Jacquie Blake is the Commercial Operations Manager for Nottingham City Council and Chair of LACA, the School Food People. She sits on the new Love British Food Schools Working Group.
My role and responsibilities
I have worked for Nottingham City Council for 31 years. I started my professional life doing a BSC in Hotel and Catering studies and then worked for Unilever. From there I went to Sodexo where I worked in staff restaurants around London. When my husband and I moved to Nottinghamshire I joined the school meal service there and then moved to Nottingham City Council. It was something I felt I wanted to do. I could see that I had an opportunity to make a real difference. It has been really rewarding to see how much we have achieved as a result of the changes we have made.
How many schools are you responsible for and how do you work with them?
62 schools mostly primary.
Most of the secondary schools in the city are either part of an Academy chain contract and some of them cater in-house.
Interestingly, part of my role is on business development. As well as making sure we retain existing contracts we also now offer our services to schools outside our area. So we now provide catering services for some schools in Derby City which is 30 minutes away as they do not have an in-house catering service. This helps us keep our volumes up; it makes business sense. It is something that has grown since we won the first contract and from that other schools have contacted us, asking us to do their catering.
My view of what we do is that, as well as seeing our work in technical terms of providing a catering contract, most importantly we view it as a partnership with the school. I always say that lunch time is the 9th lesson of the day. It is another opportunity for learning. If we give children free maths and English lessons, why not free food too? Food should be part of their education. And our role is to nudge, encourage and expose children to new tastes and flavours. There are high levels of deprivation in our city and so for many children, school lunch is their only hot meal of the day.
It is a responsibility I take very seriously. We have established a Midday Supervisor training course, training school lunchtime supervisors about allergens and how to engage with the children so that they encourage them to eat. It is about changing the way the staff view themselves; it is the same as if they are front of house in a restaurant and we play an active part in helping them perform that role.
There is such a great opportunity with school meals. If every child was allowed to have a free meal it would create such a level playing field. Once children move into Key Stage 2 I notice how many stop having meals every day, our surveys show that this is due to the financial implications for families.
Nottingham is one of the teams involved in the pilot to establish a new monitoring system for the School Food Standards, through the FSA, which is a good thing. It’s important that all schools meet the Government school food standards.
What catering facilities do you have?
The majority of our schools have a kitchen which is really key to enable us to cook fresh on site. However good the quality of food you provide, you need the right equipment and facilities to help you provide a great service, for e.g. to do batch cooking.
What is the farming and producer hinterland around you?
Being a city, Nottingham does not have local food as such. But we are surrounded by a really good area for farming throughout surrounding Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. I am not hung up about local. For me it is about sourcing British. A prime example is that all our meat is British, supplied from our butcher and much of it comes from Nottinghamshire. Another lovely example is our eggs that come from an organic farm in Newark up the road. It is all about working with what you have available; but it has to be British.
What was the catalyst for sourcing fresh British food?
Since I joined 31 years ago money and budgets have become the main driver. However we always tried to provide fresh produce. There was a movement from head teachers saying that we really need to feed the children well. The head teachers were a big drive behind us moving to an increase in fresh food.
We linked up with the Food for Life Scheme to help schools adopt a whole school approach to food. And now we peg all our standards as Silver Food for Life, this is affordable.
Other things I have done have included introducing salad bars to encourage more children to try a wider variety of fresh fruit and vegetables.
When LACA launched the workforce standards, I took the idea of embedding this across all levels of our workforce. It created the basis of measuring capabilities and from there we developed a comprehensive training programme. It is vital that the teams have the skills to be able to deliver the standards required. You can have the ideas but you need the team around you to make it happen. We have a fantastic team in Nottingham City. I have the ambition but they help me achieve it.
Nottingham City has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by 2028 so we have an important role to play in helping to achieve this. This means buying British, reducing air miles, grass fed meat and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables etc.
Training is key
We also looked at our work force and saw that not everyone was in the same space. So we used the LACA work force standards, did a skills audits of all staff and put together a 12 week training programme for all our chef supervisors and assistants, which includes cooking skills, allergen training, customer service etc
We have a commercial arm too with a staff restaurant at Head Office so we gave everyone the chance to work there and see how a commercial restaurant works. We put everyone through allergen training also. Basically we upskilled our staff. This is what you have to do if you want to serve fresh quality food.
