Marton & District C E Aided Primary School

Rachel (our fab school cook) and I have been having many discussions about school meals and how to offer hot meals whist maintaining social distancing at school.

Currently each year group sits together to eat their lunches in classrooms. Whilst the weather has been good, children have enjoyed picnic style lunches too but we know this cannot continue. Children have been unable to eat in the school hall as this would be mixing groups of children together and we would need to deep clean between all groups of children. As you all know, we have struggled to recruit Mid-Day Assistants and therefore employing extra staff to deep clean would be a further challenge for us.

Our hot meals are normally served on trays and children select their food choice at the serving hatch. We have evaluated serving hot meals but know our children would struggle transporting their trays down to classrooms (particularly KS2 via the stairs) and back. We also don’t have enough MDA’s to supervise this constant movement. I know some schools are doing this and having to extend lunchtimes by an extra hour but we want to ensure school remains ‘relatively normal’.

We have therefore come up with a plan!

After half term, Rachel will offer three choices for school meals;

• Jacket Potato with different fillings on each day
• Hot sandwich option (hot gammon roll etc.)
• Cold sandwich option

Rachel will continue to supply the hot/cold options in picnic style bags and the jacket potatoes will be supplied in polystyrene boxes with cutlery that school will purchase. We will initially introduce this till we finish in December for Christmas and further review this then.

We have greatly appreciated your support and understanding in this matter and thank you for your discussions regarding school meals via our Parents Surgery.

With best wishes

Nevin Deakin