Less than glorious food in Scotland’s schools

We can all be very proud of Martha Payne and her parents.  But, oh the shame.

Scotland’s school dinners (or at least the offering from Argyll and Bute) are the talk of the steamie all around Europe.  The story of Martha’s blog, Never Seconds, showing photos of her daily school dinner has been picked up by news outlets in Spain, Germany and Denmark.  Folk have left comments!  One Spanish child even shared a photo of one of her dinners for comparison.

All of which is great and demonstrates that the internet is a great way of linking communities of interest globally.  Children talking to each other across the ether comparing notes about their school dinners is wonderful. But did the catalyst really have to be how awful ours are?

A Call Kaye phone-in on Radio Scotland on the subject had people piling in with their own, often polarised views of the quality and substance of school dinners in their own area.

Allow me to add my tuppence worth.  The dinners the Big Chicklet got in Dumfries and Galloway many years ago were fantastic.  Some of the best cooks in the region were in charge of producing these meals – many of them had their own businesses on the side catering for weddings and corporate events.  They were fab and regularly won dinner lady of the year competitions.

When he moved to Edinburgh, he stopped.  The portions were too small, the quality was poor.  He went to a PFI secondary school.  There was no proper dining room in this brand new school, the food always ran out, it was expensive, it was largely fast food, there were never enough seats, he and his pals used to go elsewhere.

Since the chicklet began school, there have clearly been attempts to improve things in Edinburgh but this week’s menu choices include a fried food option every single day (as well as fruit and salad bowls)  and there’s not a lot of cooking from scratch going on.  And this in a school with its own kitchen – a rarity these days.

It says something about a nation when the state of our school dinners has become a hot topic.  The issue came up at a recent Nordic Horizons event which explored if there are lessons in Finnish education for Scotland.  Pasi Sahlberg explained that the Finns invested time and effort on school dinners.

Children come together and eat meals, freshly cooked and prepared which are put down in front of them with minimal choices- part of the learning experience is new tastes and appreciating the food that has been cooked for them – and the concept of eating socially is an integral part of the day, valued and respected.  It lasts an hour.  Yes, they have their fast food moments but by and large, the attitude is that healthy eating is vital for healthy bairns’ bodies and minds and lunch is a key part of the school day.

In Scotland, we have devalued the currency of the dinner hour so that it is barely 30 – 40 minutes in some areas.  It is time to be squeezed out to make way for the curriculum.  In order to make sure our children have time to eat, toilet and play in their alloted free time, many schools operate rotas with older classes taking turns to be top of the queue.

Because the time is so constrained, every week I have to impress upon the wee chicklet that he really has to go to the toilet during lunchtime.  All too often, boys in particular will cut out this vital step to make more time for play.  And yes, I’m sure I’d still be having to do this, even if they had two hours to eat, pee and play, it says something about us that the timescales needed by little children in particular, to factor in managing all three are largely ignored.

Worse, in the chicklet’s school, children in primary four and above who take packed lunches have to eat them outside.  In all weathers. Some schools don’t have a dining hall at all:  in fact, in fit to bursting East Craigs primary school, the lack of a dining hall became something of a local campaign issue in the council elections.

It’s not just Edinburgh:  plenty other local authorities treat food for children largely as a fuelling exercise.  We are forgetting the important social aspects that eating together should be teaching our bairns.

We can measure the value we place on school dinners by also examining the cost.  The last figures publicly available are for 2010-11.  In that year, we in Scotland spent £213 per school pupil per year providing them each with a school meal (670,511 pupils in total).   There are approximately 180 days in the school year, so I make that as a spend per child per school meal of £1.18.

The statisticians warn against comparing local authorities as they all include and exclude certain information from their calculations, so I won’t.  But the average cost is divined from local authorities which spend much more, and those spending far less.  And this is not just the spend on food – in most areas, staff costs will have been included.  The amount actually spent on food is probably a fraction of this (not that school dinner people are paid anything like decent salaries).

Joining the dots – as Susan Deacon urged us to do with early years – is something we should be doing in other policy areas too.  We have had to set ourselves targets to cut obesity rates among children;  we are warned daily about the implications in the medium and long term from the forecast obesity epidemic;  indeed, just yesterday I heard someone on the radio talk about how certain cancers – breast, prostrate and others – were linked to obesity.

And we are now spending a fortune on nurses and other public health professionals to try and fix the problem by working with children and adults to lose weight and change their habits after they become obese and offering expensive clinical and surgical treatments for weight-related illnesses and conditions in other areas of our health service.

Yet, we spend little on school meals, the commitment to healthy eating in schools is scarcely borne out by the food provided in many areas, we give children hardly any time in which to eat them, and we treat lunchtime as an inconvenient necessity in a busy school day.

