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All I can remember of my school dinners were enormous stodgy pies.
Potatoes, and waiting for Mr Hart the Headmaster to make sure you'd eaten them...
...is unfortunately my abiding memory of my school dinners.
We started LEON in 2004,
with the objective of making it easy for everybody to eat good food.
Natural food that tastes good,
does you good and delivered to people at scale.
We looked at fast food and we thought - why does fast food have to be bad?
Couldn’t you take the system and put really good stuff and passion
and creative cooking in at one end and actually get really good
food out the other end.
Somebody called Jamie Oliver took... Sorry, that was a joke!...
...took a LEON lunch to a meeting that he had, before they went into power,
with Cameron, Gove and the prospective Health Secretary.
So that's how Gove and Cameron became aware of the potential
of us to bring something to the party.
Michael Gove asked us to get involved in the School Food Plan.
Why did the government think we are the right people to do this?
We clearly really care about good fast food. We understand what it takes to
deliver fresh food at high volume, at a reasonable price. We get it.
I certainly started with a perception, which I now
completely understand that many other people share, was that before Jamie Oliver
conducted the campaign and did his work in school food, things were bad and now
after standards have been put in place, surely everything is great?
Why the hell do they need us?
We were going around talking to people about whether there was a job to be done.
No one could point us to an agreed vision of what good food should look like
and a plan for the country to make that happen.
Today, versus the seventies where we grew up, there was 70 plus take up
of school food in secondary schools. Today there is 36-37%.
The first major thing that we discovered, in understanding whether we should
take the job on, was 'Wow, things are not sorted'.
Our challenge is to understand why and to fix it.
We went back to Gove and said 'Look we do not want this to be a review,
we do not to be the next centimetre on a pile of paper of all the previous
reviews of school food.'
Every day we are with schools, we are with experts, we are with people
on the ground, we are with parents, we are with teaching unions
we've got almost an assess all areas pass to meet everybody,
excluding probably Robbie Williams.
We have an absolute ability to use that opportunity to get things done.
We have two objectives: the first is to get more kids eating great
school dinners, partly about the nutrition, it's partly about how it tastes and
is presented and then it is all of the other things that can increase take up;
managing queues better, making the dining rooms more lovely.
The second thing is, what is the role of food in schools?
Cooking, growing, the curriculum, how kids experience food in schools,
so that it gets more kids eating school dinners but also so that it gives them a
legacy for later in their lives.
We are going to do it with a sense of positivity so that the people
on the front line have a sense of confidence about what is possible.
We are going to be focused on building consensus.
We know from business and from life, results happen when everyone working
in a sector actually opens up and works together.
Lastly, quick wins throughout the process.
We are absolutely adamant that results must start immediately.
We wanted to deliver three things; the first is a vision of excellence.
What does really good food look like? So that any headteacher can take that
and begin to work towards it. The second is looking at what works well.
There are all sorts of people across the country, in individual pockets
who've done really amazing things and yet we go to schools
and people are not aware of that. We want to present that in a really
rich, easy to access way. The final thing is understanding what needs to happen
on a national basis to support the schools that are doing that.
What support do they need on training? What support do they need on group buying?
There is a lot of work in terms of the structure which will form the basis
of the plan that we roll out next year.
Jamie Oliver, Sharon Hodgson - who's from the All-Party Parliamentary
Group for school food, chair of that and the School Food Trust and Food for Life
have all been incredibly supportive, publically supportive.
This is an army that we need. We need a gang, we need an entire movement.
We need everyone actively involved in this.
If you a headteacher or a school cook, or a kid that knows what's good, or has
got a vision for how things can be.
We have an email address here and I have actually got it here and
I'm going to read it out loud. This is long!
school.food@education.gsi.gov.uk
Next time we are going to get a shorter email address.
It's improtant not only because of the food on the plate,
this is about childhood obesity, it's about the bill for the NHS,
it's about people being able to live healthy lives and feed their children
good food and we have a real opportunity here to make a difference.
If you are not on the phone!
Hold it! We got a text.