MANAGEMENT
C AT E R I N G
How to acheive excellence in catering ANDREW BLENCH, SBM consultant at School Business Partner Limited, explains why he believes excellent catering provision is so important, and how you can look to improve yours
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February 2022
T
he days of the school dining hall serving measly portions of rice pudding are, thankfully, behind us. However, the nutrition of students remains fundamental to their learning and physical development; how can catering services seek to feed hungry stomachs, deliver gourmet meals, and skim pennies off an SBM budget? I believe that the school catering service fulfils three main functions nutritional, social and financial.
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NUTRITIONAL It is nutritional in that it, quite literally, provides young people with ‘brain food’. I know that I sometimes forget that the brain is part of our bodies; it doesn’t help that the media talks about ‘mental health’ and ‘physical health’ as if the two are unconnected. In my view there is no distinction; our mental health doesn’t float out there, somewhere in the ether.
How we think is influenced by what we eat - take being ‘hangry’ for example when we are angry and irritable because we are hungry. We need good nutrition to help us think well and maintain a good emotional state. This is even more important for our young people whose brains and bodies are growing and developing at a rapid pace. The development of cognitive ability in young people is a complex science which involves the establishment of connections in the brain and development of ways of thinking which we, as adults, take for granted sometimes. For some of our young people the food they access through school will be the only consistent and healthy food they will see. One of the good things which has come from the pandemic, thanks to Marcus Rashford and others, is an acknowledgment that child food poverty is real and still exists during the school holidays - but then, all of us who work in schools knew that already, didn’t we?