It’s not hard to make the connection.    Martha Payne can.  We can.   So how come local authorities can’t?

 

Rangers: never mind the club, what about the tax?

So, Rangers.  Sorted then huh?

A take over by Charles Green, the former Chief Executive of Sheffield United, who left that club in less than rude health in the 90s, leading a global consortium of 20 wealthy and so far, nameless individuals.  What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, those nice chairmen at the SPL have postponed their meeting to decide if the club gets to stay in the wee-est, biggest, most important league in the world.  So that, they can, even though they shouldn’t, but what are rules if not to be broken.

And the SFA has somehow managed to achieve the impossible:  an early date for the appeal hearing against the punishment of a transfer ban and six figure sum fine.  Conspiracy theorists:  prepare to have a field day.

The only ones crying are the entirety of the Scottish media who now have to find something else to report.  And that’s only the front page journos.  The boys from the back pages will witter away throughout the summer about the club and its prospects whatever happens.  But then they’d do that anyway.

And maybe now, me and Ian Smart won’t get bumped from the Sunday Politics Show.  Unless of course, news breaks next Sunday that it was all a hoax.

So, we can all get back to normal, now our footballing world is guaranteed to continue revolving on its axis of self-interest.

Actually, no.

For there’s the small matter of monies owed to the bank of you and I.  Or the taxman as he/she is more commonly known.

Ever since the possible demise of Rangers began dominating our news schedules, we’ve been treated to speculation as to how HMRC might proceed.  Precedents for breathtakingly outrageous knock-downs of tax owed have been cited.  Portsmouth for one, Leeds United for another.  Heck, even wee Airdrie United has been mentioned in dispatches.

Apparently, the optimists have been misreading the signals, for the HMRC has been getting tough on clubs which fail to pay their tax bills.  It’s how Rangers got itself into this mess in the first place with the taxman calling time and I should think so too.

For in these straitened times, the lolly that the likes of Rangers owes the common people could pay for a lot of libraries.  Or school teachers.  Or road repairs.

The issue which does appear to have faded from view, however, is that of the tax avoided by Rangers players through the Employee Benefit Trusts or EBTs.  It is suggested that Rangers had been offering this wheeze to players for up to ten years before HMRC caught up with the club.  And while legal, HMRC decided it wasn’t on: the £49m sought by the taxman represents tax underpaid and penalties applied.   Of course, Rangers wasn’t the only club at it – up to eight current or former Premiership clubs were/are also being investigated by HMRC for its use of EBTs.

I can’t pretend to have a scooby about any of this.  Particularly not whether the Green deal involves a NewCo and Rangers rising like a phoenix from the ashes, leaving behind a trail of debt and destruction.

But I do know this.

Those players should pay the tax they avoided.  And this, all along, should have been the focus of everyone’s attention, instead of being the matter that has been ignored while a lather was being worked up over the future of the club.

Whoever they are – and isn’t it time they were named and roundly shamed – one supposes that they lived for at least some of the time, in our ain wee best country in the world.  They’ll have had houses.  With street lighting, pavements and tarmac’d roads.  Some of them might have had bairns that went to nursery and school.  They’ll have had bins emptied.  A few might even have had a cooncil uplift and not recoiled from recycling the empty Cristal bottles.

Some will have availed themselves of art galleries, museums and Christmas festivals.  Others – perhaps all too frequently – will have visited licensed premises.  A fair few might have been among those Rangers’ players who have benefited (sic) from the attentions of our police forces and court systems.  Some will even have got their breakfast in the morning.

Water was on tap.  Gritters will have visited their cul de sacs.  Hospitals might have attended to their families’ needs.  Dear god, some of them might even have been entitled to vote, and done so.

All of which is paid for by tax in some form or another.  Tax which we pay and which they did not.  Money that we, in the universal sense, need more than they do.

Bad enough that we have had to put up with them on our pitches, golf clubs and telly screens all these years.  Worse, that most other players were taking pay cuts or having to move down the leagues, as squads were reduced when our ain clubs started having to live within their means, while this lot were still demanding and getting big money and allowing Rangers to effectively cheat its way to trophies and titles by helping everyone to avoid paying their fair share of tax.

Worse still that we were effectively keeping these players in the style to which they became accustomed.

It’s time they paid up.  And it will be a disgrace if they get away with it.

How do we fix the gender deficit in our political culture?

We should be thankful, I suppose, for small gains.  The excellent website, Gender Politics, has pored over the results from the local government elections and found that it’s all now a little “less male, pale and stale“.

In 2007, just over 1 in 5 councillors elected were women;  in 2011, it rose to nearly 1 in 4.  As Drs Meryl Kenny and Fiona Mackay suggest, “these numbers represent a marked improvement on previous elections – and a record performance since the mid 1990s..” but “… the general trend remains one of stalled progress“.

