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 - 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.

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.