The dining boom

11:42am Wednesday 19th December 2007

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Despite Jamie Oliver's best efforts, the number of pupils eating school dinners is in decline. But one school in North Yorkshire is bucking the trend with a former Café Royal chef serving top quality meals to 2,000 pupils every day. Ruth Campbell tucks in

MY starter of salad with huge chunks of buffalo mozzarella, crispy Parma ham and black olives, drizzled with basil pesto and olive oil is delicious.

The lean, tender lamb which follows literally melts in my mouth.

This is not school dinners as I remember them.

Nor is it anything like the school dinners my children, and thousands of other youngsters all over the region, are experiencing today.

Despite all the good intentions of the Government and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, attempts to ditch junk food and improve our school dinners appear to be failing miserably. Taking unhealthy, highly processed and fatty foods like Turkey Twizzlers and chips-with-everything off school menus has resulted in about 20 per cent fewer pupils queuing up to eat in school canteens throughout the country, with two thirds of secondary pupils now shunning school lunches.

But at St Aidan's in Harrogate, which opted out of the contract catering system to introduce healthier eating six years ago, the opposite is happening.

Where once fewer than 300 pupils ate school dinners, chef Trevor Whitehead and his 20- strong team now serve nearly 2,000 lunches to 96 per cent of pupils and 120 staff every day.

School dinners are so popular, St Aidan's had to take out a £250,000 loan to build an additional dining hall to cope with the increase in numbers. And staff have had so many inquiries from education authorities and schools all over the country wanting to find out how they have managed to buck the national trend, that they have had to set up a catering website to give out information. www.catering4schools.com has had 80,000 hits since January, not just from all over the UK but from Barbados and Australia, too.

Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein have made repeated requests to visit and film at the school but St Aidan's has politely declined. Staff don't want celebrity chefs coming in and taking over their kitchen. It is a gimmick they don't need. Besides, St Aidan's has a celebrity chef of its own. Trevor Whitehead has worked at the Café Royal, as well as in five-star hotels all over the world and is revered in the school community and beyond for his achievements in the kitchen.

St Aidan's food revolution was the brainchild of deputy head Steve Hatcher, long before Jamie Oliver's school meals campaign. His Damascus moment, he explains, came seven years ago when he was supervising a few hundred pupils eating school dinners and was disgusted by what he saw. "Children were carrying greasy slabs of pizza with fat dripping off it, like slug trails on the floor. Staff made do with half frozen sandwiches. The headmaster hadn't eaten in school for five years and I was fed up watching 1,000 children walking out of school to eat in town every lunchtime."

As a result, St Aidan's broke free from county council dinners and employed Trevor to turn its school meals around. It became the only school in the country to employ a dietician on its staff and took on a full-time baker to produce fresh bread, while establishing its own organic vegetable garden to supply the kitchen.

Mr Hatcher recalls how the smell was the first thing everyone noticed. "It was the fragrance of freshly cooked food, rather than processed rubbish.

On the first day of the new system 800 pupils had school dinners, on the second day it was 1,200." Numbers kept on rising.

Within a short time, teachers reported better behaviour and concentration levels. Academic results have also steadily improved since the new school dinners were introduced: "We don't know if it is the food, but we are creating a virtuous circle," says Mr Hatcher.

Critics may argue schools should be employing teachers rather than dieticians, but there is no place for such a narrowminded approach to education at St Aidan's, the top performing non-selective secondary school in the country, and classed as "outstanding" by Ofsted inspectors.

Mr Hatcher explains: "We are preparing pupils for life. One of the most essential life skills is looking after your body and your health."

It has taken huge investment, and nerve, to get to this point. Some have asked when the school will make money back on the new £250,000 restaurant.

Mr Hatcher's response is blunt. "We won't. But we wouldn't expect to make money from a new geography classroom either. You couldn't measure the impact this one room has had."

St Aidan's manages within the same tight budget as other schools, charging only £1.50 for a main course. Cutting out contract caterers made some savings. Also, St Aidan's doesn't employ supervisory staff since most teachers now eat school dinners.

Trevor Whitehead admits initiating the turnaround was difficult. At first, catering staff were resistant to change and half left. The key to success, he says, is his strong team and school's dedicated hands-on approach.

Watching him at work in his kitchen, producing for four different venues - as well as the main restaurant, there are separate sixth form and first year dining areas and a bistro - is a revelation.

Everything has to be served within the hour. It is an intense environment, which would probably send Gordon Ramsay running for cover. "The timing is down to minutes," says Trevor, who also serves breakfasts, afternoon snacks, after-school meals and evening take-aways.

Pupils are served quickly. In the past, meals had gone cold before they sat down, or hot meals ran out before they had the chance to order.

St Aidan's has introduced nutritious, grab-andgo meals from the bistro for those in a rush and a time-saving cashless card payment system. There is advance notice of menus to avoid dithering. And all pupils are guaranteed a hot meal, no matter how late they order.

In the restaurant (no-one calls it a canteen) the atmosphere is calm and sociable. All the pupils I talk to love the food and agree they are now more adventurous and better informed about what they eat. For many, it is the main meal of the day. "It is like restaurant standard food," says 16-year-old Daniel Chetcuti.

Pupils (staff call them customers) are treated with respect and give it back in return. The restaurant is tidy after they leave. The white walls are spotless. "It used to look like the Somme after school dinners, with stuff spilt all over the floor.

This hasn't needed so much as a lick of paint in six years," says Mr Hatcher.

He criticises schools who want to ban packed lunches so pupils are forced to eat school meals and was infuriated by School Food Trust chair Prue Leith's argument that children should be barred from leaving school at lunch times. More than 1,000 of St Aidan's older pupils could walk off the premises for lunch but choose not to. "Children will not learn by indoctrination, we don't have to lock them in school at lunch time," says Mr Hatcher.

There has only been one gripe about St Aidan's school dinners in six years. That came from a parent who wrote to say her reputation as a good cook was in tatters because her children said school meals were so much better than what she served at home.

How many other schools can boast of a complaint like that?