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Jamie's School Dinners

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Jamie's manifesto for Teachers

TEACHERS - Qualified cookery teachers urgently required.

There's a national shortage of properly qualified cookery teachers. How are schools going to deliver this new entitlement? If the government is going to put cooking back on the curriculum, it needs to:

• Sort out a recruitment programme for new cookery teachers now.
• Set up specialist training colleges to train up more cookery teachers.
• Ensure that all teacher-training courses include the basics of food and cookery.

HEADS – Make every school a junk-free zone.

It's great that schools won't be able to sell or serve junk to our kids at school any more. But the government needs to go one step further and make sure they can't bring it in from outside either. I held a junk food amnesty in Greenwich and the result was pretty worrying.

If heads and governors aren't empowered to ban kids from bringing in this rubbish in their lunchboxes or school bags, how on earth are they going to be able to get them to switch over to eating proper food instead? The Healthy Schools policy which all schools are expected to adopt needs to be specific about including a total ban in order to qualify.

Heads need to take responsibility and find out how much of this stuff their pupils are bringing in on a daily basis. They need to get support from governors and parents to introduce a school policy that makes their school a junk-free zone.

Jamie's manifesto for Parents

PARENTS - Get parents on message.

I think many parents are unaware of how much junk their kids are actually eating and drinking. Many need to be guided to understand that if a chocolate bar, fizzy drink and bag of crisps are part of their kid's daily diet, they aren't getting the right kind of nutrition for proper growth and are going to face a load of serious health problems from early adulthood.

As well as the frightening rise in obesity there's a growing number of kids, no matter what shape or size, that simply aren't getting fed enough nutrients like iron, calcium and vitamins. It's having a huge effect on their brainpower, behaviour and ability to concentrate and learn at school.

Take iron: half of the country's teenage girls don't get enough, which affects IQ and probably means they're not doing as well at school as they should be.

This is literally a growing health problem which means that even if kids aren't already fat, more and more of them are becoming malnourished.

The government is spending £75 million to get us to stop smoking. We need the same kind of massive campaign to educate and scare, if necessary, families into knowing how important a good diet is to their kids' growth, health and future. If we don't get it right now pretty soon we're going to be a nation of overweight underachievers.

Jamie's manifesto for Dinner ladies

DINNER LADIES - Skills training for the nation's school cooks.

Many dinner ladies still don't seem to get money filtered down to them to pay for any extra hours they need to cook proper meals from scratch. They're also not getting any proper training yet. In the summer, The Prime Minister asked me what was still needed to train up our dinner ladies and get them motivated again. Here's a summary of what I asked for:

• Set up a network of training kitchens by next autumn and get all head cooks trained up as quickly as possible.
• Teach the girls how to cook. Refresh their skills and revive their confidence in the kitchen. Teach them about the new standards so they're equipped to deliver them.
• Make sure the course becomes a recognised qualification and that at least one person in every kitchen has been on it. Use it as a foundation course for further career training, like an NVQ.
• Set up a network of mentors to follow up and help the girls put the new standards into practice.
• Ensure there's a national training centre to train the trainers.
• Train other people, like heads, governors, teachers and catering managers too.
• Find £2 million to fund the set up.

Jamie's manifesto for Government

GOVERNMENT – Commit to a ten year campaign

It's not clear from this week's announcement how much new funding the government has actually committed. We need a strategic ten year funding plan which gets all the ministers – health, education, farming, sport – and both national and local government working together to get the nation's health back in shape and to get people cooking for themselves and eating properly again.

This should get priority funding from the £1 billion obesity budget which doesn't seem to be doing much at the moment.

Local government also needs to engage with the problem. By the time the government money gets divided down to a school level it's a tiny amount. How many councillors know what's happening about school food in their area? What are they doing to make it a health and education priority for the children in their care?

More money is still needed to:

• Get basic cooking equipment into schools so they can start teaching kids to cook.
• Run a recruitment and training drive for more cookery teachers.
• Fund more hours for dinner ladies so they get paid for doing their jobs and feeding our kids better.
• Fund a massive and sustained national campaign to re-educate people about proper eating.

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