School Meals Update

Dear parents / carers, 

As we’ve been a few weeks I thought it would be useful to give you a very quick update on our school meals provision.

School meals organisation

You may or may not realise the hugely significant changes we have had to make to lunchtimes, in order to maintain year group bubbles.  In order to maintain year group bubbles and the Covid 19 cleaning requirements, children are now eating in three hall spaces and the six Upper Phase classrooms.  This ensures that children from different year groups are not mixing.  We have had to extend the hours of our lunchtime staff considerably in order to manage this, as lunches now take place over a much longer period of time.  

As we have two buildings and the main building also has two floors, getting all the lunches over to the right places is also a logistical challenge.  As the weeks have gone on the new routines are settling and staff and children are becoming familiar with them.  This has resulted in the routines now working well, with some slight changes that we have made along the way.  I would like to reassure you that now the routines are embedding, no child is being asked to leave before they have finished what they want to eat.  We appreciate that a small number of children felt unintentionally rushed initially.

Hot meals

We’ve had a small number of queries about hot meals provision, which is understandable.    

We were always keen to investigate a way to move to hot food provision before the weather got colder.  So we have begun some discussions with the schools meals service.  But the logistical challenges of getting food which is still hot to children in nine different places is a challenge.  This is not the case for all schools, especially smaller schools.

It is likely that we will trial any hot provision with a phase in school, probably our youngest children.  Our youngest children are eligible for universal free school meals and our oldest children very often brought packed lunches in anyway pre Covid 19.  So the demand for hot food has always been less with the older children.

We are doing our best to manage all of the many challenges of lunchtimes that Covid 19 has brought us.  If we are able to trial some hot food in the coming weeks, it will not be possible to provide a range of hot food to pick from.  At this time, our school meals provider, North Tyneside Catering Services, are only offering a limited hot menu.  This is because the food will not be able to be served as it previously was in one hall, as the food will need to be taken to children.  This is due to the need to keep bubbles separate and to have cleaning between year groups using the same tables in each hall that is being used.

What will happen next?

Now that we are a few weeks into the term and lunchtime arrangements are beginning to settle, we are able to see what options there may be for an initial trial of hot food with some year groups.  I will write to you again to update you if this is something we are able to find a way to do.  

Yours sincerely

Kate Byrne

Headteacher