Jamie's School Dinners — The Campaign

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Jamie's Manifesto

Jamie's new six-point plan to improve food for Britain's children

Make cooking and life skills classes compulsory for ALL kids so they learn about food and good eating habits while they’re young. Our kids need to be equipped to understand food, cook and shop on a budget, which are essential life skills.
Recruit and train new cookery teachers, otherwise the new entitlement to cookery lessons won’t be able to happen.
Empower heads to make every school a junk-free zone.
Educate parents and help them to understand the basics of family cooking and responsible nutrition.
Invest in dinner ladies with proper training and appropriate, paid hours to cook food and not just re-heat junk.
Commit to a ten-year strategic plan and fund a long-term public campaign to get people back onto a proper diet and empower/persuade (and possibly scare, if needed) the public into making better choices.

Jamie's Manifesto - 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.

Find out more about Jamie's manifesto for:

www.jamieoliver.com/schooldinners/

Find out some basic facts about school dinners

Are you concerned about your child's school dinners? Do you know what they serve? Do you know who to talk to or even who's in charge?

Channel 4 has produced a fantastic downloadable action pack specifically for parents.

We've got lots of advice on finding out about the quality of your child's school meals, ways to start a campaign for change and some simple ways to improve your child's general diet.