Are school caterers on the march to war? Will dinner ladies across the land cast down their ladles and storm the barricades?
We’re use to strikes from nurses, teachers, posties and the French but school caterers?
Certainly the frustration and anger of many delegates at the Local Authority Caterers Association (LACA) conference in Birmingham last week was palpable and led to some tasty debate.
Irene Carroll, LACA national chairman, set the scene in her opening address by imploring the Government to put its money where its political mouth is. Carroll said ministers must fund the transformation of the school meals service, which they had so eagerly launched into when campaigner Jamie Oliver was still on the scene making plenty of noise, properly.
As one of the later speakers on day-one of the conference pointed out, no matter how good a financial spin-doctor the new prime minister and former chancellor, Gordon Brown, is even he can’t dress up the £240m of future funding promised as equivalent to the £400m or so estimated to have been taken out of the service in the 1980’s by deregulation.
The LACA event was titled From Here to Reality. The reality, according to those on the ground delivering the meals day-to-day, is that more funding is needed to deliver the improvements to the school meals service that have been promised and gobbled up by parents everywhere.
For an alternative take on the conference school meals campaigner Jackie Scheider has a blog for the Guardian
