Meeting of the Parliament 03 April 2019
If we followed the path of procuring food that is sourced as locally to the school as possible, that problem would be solved in one fell swoop.
The Government cannot be satisfied with the lack of support for our food producers. That contrasts with the gold standard in East Ayrshire, where nearly 75 per cent of ingredients for school meals are sourced locally. There can be no excuse.
We will support the Government’s amendment but, in doing so, we note that it is rather high on platitudes and light on positive action. It is not enough to note that schools are a place of education—that is hardly a revelation. We need to afford pupils the opportunity to apply that learning. However, Education Scotland has reported that, following 109 nutritional inspections of secondary schools, it was found that some 70 per cent of school meals failed to meet nutritional standards. Platitudes will not solve that problem. We need to create an environment in which the learning that pupils receive in schools can be applied in the real world. I am pretty sure that, if it were left to pupils to deliver the learning that they receive, the system that they would come up with would not look much like the current one.
Apart from regurgitating the point that there is a higher prevalence of fast food, alcohol and tobacco outlets in more deprived areas—that is one of the main reasons why we are having the debate—there is little substance to the Labour amendment. In fact, there is the usual one-dimensional approach. When a person drives past any fast food outlet near a school at lunch time, are the huge queues of school pupils that they see the result of a lack of money or austerity? Is the fact that so many pupils who are eligible for free school meals still choose to join the fast food queues an austerity issue? Labour has chosen to avoid the issue in favour of ploughing a tired political line in search of some kind of relevance.