We have also created the post of Food Development chef. They support new schools and new contracts and ensure they have the skills to meet our standards, provide refresher training, have tasting sessions and also focus on recipe development and testing.
You can buy fabulous produce but you have to invest in your staff so they have the skills to cook it.
I always remember that at the time I joined the council, I had 2 young boys and my youngest came home from school one day (from his school that was actually in the next door county council) and he said that he had told the school dinner lady he wasn’t happy. She asked him what he was unhappy about and he told her that all day he had been looking forward to a roast dinner but all there was on the menu was a vegetarian sausage.
This gave me the idea of introducing a pre-ordering system; and we now have electronic system that supports this. Parents and children can place their orders for the whole week. This helps reduce waste and helps with pre ordering. Not all schools want the system but we are pushing more to take it up. Also it really helps with allergens because once a parent has registered their child’s allergens, the system automatically blocks that option out. It is brilliant in this respect.
With regard to funding, I do think it should be ring-fenced by central government and that everyone is encouraged to fund caterers with the full allowance, ensuring the same standards. This is particularly important with the current increases in food , labour and equipment costs.
What is your budget?
It is on a school by school basis depending on the funding they receive and choose to pass on to us.
Currently the funding is £2.34 for UIFSM.
But the majority of caterers do not get that. Schools do not pass on the full funding.
This is going to become a big issue as there is a huge challenge at the moment with prices rocketing.
My thoughts on school puddings
We reduce the sugar across our meals so we see puddings as an opportunity to get children to eat fruit. There may be a small short bread biscuit with the fruit for eg, but the pudding will be mainly fruit. It is all about getting them to eat what is there. Reducing your plate waste and making sure they are enjoying what they are eating.
My thoughts on meat free dishes
We put some meat free dishes on. And we work with pro-veg organisations. But it is all about the messages. A dish may not have any meat in it but we highlight what is in it, not what is not in it. It is about less meat, not no meat. It is about balance and encouraging children to make some positive changes in their diet as a whole..
Suppliers
Everyone wants to buy British but it is about making sure the infrastructure is there for farmers to provide the volume that the public sector needs and at the right price.
So it all comes back to funding so we can achieve this.
The key is to consider this properly when you write your tenders. It is about what you put in your specification. You must write in the quality as standard. We have organised a suppliers day and invited SMEs in. You have to bare in mind that many small companies are not familiar with writing a tender submission. So we have had sessions to support SMEs and we have broken the tender down into smaller lots making it possible for smaller suppliers to be part of it. For example we offer them the chance to supply to just one part of the city, for example Clifton only, which is an area within Nottingham. This has meant that the smaller suppliers can be part of what we do.
It is all about seasonality and flexible menus. We write ‘vegetable medley’ on our menus so we have flexibility to provide fresh and seasonal choices .
It is all about working with your supplier.
All our meat comes from Maloneys Butcher: as a general overview we specify British Red Tractor as the minimum standard. We do taste testing with them.
Lessons learnt and hot tips
- Make the tender process easy for suppliers to respond to: First and foremost, in a Local Authority you have the advantage of scale so it is all about starting with your procurement, contracts and specifications and what you put in them. Getting this right. Doing the research. It often only takes a phone call to a potential supplier. Don’t just put your tender out on a portal and expect people to respond to it. Ring round local suppliers and invite them to respond.
- Train your staff: Once you have good produce it comes down to your team and menus. They need to be trained and refreshed and kept up to date with trends.
- Your relationship with schools is key: having a strong relationship with the senior management team in each school is so important. Where we have high uptake is where we have senior management who see lunch as an important part of the school day. When you have that relationship you can have fun doing things like creating themed events around menus to stimulate pupils’ interest in food. Often, if I have an idea I want to run with I find a couple of head teachers I can run it past and then I find the grapevine works and other schools soon come on board wanting to adopt it too. You need a hook for senior management teams. Think: “What does it mean to them? What is in it for them?”.
My secret
I can do the Cha-cha-cha, waltz and foxtrot!
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