that the coalition has introduced, it has not been possible. The council has been able to prioritise and make choices, and it has found some money to enable schools to stick at £1.30 for now, with the aim of reducing the price to £1 by Christmas.

We are, therefore, still taking a positive approach in Hull, because we recognise the scheme’s importance. We also recognise that the long-term aim is to have free school meals not only in Hull, but in other parts of the country where our youngsters could benefit from the offer of universal free school meals. Such an offer would ensure that they achieve as much as they should in school and that the nation’s health improves.

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[Sarah Teather]

The Government are not scrapping them, and if the hon. Gentleman will now let me finish I shall deal with the points on which I disagree with him.

I just want to pick up a point made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson). I ask hon. Members to forgive me but I am still losing my voice; it has almost returned after last week’s Education questions, but it is coming in and out. The hon. Lady made a point about nursery education, and the realisation of the need to embed the relevant attitudes early is precisely why I have asked the School Food Trust to produce some nutritional guidance for nurseries and children’s centres. It is producing that at the moment and I hope it will help to embed some of those standards at an early age.

We are absolutely committed to driving up the take-up of school meals. It now stands at 44.1% in primary schools and 37.6% in secondary schools. However, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) pointed out that, in her constituency, the take-up has gone down in some schools. The School Food Trust is looking into some schools that have had difficulties; although the average might have gone up, some secondary schools have seen striking decreases, and the trust is considering the details in order to understand why.

To help drive up the number who take school meals, we are encouraging schools to use more freedom in charging. We included measures in the Education Bill to allow schools to be more flexible in how they charge. For example, they can make offers if a family has two children or make introductory offers to encourage people to take up school meals. However, I disagree with Opposition Members on many points.

One of the consistent themes of the debate was our decision to remove the ring fence. I was struck by the contradictory nature of Opposition Members’ argument; they spoke about the commitment to school food that they see in their constituencies from schools and head teachers, yet they are unwilling to trust schools to deliver. It is not right to ring-fence everything. It is right to give schools the freedom to decide how to prioritise spending, depending on existing practices. None the less, I recognise what many Opposition Members said about the impact of rising prices. That is why we are working with Pro5, a partnership of the UK’s largest public sector organisations; we want to drive down the price, encouraging better procurement by using centrally negotiated contracts. I hope that we will reap benefits from that.

[Diana Johnson]

Am I correct in thinking that the Government decided to ring-fence the music grant for at least one year to ensure that music was provided in schools? If they can do it for music, why can they not do it for school food?

[Sarah Teather]

The hon. Lady would be the first to blow the trumpet if the Labour Government had done so, given the extent to which schools already offer healthy balanced meals. Is she honestly saying that we should always ring-fence everything for ever? I am sure that that is not her view.