Schoolchildren brace for higher quality meals under council’s new £4m framework – South London News

Schools in a neighborhood are ready for higher quality food school meals after new plans were approved on Monday.

The plans – approved by Southwark Council cabinet – will help schools source and buy high quality, healthy food from more local businesses and for better value for money.

The school food market in Southwark is complex. Each school has different contracts in place with different ways to find and select food products and services.

A more stable system will give schools more control over their catering contracts and the quality of their food.

To achieve this, councils’ plans include reducing the administrative burden on schools when running food services, increasing pay in school kitchens, maintaining high meal standards and improving access to services from smaller businesses and community groups in the area.

The council’s cabinet approved plans to develop the new framework with an estimated total cost of £4m.

The framework will be available to all schools and academies in Southwark.

A council spokeswoman said: “We were one of the first councils to commit to providing free and healthy school meals for all primary school children. Since then, our children are better nourished and achieve better results.

“Now we are raising the bar again by unlocking the power of procurement to further improve the food we provide to pupils throughout the day, working closely with schools and partners.

“Our new framework will make it much easier for schools to ensure they are consistently serving nutritious, sustainably sourced and good value food.

“The framework will reduce the burden and costs on schools, while opening up new jobs and new access for local businesses to our school food market.”

The Council is working with the Department for Education to deliver the procurement framework.

This project is one of the aims of the local authority’s wider school meals transformation programme, launched in December 2021.

(Image: Oleksandr P/ Pexels)

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