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The Big School Meal Debate 2025 case study

Blog
The YPO Team
11 Jun 2025

The challenge

The UK school meal system faces several challenges that impact its overall effectiveness and operations. Due to the current cost of living crisis, many schools are struggling with increased costs for food, labour and basic catering supplies. As a result, the quality and nutritional value of school meals are being reduced as schools begin to rely on ultra-processed and unhealthy food. These rising costs have led to tight budget constraints in the education sector, and this remains a substantial issue across UK schools. The disruptions to supply chains have also caused delays and shortages of vital items.

Additionally, there are many children in the UK who need free meals but are not eligible to receive them under current criteria, due to limited access and funding. Tackling these issues is necessary to ensure all students have easy access to nutritious, high-quality school meals.

Our partnership with Civica

Since 2016, YPO has offered a dedicated framework for customers such as educational institutions who are interested to purchase software that can enhance and increase school meal uptake through several ways; this includes utilising pre-ordering functionalities, catering, cost, stock and allergen management.

As a key provider, YPO has been in partnership with Civica, a market-leading company in software, for almost 10 years, aiming to create software that helps deliver critical services to citizens all around the world. Within this objective, Civica aspires to help hundreds of schools improve their school meal systems and provide cooks, staff and parents with full visibility of foods and the nutritional information within. They place the safety and well-being of children and students at the heart of its core mission, providing smart, innovative catering management and cashless software to keep people fed – safely, sustainably and efficiently.

Civica is a pre-approved supplier, and have been successful on our two previous Frameworks as well as our current Framework: Electronic Catering Management and Payment Solutions – 1205 – Framework.

Civica also partake in wider conversations that drive positive change in education and school catering, including delivering The Big School Meal Debate 2025 in partnership with Contract Catering Magazine, LACA, and Bidfood. This debate, hosted in February, provided the perfect opportunity for incredible experts from the contract catering world to collaborate positively and discuss the best way forward for the industry.

The industry specialists that were involved in the debate included:

- Stewart Mcluskey, Civica
- Paul Brown, Bidfood
- Pat Fellows MBE, Bidfood
- Andy Kemp MBE, Bidfood
- Gavin Squires, Bidfood
- Geoff Campion, Chartwells
- Ciaran Vaughan, Dolce Schools Catering
- Nick Clegg, Edwards & Ward
- Jo Anne Robertson, Elior
- Neil Porter, LACA/BAM
- Judith Gregory, LACA/LEA Cardiff
- Frances Thivet, Sodexo
- Luke Consiglio, The Pantry

Stewart Mcluskey, Executive Direct of Education at Civica, shared:

“We will look at some of the ways in which technology is proving to be a useful ally. This can be through enabling more effective cost management, helping to optimise processes for easy compliance and tracking, or streamlining services to deliver a better user experience.”

“We’ve observed a recognition in the industry that the quality of the food provision and the uptake of school meals has a knock-on effect to attendance, to behaviour and to attainment. And this is exactly what these schools exist to achieve. If we could draw a stronger logical link between the uptake and quality of the school meal provision and those factors, is that likely to help your cause? It could potentially influence government to say, ‘There’s a great outcome here, and the great outcome is millions of students attain better and therefore have a better quality of life moving forward’.”

During the event, the panel discussed the following:

- Cost vs. quality: The significant increase of food prices is making it difficult for catering staff to provide school lunches that are both healthy and affordable for students.

- Challenges for rural schools: This crisis heavily affects smaller schools, particularly those in the countryside, facing bigger problems with costs and getting everything they need.

- Technological solutions: How the use of technology and digital solutions can reduce costs and food waste to help organise commercial kitchens, and ensure catering requirements and rules are met.

- Better food, better learning: How there are intrinsic links between high-quality nutritious meals and improved academic performance.

- Funding and policy needs: The desperate need for new funding ideas and policy updates, alongside changes to support the school meal program across UK schools.

The experts underlined the critical need for immediate action to fix any financial shortfalls that pose as a threat to providing high-quality food.

The solution

Proposed strategies to combat these issues include adopting innovative funding models and establishing central product kitchens that help reduce costs through bulk purchasing of ingredients and shared supplies, aimed to support all schools, especially smaller schools that are struggling under their current conditions.
You can download Civica’s Big School Meal Debate digital resource here to view the full discussion and learn more about how to improve school meals:

The Big School Meal Debate 2025 | Civica.

As another effective solution, you can contract with Civica directly via our Electronic Catering Management and Payment Solutions – 1205 – Framework. This framework is a legally compliant route to the catering market, offering you easy access to approved supplies, such as Civica, who have undergone a rigorous screening process to ensure they deliver products or services at the best possible value. By using this framework, you will establish an agreement where you can place orders directly with Civica on a ‘contract’ basis and they will deliver direct to you on an agreed basis.

As YPO is 100% publicly owned, this compliant and free-to-use solution aims to support your procurement goals and fulfil education sector objectives.

For more information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our procurement team who are here to assist you at every step of the procuring process.

Explore our extensive range of procurement frameworks here.

Author

The YPO Team

YPO supplies products and services to a wide range of customers including schools, local authorities, charities, emergency services, public sector and other businesses such as nurseries and care homes. YPO are 100% publicly owned, by 13 local authorities, which means the profits made are returned to public sector customers, delivering even better value for money.