Government nutritional guidelines

The Government has become aware of the consequences on the nation's health of a poor diet at childhood. This has placed school catering well and truly in the spotlight with the Government planning to introduce revised nutritional standards, which will require constant and accurate monitoring within Local Authority catering and other establishments that need to monitor nutrient intake.

The School Food Trust

The Government via the School Food Trust is introducing nutrient based standards in all Primary Schools as from September 2008, and in all Secondary Schools and Special Schools from September 2009. A guide to this is available on the School Food Trust website www.schoolfoodtrust.org.uk

It provides information on how to meet, implement and monitor Government's food based and nutrient based standards for school lunches.

Our 3 week menu cycle was developed using recipes from our menu planning and nutrient analysis software package. This menu cycle meets all the nutrient based standards.

Objectives

From September 2008 all school lunches must meet both the food based standards (already introduced) and the nutrient based standards. These standards will be mandatory, which means the schools will have a legal responsibility to compile. The ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the standards are being met lies with the Local Authority or, if the budget for school meals has been delegated, with the school governing body. However, it is important for everyone involved in school lunches, including parents, carers and pupils to be able to see that the standards are being followed.

OFSTED will be monitoring the way schools approach healthier eating as part of their regular inspections of schools. Norse Commercial Services, who operate the majority of school catering in Norfolk, has invested in a software programme called 'Saffron' to analyse its menus. This has been devised to check that the 3 week menu cycle meets the new guidelines.

The system needs all of our recipes to be put on which includes all of the ingredients required for each day to enable it to analyse the menu. It then lists out the amount of each nutrient, energy, carbohydrate, non-milk extrinsic (NME) sugars, fat, saturated fat, protein, dietary fibre, sodium, vitamin A, vitamin C, folate, calcium, iron and zinc. All of these have to meet tolerances dictated by the School Food Trust. Saffron Nutrition already has rules defined in the database based on the Government standards; these can be changed or amended if required.

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