Fundraising for the children of Bere Regis School

Bere Regis School Meals—Our Children’s Future

The Problem we face

We all know how important good nutrition is, particularly for children. Good food, cooked well, and attractively served is a vital ingredient of long-term good health, energy, alertness and physical and mental development.

The problem is that over the last couple of years we have been increasingly disappointed with the meal service that the existing contractor has been providing for our children. The portion sizes have decreased and the quality of the food supplied has been increasingly poor. The food is delivered to school, pre-cooked, in a hot box and kept warm until lunchtime. Very few children, beyond those who are entitled to free school meals, are ordering the hot lunches and not all of those entitled are doing so. We believe that this is a reflection of the quality of the food presently offered.

The Solution

We want to see all, or at least most, of our children having a nutritious, hot lunch each day, particularly in the cold months of the year. We are particularly keen that all our children who are entitled to a free-school meal take up the offer of the cooked lunches. Having hot, nutritious food at lunchtime is proven to make a great deal of difference to a child’s learning in the afternoon.

After much research, we have decided to move the cooked lunch provision to a new provider. From September, our school lunches will be provided by Weyco, a local lunch provider, working from Weymouth College. The lunches are pre-prepared (like you would buy from COOK), chilled and delivered to school, where they will be heated on site by our own kitchen staff. Jacket potatoes will be cooked from fresh; salad and fruit will be prepared here.

However, in order to provide these vastly improved lunches, we need to make major changes to our kitchen facilities. We will need:

An industrial regeneration oven

A catering fridge

A serving hotplate

An upgraded electrical specification to safely run the appliances

The Cost

This investment in good food, better nutrition, and enhanced educational outcomes for our children is not cheap. We will need to find about £10,000 to fund these improvements not only for the children in our village school today, but for all those who will be attending in the future.

How you can help

Our fundraising campaign has been underway for some weeks, and I am delighted to say that we have £2500 in the bank already. We have a variety of fundraising activities and approaches in planning, which we like you to support in due course, but right now, we would ask you to be generous in giving as much as you can towards the future health and development of our children.