While all progress is good towards achieving equal represenation, it is also worth considering how many women occupy high profile positions in local politics.  How many female council leaders will we have?  A mental tally suggests very few.  We might, though, end up with a female Lord Provost (sic) in Glasgow in Cllr Sadie Docherty and the key Edinburgh positions are yet to be determined.

Elsewhere, women’s voices in the Scottish political domain are muted.  In both of Scotland’s national Sunday newspapers yesterday, much of the comment and analysis on topical political issues was provided by men.  And while it was a joy to read and to mull over the thoughts and wisdom of Iain McWhirter and Euan McColm (the latter especially, whose own distinct voice has been missing for too long from the political scene), it would be nice, just occasionally, to be able to read what a woman (a non partisan one) thinks of the big issues of the day.

There are more women opining in the blogosphere – Caron’s Musings, Village Aunties, the Shoogly Peg, and maself of course – and theirs are some of the blogs I always make a point of reading, alongside a host of ones written by men.  Because often, I get a different take on things.

Women see things differently, they vote slightly differently, different issues (sometimes only be degrees) influence them.  We are a 50-50 population and that should be reflected in our political population, from who represents us at all levels to who provides analysis.

Of course, views and opinions are not split on gender lines, just as they are not necessarily split by geographical location, age, ability, sexual orientation or identity or ethnic background.  People with a range of characteristics, often poles apart, can and do have similar views and political standpoints.

But the fact remains that a healthy democracy is a diverse one, and our democracy and all its component parts should reflect that.

We could simply pass a law insisting upon 50-50 representation and while the stick approach might be the quickest way to solve the problem, by itself, it would not work.  We also need a cultural shift:  we need parties to see that they have to change in order to encourage women into front line politics.

There are many within our parties who see positive discrimination as undesirable.  Yet, left to their own devices, parties have an innate ability to prefer blokes.  Labour’s policy of twinning constituencies in 1999 achieved gender balance in their MSP group, but it was a one off measure.  In 2011, when there was a significant turnover of constituency candidates, in every single seat previously held by a woman, the local parties chose men to replace them.  Indeed, somewhat ironically, the scale of the defeat to Labour in the constituencies resulted in more women being elected through the regional lists than everyone had expected.

Even the SNP, which has long resisted deliberate measures to achieve gender balance in its elected ranks, has moved to try and increase the number of women candidates coming forward.  NEC member, Julie Hepburn, has been put in charge of developing an equality strategy and it will be interesting to see what she brings forward.

One party, the Scottish Greens, is committed to equal representation and provides a 50-50 split of candidates.  But even their approach is not foolproof, with more men than women being elected as councillors.  Still, we should all look at what the Scottish Green Party does and learn, if not copy, its approach.

All this is good.  But it is not enough.  Other things need to change if more women are to be encouraged to become actively involved in politics and to become elected representatives.

Key to that is asking women – and men – for their views.  Do women treat politics differently?  Do they access news and views differently?  Do they read any of the political comment in our newspapers?  Do they march, protest, write letters, read blogs?  What influences how they vote and who they vote for?

What do people think are the reasons why fewer women get involved in party politics?  What might change that?

It’s not enough for the parties to try and address these thorny issues internally;  the women, after all, who are currently active in politics (myself included) are probably not very representative of the wider population.  So talk to women and men whose sole engagement with politics is to vote.

One of the key conundrums is that women are usually pretty engaged in their local communities.  It’s not that they’re not active, they’re just not active in political parties.  Women – or at least, more than in parties – are to be found engaged in a wide range of community interests:  churches, schools, galas, playgroups, book groups, halls, youth groups.  Ask them why they are prepared to get involved in running, fundraising, advocating on behalf of such community interests but have never considered getting involved in party politics.

And maybe therein lies one of the solutions.  The configuration of party politics, how it engages members and supporters, identifies candidates, supports and trains them, is perhaps one of the problems.  Are there things that parties can learn from other organisations which provide more welcome spaces for women  (culturally as well as literally) and enable women to represent them in as many numbers as men?

There’s no quick fix to all of this.  For too long, we’ve been in denial that there’s a problem, yet over a decade of elections in wholly Scottish elections at parliament and local government show that progress, if evident at all, is slow.  Indeed, there are also fewer women political journalists in Scotland than there ever were, yet more women in journalism generally.  What’s that about?

The lack of women candidates and elected women representatives are issues intrinsically linked to the wider problems of disengagement and disenfranchisement from our political culture.  For too long, in the parties and in the media, politics has been something practised by a relatively small group of people, most of them men.

It’s not healthy at any level and we need to do all we can to change it.