School Background
Charter Academy (formally St Luke’s School) is a voluntary aided church school situated in Portsmouth with around 750 pupils on roll. They cater in house and currently run at a loss. Take up is at 50% and they would love to serve more of the students. They have 45% families on benefit and 35% eligibility for FSMs. Their chef recently won an award on Radio 4 for dinner lady/man of the year!
“St Luke’s Secondary School is a smaller than average sized comprehensive school serving parts of Portsmouth and Southsea. Levels of social and economic deprivation in the local area are well above the national average. The number of students from Black or minority ethnic backgrounds is close to the national average. The proportion of students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is very high. The number of students arriving or leaving during the school year is also high.”
(Ofsted, 2007)
Project Team
- Bursar
- Chef
- Avail Consultant
- SFT representative
Case Study
Read the case study on Charter Academy here:
www.schoolfoodtrust.org.uk/casestudies/charteracademy
Final report
The school was very proactive in making improvements to their school meals and the service of meals. 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. This included:
- Introducing a cashless payment system with a single meal price. Tickets could be bought from the school reception during the morning and were exchanged for a hot meal or a packed lunch.
- Packed lunches were served in a separate part of the service area to minimise the impact on the flow around the service area. These could be taken to be consumed away from the dining hall.
- The menu had been recently revised to reduce choice and minimise waste.
The school recognised that the service was still a bottleneck and there was significant disruption and queuing around service. They were very keen to trial a system of allowing the pupils to serve themselves, something they had seen work very effectively in Finland.
The main changes made at Charter Academy were around self-service, the equipment used to facilitate this and the results of the trials.
Key Achievements
The main changes have been to the service model and the use of combination ovens within the kitchen.
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.
Through a series of free meal trials the school was able to show that it can manage to serve most of their pupils without extending the lunch period and without requiring the pupils to queue for considerable periods of time.
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 overall unit costs.
All in all, the test performed at Charter Academy have been a great success and the Chef has been asked to work with other schools in the ARK Academies portfolio to test out a similar model of service.
St Luke’s School Report
