How it works
St. Augustine’s CE High School is a mixed comprehensive in the City of Westminster, boasting Healthy Schools Status (Jan 07), Active Mark 2008 and Sports Mark 2008. It serves a multi-ethnic, socially deprived student body with over approximately seventy percent of students having English as a second language. The school’s results have increased considerably over the last few years and it was one of the most improved specialist schools between 2005 and 2008.
At St. Augustine’s there is a strong focus on school food that has been in place for a number of years. Several initiatives including the early adoption of a healthy meal programme, removal of vending machines, cashless catering (using a bio-metric system) and a split lunch hour have helped to improve the quality of the dining experience for students.
A key feature of St Augustine’s policy on dining has been to introduce a stay on site policy. No student in Years 7-11 are now permitted to be off site during the lunch break. Post 16 students retain the option to leave the premises however, many, particularly those entitled to Free School Meals, continue to eat in the school canteen.
Why they wanted to do this
Despite Key Stage 3 pupils already remaining on site during the school day, Headteacher Alex Thomas still had concerns for the remaining pupils…
- Student safety / behaviour in the local area. St. Augustine’s High School is located in an area of high deprivation where students could be vulnerable to verbal or physical harassment
- Punctuality in the afternoons. There are relatively few takeaways in close proximity to the school although a high street is 5/10minutes walk. This encouraged some pupils to return late after lunch providing a poor start to afternoon lessons
- Nutritional intake is not controlled off site and the school was concerned about the effect it had on behaviour post lunch
What they did
With these concerns in mind, the School Leadership Team weighed up the pros and cons of the following options:
- Maintain status quo which allowed Key Stage 4 pupils to go off site
- Allow only Year 11 and Post 16 of site
- Allow only Post 16 students off site
- Allow no students off site
The decision was taken to adopt Option 3 and to stagger the introduction of the policy one year at a time, progressively removing off site access from Year 10 and later Year 11 pupils.
The school also wrote to parents explaining their reasons for taking the decision to adopt a full stay on site policy and offering to talk to any parents who had concerns with this.
Headteacher, Alex Thomas regards the following as the main considerations the school had to address when introducing the policy.
- Larger numbers of pupils on site results in increased supervision costs at lunchtime. This was subsumed in the school budget.
- Pressure on facilities and the canteen, including crowding, queuing and dining experience. In order to address this concern the school sought to improve the dining experience by:
- Using the school council as a forum for students to voice their views and to inform caterers of students’ concerns
- Introducing cashless catering to reduce queuing
- Introducing a split lunches to reduce pressure on the canteen and reduce queuing
- Resistance of some students based on their perceptions of school food ie: they dislike the taste, do not like the types of food on offer, perceive the canteen as ‘dirty’ or feel food is too expensive. For example, the less healthy items such as a portion of chips (which is what pupils would buy elsewhere) is cheaper outside of school. In order to address some of these concerns, the school changed catering company to a school-managed contract with Caterlink and introduced a fresh food policy from September 2005
- Resistance from those expecting the privilege of being allowed off-site when they reached the later school years. The school helped to mediate this by allowing Year 11s off in the first year of implementation moving to all Key Stage 4 on site in the second year
- Some limited resistance from parents and carers. There was very little parental response generally and many parents supported the school. However, a handful of parents sought to organise for their child to go home for lunch
What was the Impact?
Headteacher, Alex Thomas says that, “Whilst it is difficult to identify a causal relationship between behaviour and a stay on site policy, the start to afternoon school for Key Stage 4 lessons is now much more focused and punctuality is no longer a concern as it was before. Similarly, the whole school stay on site policy has reduced to nil any issues with members of the public at lunchtimes, which has helped the school’s reputation.
“The effect on health is difficult to measure but school meal take-up has increased and is increasing and, as our school food meets government standards, we know that the school food pupils are now eating is more nutritionally balanced than when they could buy food off-site. The increased takings are also reducing the subsidy that we are making to our meals service.”
Mr Thomas concludes by saying “The dining experience is part of the educational package we offer to our pupils. Given the type of pupils we have at St. Augustine’s this is an extremely important part of the day and one we want to make successful and enjoyable. All the initiatives implemented, including the closed gate policy, have had a positive impact on this but we are always interested in ways to improve our service!”
