Fatty meals rationed as Michael Gove shakes up college food

Pupils will only be presented two portions of deep-fried, battered and bread-crumb coated foods every week. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Education secretary Michael Gove will unveil a crackdown on fatty and sweet foods on Tuesday as part of new standards on school meals.

Milk need to also be available to principal and secondary pupils throughout the college day under the new rules which come into force in January.

Pupils will only be offered two portions of deep-fried, battered and breadcrumb-coated food items each and every week underneath the rules outlined by Gove.

Pastry-based dishes will be subject to the very same restrictions, schools will be entirely banned from providing chocolate and confectionery in canteens and tuck retailers, and salt will not be accessible for pupils to add to meals right after it is cooked.

Gove has unveiled clearer food specifications for all state colleges in England – and imposed the new principles on totally free colleges and academies that were previously exempt from national requirements in an effort to cost-free them from laws.

But the new guidelines – which are a simplified edition of the existing college food code launched under the earlier Labour government – will only apply to new academies and totally free schools nevertheless to open, because of the legal issues of inserting clauses into the contracts of the academies that have opened because 2010.

Gove was criticised by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver for allowing academies and free schools to “erode” the tougher principles launched soon after Oliver had publicised the poor good quality and nutrition of college lunches.

This time, the Division for Schooling hopes that the one,500 academies and cost-free colleges that opened in England between 2010 and 2014 will voluntarily indicator up to the new laws. Academies produced beneath Labour have been previously needed to adopt national meals specifications.

“We now have a clear and concise set of food standards which are less complicated for cooks to comply with and much less costly to enforce. Crucially we have achieved this with out any compromise on top quality or nutrition,” Gove said in announcing the new requirements.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the Nationwide Union of Teachers, welcomed the selection, but explained it was “a missed opportunity” in allowing existing academies and cost-free colleges to opt out.

“This will imply that above half of state-funded secondary colleges and more than 10% of primaries in England will only be required to sign up to the standards on a voluntary basis. Parents of youngsters in these colleges will rightly be unhappy that the Government is failing to provide the identical guarantee of minimum nutritional food standards for all school,” Blower mentioned.

The new regulations retain a lot of of the overall health and nutrition regulations adopted in 2008 and 2009, like a ban on fatty snacks such as crisps, a restriction on the serving of fried food to two lunches a week, and the promotion of water and milk alternatively of sugary drinks.

The most significant modify is the scrapping of stringent reporting and nutrition targets, which have been criticised by schools and caterers as cumbersome and expensive, with chefs getting to use computer software to judge the content material of each menu.

The new rules also incorporate some tougher measures, restricting serving portions of fruit juice to 150ml and mandating that reduced-fat milk be obtainable for sale.

The DfE stated that the new specifications had established to be common with college cooks for the duration of trials, and have been just as efficient at delivering the suitable energy and nutrients. Secondary schools that trialed the new principles reported an increase in the consumption of veggies.

Fatty meals rationed as Michael Gove shakes up college food