Food & Health Alliance

The East Ayrshire Food for Life school meals programme has come a long way since it began in a single school in Kilmarnock back in 2004.

Aim and targets of the programme

The scheme, which seeks not only to improve the quality and variety of school meals but to ensure the food is locally sourced and sustainable, is now operating in 42 of the county’s 53 schools. There are even plans to extend the principles beyond schools to other areas of local authority catering.

And it’s already outstripping its own targets of serving up 50% locally sourced food, 30% organic and 75% unprocessed. In fact across all the schools in the scheme, 75% of food is locally sourced, 35% organic and 90% unprocessed.

Robin Gourlay, head of facilities management with East Ayrshire Council and the driving force behind the programme from the start, believes passionately that school catering is about much more than simply filling people’s stomachs.

‘My starting point has always been that school catering is in a privileged situation and is an education and health service, not simply a commercial operation. We run a really efficient business but perhaps my motivation comes from a different place than simply reducing costs and increasing income. We are trying to reconnect children with food and where good food comes from, and make them aware of the impact of their choice on their health and the environment.’

Evaluation process

But he nevertheless accepts that robust evaluation has played a key part in the success of a programme that has won admirers not only across Scotland but beyond.

As he says: ‘You can provide the best food in the world but you still need to market it and excite about what an excellent service people can get in the school dining room. Simply providing it isn’t enough.’

From the start the council set up robust performance management systems to monitor the scheme’s progress, including measuring school meal uptake levels, menu popularity and costs, as well as how much food was locally produced, organic and unprocessed.

But perhaps the breakthrough came the following year when the Scottish Executive approached the council with a proposal to run a comprehensive evaluation of the effect of the scheme on parents, pupils, staff and producers.

The results were impressive. Ninety-five per cent of parents supported the programme, for instance, because it kept money in the local community, 80% said it was better for the community and 77% felt this was a good use of the council’s money. There were similarly high approval ratings from pupils and producers.

‘The evaluation gave us very helpful information of both a quantitative and qualitative nature,’ says Robin, ‘and that meant we had a more persuasive story to tell.’ One of the lessons from the East Ayrshire project is that success breeds success. The early reports of progress led the Scottish Executive to knock on their door, followed more recently by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) and environmental consultants Footprint Consulting.

Building food sustainability into the evaluation

SEPA commissioned research which showed that using local and organic food saved the average primary school 37.7 tonnes of CO2 gases each year – roughly a £2,500 saving per school. The Footprint Consulting research examined the social, economic and environmental impact of the initiative to conclude that every pound invested by the council benefited the local economy by between £3 and £6.

Interestingly, the one evaluation result that is rather less dramatic is the uptake of school meals, which stands at 50% within primary schools in the scheme and 43% of secondary schools. Robin insists that simply increasing school meals uptake was never the main objective of the programme but admits it has been helpful to have other weapons in his armoury when making the arguments for continued support for the scheme.

‘If, for the sake of argument, the council came to me and said this was a great effort but was costing a bit much, then I would now have a fairly robust set of data that would allow me to argue the case for what we were doing.’ On balance he does not believe the whole enterprise would have foundered if it had not been evaluated. But evaluation has certainly helped.

‘I would have fought tooth and nail for the programme to carry on regardless because I believe this is the right way to go,’ he says. ‘But we all need something maybe more tangible and we all need approval, so to have that evaluation was important though maybe it wasn’t make or break.’

Moreover, he thinks there are lessons for other projects working in less high profile areas. ‘If you were working with young offenders, for instance, it might not cut much ice to say that in return for the thousands of pounds invested, three people weren’t re-offending. But if you look at that holistically in terms of education, health, environment and crime across the whole programme then you may get a very different picture. That may be a better way of evaluating some projects rather than a straight balance sheet.

’He also believes that some of the ‘softer’ elements of the programme are now coming into their own as carbon reduction moves up the political agenda. ‘More and more councils are going to face pretty tough targets for carbon reduction in the next few years, so something that was quite peripheral has now become very central.’