School Meals Matter - Ealing Profile Part 2

Friday 12 February 2010

Continuing our profile of our Ealing Local Authority contract, today we'll be focusing on our staff and their fabulous achievements. As we've already said, our results in Ealing are fabulous with September to December's meal numbers up 17% on last year - and encouragingly, paid meals are up 23% - but how do we achieve this? Much of it is down to our staff.

As you can imagine, with a contract made up of 59 primary schools we are responsible for a large number of staff across the borough. At Harrison we take training, encouragement and most importantly career progression very seriously, and it has always been our aim to be the employer of choice in the catering industry.

The challenge which has often faced kitchen staff is that many contract caterers don't really encourage their staff to actually ‘cook' - much of the food is pre-prepared and bought in, with minimal intervention required to turn the ingredients into the finished dish. At Harrison, because our central ethos is based around meals made from scratch from fresh ingredients, our kitchen staff are trained to select, clean and prepare raw ingredients to a very high standard - not to mention actually cooking the meals! We feel that this gives far more satisfaction than simply opening boxes and adding water to pre-made mixes, and our staff retention figures agree: our turnover is considerably less than the industry average.

Across the Ealing contract, we have 53 individuals at Catering Manager or Chef/Supervisor level. 28 of these have been trained, developed and promoted internally, usually from General Assistant level. 12 of the remainder were working in the contract when we took it over, so we have actually only had to recruit 24% of the staff at this level from outside the business.

In training terms, we have 60 staff currently taking or holding NVQ Level 2 in Food Preparation and Cooking, and 20 have completed NVQ Level 3. In addition, 4 of our staff are studying for Foundation Degrees in Hospitality. What is significant is that virtually all of these individuals had no formal cooking or food preparation qualifications when we took on the contract in August 2003.

We are extremely proud of the staff in our Ealing contract, as their hard work and dedication was certainly part of the reason we retained the contract for a further five years when tendered in 2008.

For more information on the School Meals Matter campaign, click here.

Posted by Giles Cooper

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