School Dinners anyone?

How can you be sure that school dinners are of a decent standard?

We are all familiar with the Jamie Oliver effect, I guess! One thing that happened after the outcry surrounding his TV programmes was that the national food standards agency imposed new strict standards on school kitchens, limiting the amount of saturated fats offered to children as well as eradicating processed foods. So, in terms of choices available to kids nowadays, it has never been better.

What will vary is the quality of the individual catering consortia and, more pertinently, the individual cooks. All of the standards in the world will not improve things for children if the cook can’t actually ‘do what it says on the tin’! (i.e. – cook)

Of course another by-product of the Jamie Oliver factor has been the tendency for a lot of kids to go over to packed lunches which are, of course, entirely unregulated!

Transfer to secondary school - act soon!

The process for filling in the common application form which is handled by the local authority and coordinates the transfer from primary to secondary schools is about to begin. This seems to have been an earlier and earlier feature of life for year 6 pupils and their families and is certainly something not to be overlooked.

How can I find out about secondary school selection procedures?

Your school should be able to provide you with a booklet outlining the options open to you as your child nears the end of their Primary School. This is produced by the local authority and is, in many authorities, already available. Additionally, many schools will run an information evening for parents, often attended by the admissions department of the local authority. Often this will be available to Year 5 parents during the summer term.

Children starting school - not a level playing field!

Entering Reception – January or September?

There is disparity nationally, and sometimes locally, in terms of admissions arrangements. Some schools and authorities admit all children in September, some have September and January and a few still have a 3^rd entry point after the Spring holidays. There are a couple of important things to remember here;

1. Children do not have to statutorily attend school until they are 5 years old, even though most schools admit them before this time.
2. Your school’s admissions policy will have been set by the local authority if it is a community school, meaning that it will have very little flexibility to admit your child at any other time than their published admissions criteria. Even if it is the Governing Body that sets these criteria (as is the case with foundation status schools, it takes time to change these admissions criteria so it is unlikely that any specific requests will be able to be accommodated to take into account your own preferences.

Breakfast Clubs / After School Clubs - should every school provide one?

Juggling the return to school for working parents can be a bit of a nightmare and some parents are very keen for there to be adequate childcare provision on a school's site. But, is it actually the case?

Not necessarily. The whole extended schools agenda had really taken off in recent years, particularly driven by the Government’s ‘every child matters’ edict. However, clearly not every school is able to provide every service and so what many are doing is ‘signposting’ parents to their nearest range of services which may well include the breakfast and after school club facilities. If there is a huge demand for one of these at your school and the school is not providing it, it may be worth asking them if there are any plans to do so – you could even make your views clear to the Governing Body which has an obligation to consider the views of their main stakeholders.