School Dinners

[lochend]

Bobh,I was not trying to avoid answering your question and must defer to your experience in these matters. It appears that you have been there and done it.At the risk of appearing "old school" as anothe poster would have it, I would not allow 'phones in the classroom.Perhaps they could be left at reception or something.I can appreciate that parents may wish their children to have them on the way to and from school but surely having them ring or having children texting in class is totally unacceptable.You have been closer to the coal face than I but to say it is unenforcable is giving up.What next.

[Swanseajock]

Outstanding and hilarious Made Oi larf

[Ruairidh]

I thought the same, Perfect tune too lol

[WTC]

:lol


(PS The Forum police state only 20 Smilies yet one turns into 'lots of love'!!

[WC1]

I’m not sure I want to continue adding to this thread, but, having been away in Staffordshire for a while visiting family, I’ve not had the chance to defend myself against the charges of being pedantic and ‘old school’. Let’s start with the second of those. So far from ‘not getting’ the new CfE, I was heavily involved in making sure it was implemented effectively in CGS. We got a lot of inter-disciplinary working in place, introduced Drama as a core subject (to encourage “effective communicators” and “confident individuals”) and constantly emphasised to staff that it (CfE) called for a completely new mindset, not just tweaking existing courses. One of the inter-disciplinary projects involved pupils in developing a blog about it. We even re-developed part of the school to enable greater cross-subject teaching and co-operation, planned in my time in post though completed after my retirement. So I “get it” all right, even if I have some honest reservations about CfE, along with a good many in the profession.

If it’s pedantic to expect things to be done right, and that the truth about something should be paramount, then I plead guilty to being pedantic. The trouble is that truth has been a casualty in all of this. My objection to Martha’s blog was that it started out by giving a false impression of her school meals. Those first photos were appalling. If they truly represented school meals in Argyll and Bute those responsible should have been sacked. The problem is, they weren’t a true representation of the daily experience of both staff and pupils. If they were, do you not think there would have been an outcry long before Martha started her ‘writing project’? Since that horrific point of departure, her photos have generally shown something much more realistic and accurate, and where she gives her meal a lower mark, it tends to be because she doesn’t like what was on offer rather than because of the lack of either quantity or quality. Unfortunately, that hasn’t had any publicity. In fact, only last week we had the Daily Mail saying that it was because Argyll and Bute was out on the ‘remote west coast’ that the whole healthy eating thing hadn’t got through to us yet.

At the risk of being pedantic again, could I point out that school meals in Argyll and Bute are governed by regulation (the Nutritional Standards in Scotland’s Schools Regulations 2008). These define both what has to be in school meals (and what must not be) and the quantities which must be delivered. Senior officials in the authority have to ensure that policies are in place to implement the regulations, more junior officials have to develop menus in keeping with the policies, and at the sharp end the dinner ladies in the school kitchens have to deliver meals in accordance with the menus. All that is in place, and it’s regularly inspected by the government. Argyll and Bute’s school meals tend to score quite highly in these inspections. Which brings us back to my original point: something went badly wrong when those original photos were taken. They did not reflect accurately either what my personal and professional experience told me or what the inspections find.

I could go on at even greater length about whether you should blog first and complain later, or about whether mobile phones should be allowed in schools. My views on those topics are clearly not popular with some contributors but, again, are based on sometimes bitter experience at the sharp end. Let me finish by saying that I agree with the wisdom expressed by the For Argyll website when it suggests that the time has now come for Martha to bring this writing project to an end and regain the anonymity which is her right as a nine-year-old: “. . . now is a good time to let the blog go, before serious and subtle damage is done to people who do not deserve it; to the unthinking mutual trust that is fundamentally necessary in education; and to Martha herself”. There comes a time when any educational project has met its objectives and Martha’s has more than accomplished her’s. All credit to her for raising over £100,000 for Mary’s Meals, as I heard on the wireless tonight, but to continue would, I think, have the sort of downside that For Argyll suggests. Come to think of it, I said something like that in one of my first pedantic posts on this subject.