Sharon Ball

Oldfield Park Infants School, in Bath, has won the School Food Trust’s School of the Month competition in recognition for their innovative work on improving their school meal service, which has seen meal take-up rise by an incredible 21%.  The Trust has awarded Oldfield £5,000 to further the good work and improvements they have already made.

Head Teacher Jo Claridge, together with governors, staff and parents in the School Food Group recognised the need to increase meal take-up at Oldfield.  They decided on a range of activities and meal service improvements to change parents’ and pupils perceptions of school meals and promote their nutritious and good value school meals to help drive take up. These included; Parent and pupil questionnaires to gather feedback and ideas for improvement, a buy one get one free meal promotion for parents providing an opportunity for them to enjoy a school meal with their child, the use of a special menu board and photographs of children enjoying their school meals to advertise their meals and offering every child who does not eat a school meal on a regular basis to try one of their meals for free.

Head Teacher Jo Claridge said ‘‘We are thrilled to be selected as School of the Month. The award is a tribute to the considerable effort put in over the past eighteen months by our School Food Group. Everyone has worked so hard to raise the profile of the school meals service and make parents aware of the excellent quality of the meals on offer. The award is very timely as we have a major refurbishment of our kitchen and dining area planned for this summer. Our plans for the £5000 include engaging an artist in residence to work directly with the children to create murals on the theme of healthy eating, growing food and exercise which will make lunchtimes more enjoyable.’’

Oldfield Park Infants' School have a long tradition of serving the local community and recently celebrated their 130^th birthday last week.

The School of the Month competition is a new initiative set up by the School Food Trust to recognise excellence and innovation in the area of school food.   It allows all the schools that are signed up to the School Food Trust’s Million Meals campaign the chance to win £5,000 every month.

The competition is part of the School Food Trust’s Million Meals campaign, which aims to improve the health and wellbeing of children by getting a million more students eating school meals by 2010. Over 2,800 schools across the country have already signed up to the campaign.