Having been told about the horrors served for lunch at our local primary school – which include something described as a “vegetable biscuit” and a dish known among the inmates as “Bad Pie” – I remarked to one of the teachers that everyone thinks school dinners are horrible when they’re a kid, but they’re probably quite nice. Nope: even the teachers, I was told, found the meals revolting. Bad Pie is the taste of outsourcing.
The Department for Education currently pays a meal rate of £2.58 per eligible pupil. The average English and Welsh prison has a food budget of £3.07 per prisoner per day (£4.14 in Scotland). Neither is extravagant, and this certainly isn’t an argument for even worse food in prisons. But it does help to illustrate how little is spent on the nutrition of growing bodies and developing minds. What really matters is the portion of that £2.58 per day that actually ends up as food.
Reading the accounts of the company that provides the Bad Pie, I found it declared a turnover of more than £70m in 2023-24. It is owned by a holding company that has five directors and who collectively paid themselves more than £2m in that year. The highest-earning director was paid more than £1m. This single salary would have been more than enough to buy up the entire stocks of “raw materials and consumables” (food) declared on the company’s balance sheet for the year. And that’s just their salary, before pension contributions (more than £50,000 shared between five directors), or the hundreds of thousands in dividends that were paid to the owners (one director also owns most of the shares).
So, there’s excellent money to be made from owning a company that sells school dinners. I guessed the people serving the dinners aren’t as richly remunerated, so I pretended to be a jobseeker and answered an advert for catering staff with the company. I was told that it paid £12.21 per hour – the UK minimum wage. In the time it takes a dinner lady to earn £1, the person at the top of the company gets something around £50.
But this is small beans for the school-dinner rich list. The biggest school caterer in the UK is Chartwells, which is – along with other school catering firms such as Pabulum – a subsidiary of Compass Group, the world’s largest food service provider. Compass Group’s most recent accounts state that the total remuneration received by its CEO, Dominic Blakemore, (including pension contributions, bonus and long-term incentive plan) reached £9,499,000 in 2024. That’s about £8,765 for each of Mr Blakemore’s three meals a day for a year, and 330 times the pay of the average worker at his company. The Compass accounts contain a long explanation of why this, and other seven-figure salaries in the company, are necessary.
The proof is in the pudding, however, and Chartwells has had the occasional unhappy customer. Jason Ashley, a headteacher from Southampton, wrote to parents last year to apologise for the quality of meals at his school. “Chartwells seem to be unable to bake a potato,” he wrote.
Sharon Hodgson MP, who has chaired the all-party parliamentary group on school food for 15 years, told me she has been hearing “more and more horror stories of quality and portions going down, and probably that will be worse in the schools that have a contract catering company”.
The overall quality of school meals fell dramatically during 2022, as budgets were squeezed between higher costs and rising wages. A survey by Hodgson’s group found that some contract caterers stopped serving fish and most vegetables. Only the very cheapest processed meat was served, in some cases just once a week. Burgers became bunless. Children began to return home hungry, having been given much smaller portions. In one school, the typical lunch became a sausage roll and a piece of fruit. One catering provider claimed it had dropped fish from the menu due to “lots of the UK fish being caught in Ukraine waters”, which is, if you’ll forgive me, utter pollocks: the UK has never imported any significant proportion of its fish from Ukraine. At one rural school, the caterer simply cancelled their contract because it was no longer worth having, and a parent had to step in – at their own expense – to prepare meals.
Schools are supposed to meet certain nutritional standards, but these are in most cases not met, Hodgson told me, because “nobody is monitoring them”. Her experience is that while some large food companies do provide good food and good value for money, schools typically offer better food when they bring it back in-house. She spoke admiringly of one group of kids who documented their meals, sacked their caterer and negotiated a new supplier themselves.
The problem is that running a school is already a very difficult job and managing the catering in-house is more work. That’s how outsourcing gets into the state – by promising to take away some of that work – and why it can be hard to get rid of, because the more overworked public sector staff are, the more they welcome anyone with a quick solution. And that is why almost a third of public spending – £326bn in 2022-23 – is outsourced. A truly horrifying amount of Bad Pie is being served, and it’s making some people a lot of money.
[See also: Britain is growing old disgracefully]
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This article appears in the 09 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Harbinger