Background Information:
Charter Academy (formally St Luke’s Church of England School) is a small voluntary aided church school situated in Portsmouth, for pupils aged 11 – 16. There are 440 pupils on roll and the catering is provided in house. In summer 2009 the school was reformed as the ‘Charter Academy’ and is being run by ARK Academies. The chef at St Luke’s won the Radio 4 ‘Food and Farming’ Dinner lady/man of the year in 2006.
“The school’s high quality provision for healthy eating is popular with students and makes a strong contribution to their ability to lead a healthy lifestyle.” Ofsted 2007
Why did the school make improvements to the lunchtime provision?
The school has two dining halls, one for years 7-9 (lower hall) and the other for years 10 and 11 (upper hall). The service area was at the front of the kitchen. This school food provision is illustrated in the diagram below.
The school was very proactive in making improvements to their school meals service. The Chef and Bursar had recently visited Finland to see how school meals were managed and had made a number of changes before the project started including:
- Introducing a cashless payment system
- Introduced ‘grab and go’ packed lunches
- Packed lunches were served in a separate area to reduce queues
- Menu revision
The school recognised that the lunchtime provision was still at a bottleneck with significant disruption and queuing around the servery. It was not unusual for pupils to queue for over 15minutes at the servery. They wanted to trial a system of allowing the pupils to serve themselves, something they had seen work very effectively in Finland.
Who was involved in making the improvements to the lunchtime provision?
- Chef
- Bursar
- The School Food Trust
What improvements were made?
The main changes made at Charter Academy were around self-service, the equipment used to facilitate this and the results of the trials.
Kitchen area:
A spaghetti diagram was developed to map the flow associated with preparation activity for ‘Grab and Go’ packed lunches, given these were the most popular option.
The diagram illustrates that the location of the fridges, dry ingredients and cooking utensils were not ideally placed in relation to the main preparation space. However, the kitchen staff did use a trolley to collect the items which avoided the need for multiple journeys to any single location.
Equipment in the kitchen was re-organised to increase efficiency. The diagram below shows the new kitchen layout with a central preparation table in front of the two combi-ovens. Both the fridges and shelving have been moved closer to the preparation table. A third combi oven was installed in the kitchen area to reduce cooking time and an old range cooker (hob and oven) was removed to create space.
Dining areas:
The school ran a series of free school meal trials. After the first day, it became apparent that there were insufficient chairs and tables in both dining rooms to cope with the demand.
The school installed additional old chairs and tables in each dining hall, creating a further 32 seats in total.
Servery area:
The school went through a series of PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Act) trials to test the impact of self-service and justify the purchase of self service buffet counters.
PDSA Trial 1: Queuing was timed to gain a baseline prior to improvements. The school introduced self service and then measured queue time again.
Following the initial trial the school decided to permanently implement a self-service system. The School Food Trust agreed to purchase a self-service buffet counter for the upper school hall.
PDSA Trial 2: The school ran a series of meal trials, the first of which provided free meals for one week.
PDSA trial 3: The School Food Trust approved the purchase of a self-service cabinet for the lower hall with one alteration. The second counter contained an integrated heated cabinet so that food could be replenished from underneath. Queuing time at the new serveries was timed to measure the impact. Pupil’s also paid a set cost for their meal prior to entering the dining hall.
What were the benefits to the school?
Kitchen area:
The introduction of a third combi-oven in the kitchen has reduced the amount of cooking time on key items such as vegetables and coupled with the new self service model has allowed the school to reduce staffing in the kitchen. Remaining kitchen staffs have taken on some of the additional roles from the cleaning staff. This has saved the school over £700 per month.
Dining room:
The school installed additional tables and chairs that they already had in storage. This improvement increased the seating capacity at no extra cost to the school.
Servery area:
Switching to a self-service model using dedicated self-service counters has reduced the service time by 46% and has proved very popular with the pupils. This has allowed the school to cease the production of ‘Grab and Go’ packed lunches without reducing the take up of meals.
PDSA trial 1: Pupils adapted quickly without any disruption. Initially the service area got very messy during service, but this has improved over time as the pupils got used to serving themselves. The self-regulation of portion size worked with little intervention. Over 90% of pupils surveyed during the trial preferred the self-service system, thought they were getting a ‘good deal’ were being ‘treated like they were adults’.
PDSA trial 2: The number of meals being served during the trial increased from 140 to 280 on average. Furthermore, the number of pupils taking a ‘Grab and Go’ packed lunch during the trial dropped from 36% to 26%. Therefore, the school decided to take packed lunches of the menu which also reduced food preparation time.
PDSA trial 3: The reduction in service times and the self-service counter in the upper hall enabled the school to maintain their 35 minute lunch period.
The following diagram illustrates the reduction in service time following each of the trials.
The average time at the serveries reduced from 26.5 seconds to 14.5 second per student, immediately. After a further 6 months pupil time spent at the serveries reduced down to 11 seconds. Part of the success of the self service model was attributed to the pre-pay system. Whereby, pupils paid a set cost for their meal prior to entering the dining hall. This meant that the queue at serveries was reduced as money was not being exchanged here. Prior to the improvements the average take up was around 25% After the improvements were implemented average take up of school meals has remained consistently higher at 34%.
Learning Experience and Top Tips
The new self- service counter needed continual restocking throughout the lunch period. This required staff to carry/wheel hot food through the dining hall from the hot locker to the counter. The hot locker was re-located next to the upper hall to minimise the distance to travel, but this was not an ideal situation and did cause service to be disrupted. To overcome this issues the school installed a second servery counter, complete with a hot locker underneath removing the need to transport food.
Contact details:
If you would like further information please feel free to contact the School Food Trust on 0800 089 5001 or alternatively please email enquiries to info@childrensfoodtrust.org.uk
