School Catering Expenditure
Having followed the school meals campaign by Jamie Oliver any being prompted by a recent Guardian article I decided to find out which were the best and worst local authorities for catering spend. I was amazed to find that there are still local authorities spending less than £0.60 on every school meal!
I then wanted to see if the amount of money spent per pupil was correlated to the take-up percentage of school meals. Now yes this is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, if you have more students with school meals you can spend more, achieve better economies of scale, improve quality and therefore have a greater take-up percentage. But in this case I feel it needs to be a government initiative to spend more in order to improve quality and take-up, therefore I judge the positive correlation between the two variables to be valid. If you increase spend per student you will increase the take-up of meals.
This meant adding a second tab to the dashboard to highlight which local authorities are not spending enough money on catering to hit a target percentage of 50% (or whatever you want to set it to). I was stunned a second time to find that even 5 years after the campaign began there are still 99 local authorities achieving less than 50% take-up! No wonder when they’re also spending under £0.83 per student per day. A very unscientific, quick browse of Tesco ready meals on mysupermarket.co.uk and the only product I could find for less was a very sad looking Tesco Value Shepherd’s Pie (300g) at £0.79 (that’s without any kind of vegetables of course).
Please will somebody point out to me where I’ve gone wrong in this analysis, because if this is the case, if the quality of school meals you receive ranges from £3.64 spent per meal down to less than £0.30 based on where you live, I don’t want to be right.
