When is it lunchtime?

All children will wash their hands before and after lunch.

Hot Lunches

Hot lunches are provided in school by The Great Plate, a new social business from the team behind The Long Table.

These are our current menus. Menus work on a two week rotation:

Paying for School Dinners

The cost is currently £2.35 per day.

We encourage parents to pay for the meals online in advance via http://www.schoolmoney.co.uk (click on the logo to take you straight there – please note, the login portal may not work properly on some browsers. Try to use Chrome if possible)

Universal Infant Free School Meals (UIFSM)

All children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 are entitled to a free school meal thanks to the Government Universal Infant Free School Meals (UIFSM) scheme.  UIFSM must be applied for when your child starts school; it is the same online application as income-based free school meals (please see below for link).

Free School Meals

Parents claiming income support or job-seeker’s allowance which is income-based are encouraged to apply for free meals as receipt can mean further funding for the family and the school.  Please follow this link to apply: https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/education-and-learning/school-transport-and-free-school-meals/apply-for-free-school-meals/

Lunches are ordered daily at morning registration. Children can sit anywhere in the hall.  There are two hot choices each day.  Salad, fruit and water is served with meals.

About The Great Plate

The Great Plate are going to revolutionise the way school meals are cooked, eaten and shared across the school communities in Gloucestershire. We are starting in Nailsworth and Amberley.

We have three main goals for the food provision in Nailsworth:

1. To continue and develop the work of Colourful Catering in producing the best quality, locally sourced and professionally cooked food for children’s lunches.
2. To develop a Nailsworth School Freezer of Love for everyone in the school community to benefit from- children, teachers, parents and families.
3. To create a training model that allows us to train young chefs through apprenticeships to cook amazing food that is eaten in their local community.

Our values around food are summed up:

We are a social enterprise, that means we are a trading company that is not for profit. We make our money by selling things but all the surplus is used to further our social goals. In this case, it is making sure every child and family can have year round access to good food.

We will be working as partners with the school leadership teams, the families and our colleagues at The Long Table to help deliver a new type of school meal company. As we get to know everyone and build up trust we hope to be able to experiment and develop new ideas to see how we get good food onto the plates of everyone, all year round.

The Team

The team is led by Maisie and Shane. Shane is the head chef and Maisie is the business lead. They are working together to deliver our food and the service at lunch time. We are working with Mandy, Grier and Yvonne to ensure that the service at lunch is excellent. The team have a range of experience- years of chef work, nutritionist training, working with Colourful Catering at the school and even working as a zoo keeper and providing the food for film stars on the sets of blockbuster movies!

What is a Freezer of Love? How is this new service going to work?

The Long Table developed a network of freezers of love during the lockdowns over the past year. We realised that cooking food and freezing it can create the most amazing instant, accessible resource for people as they run around living life. Through a freezer, busy NHS staff (or teachers), parents looking to get a quick, healthy fast food choice or those going through busy time in life, like having just had a baby, could all get healthy, delicious food in an instant.

Equally, COVID awoke the world to the reality of food inequality in our county and the work of people like Marcus Rashford and more locally Bishop Rachel has even more so focussed this question on the unequal distribution of food for children of school age.

The problem was, how do we fund and develop a freezer of love model? The answer we think is via school kitchens. We will cook extra meals each day at school at our cost. These meals would be frozen down and stored ready to be distributed to school community. This will work as the marginal cost to produce 50 pasta meals is almost exactly the same as to produce 55 meals. The majority of the cost is not the ingredients but instead the staff etc which are fixed regardless of output of meals (these costs are paid for by the school catering contract). We could then store 25 meals per week ready for the school holidays for families to take home.

We are inviting parents, pupils, teachers and families to join us in this new experiment. Can we make healthy, delicious and simple food available for everyone by working together as a connected community?

Healthy Packed Lunches

If your child would prefer, they can bring their own healthy packed lunch and drink in a named and sealed container. Children can combine lunch packs on some days, school dinners on others. We do request that packed lunches do not contain fizzy drinks, bars of chocolate or sweets. For some great tips and inspiration for healthy lunch boxes, have a look at these sites:

Playtime

All children are supervised by lunchtime supervisors both whilst eating their lunch and afterwards in the playground. During wet playtimes children are supervised in their classrooms and can choose from a selection of games generously provided by the PTFA. If children wish to go outside on a wet day and have wet weather gear in school, then this is arranged.