RISE Social Enterprise Case Study Films

(Student)
I think soup days are pretty good, because soup is easy to eat and it’s quicker to eat and I get to see my Dad and my mum.

(Caroline Morgan)
Part of my job has been to go around to the 8 primary schools in the Bridport area and persuade them to come onboard with our pilot scheme which is quite different to any other scheme they would be offered. What we are offering is not only better, it’s better in Dorset because Dorset is one of those counties where the schools have hardly any kitchens and the council is under great pressure because they have got such a limited amount of time to get those school meals to be offered to the children. So the easiest option is to bring ready-made meals in and reheat them. We just don’t think that’s good enough.

(Tim Crabtree)
We try to be as local as possible and that means partly that we try to source as much of the ingredients from the local area as is possible. Where we can’t do that we go for organic or fair-trade ingredients wherever possible. And we also try to localise the production. We a have a set of staff that prepare the soup and we also have some volunteers that come in as well. The soups are then chilled and the next day they are taken to the schools who we are currently working with. We then heat them up in soup kettles.

(Angie Hurley)
We are making ‘Pumpkin’ and also ‘Autumn Vegetable’. Mostly pumpkin obviously in the ‘Pumpkin’ with carrot, potato and onion. And in the ‘Autumn Vegetable’ potato, onion, leeks, lentils, I think parsnips, yeah, oh and garlic.

(Jill Beed) 1.58
I serve it on the Tuesday and the Wednesday at the two schools we’re doing and the children absolutely love it as do the teachers. Years 5 and 6 like to have a competition to see how many seconds they can have. Both schools. But they do love it.

(Tim Crabtree)
At lunch time when the children come in for their soups we have a couple of part-time staff who co-ordinate the whole thing, but we also have a lot of parent volunteers who come in to help serve the soups and then to clear up afterwards as well.

(Caroline Morgan)
The reason that our scheme is different is that we are not a catering company who are just going to come in and reheat meals in their kitchens for their students. We are going to come in and have a partnership with the parents and the grandparents at the school.

(Students)
It’s made in a big kitchen, and we think that it’s labelled so they know the difference, and we think it also comes from Alwell fruitfarm.

(Farmer)
We are here at Alwell fruit farm and this variety that you can see here is called Jonnagold, which is a late season variety, and we are going to pick it later on this week and it’s one of the varieties we supply to the local food links.

(Tim Crabtree)
By September 2008, which is the date when schools have to be offering a hot meal everyday, we are aiming for a 40-50% take up across 7 or 8 schools in the Bridport area. Within that pyramid of schools there are about 1000 children so we are looking at 400-500 meals a day, ideally. We will be looking at a cost to the parents of around £1.50 though obviously if we can reduce that by reducing costs we will do so. That will give us a turn over across the year which will allow us to cover the costs of ingredients and the costs of the production as well and break even with a little bit of money to reinvest in the service.

(Jill Beed)
This with the red sticker is ‘Pumpkin’. This totally different soup with the yellow sticker is ‘Autumn Vegetable’.

(Parent volunteer)
Right I’ll try not to get confused!

(Jill)
It’s amazing isn’t it, I think it’s quite impressive actually!

(Tim Crabtree) 4.33
Schools have 3 options when they are looking at school catering. Either they can do it themselves, but for an individual school that can be quite a challenge, and in Dorset it’s a particular challenge because primary schools haven’t had kitchens for the last 25 years. Secondly they could get the county council to have a catering system that delivers meals into the school, but again in Dorset we don’t have that system. The third choice that is generally open to the schools is that they contract in to a private provider. But what we’ve seen in Dorset is that those private providers will often prepare the meals, in our case up in London, they truck them down, at the moment they’re cold meals but in the future the would be regenerated in microwaves so we feel that that’s not in any way the best option for the children.
What we’re developing with the local schools is a specific social enterprise option. We’ve pulled together a partnership of 7 local schools all in the local pyramid of schools and we’ve said to them that we can help them to set up their own social enterprise which will be not for profit, which will prioritise healthy eating and as much local organic fair-trade ingredients as possible, but which will also have a strong parental involvement, partly because it’s the parents in the main who are buying the food, and partly because it’s the parents who have to be engaged really in this process.

(Ruth Clench) 06.12
I feel really that we’ve made children much more aware of the ingredients that would go actually into the soup, and we’ve talked an awful lot about that and we do a lot of work within our healthy school’s curriculum. In addition to that, children have become much more aware of what is good for them and the meaning of organic. Children are being encouraged to try many more vegetables and along with our fruit scheme they are obviously being encouraged to think about what they are eating. We hope that it will be replicated, and in fact some schools within the Bridport pyramid are already using our model. There are other schools to still come on stream. But we feel that we are moving forward on that and we are hoping to introduce yet another hot lunch as a trial run again in the next half term with a view to providing a hot school meal on a regular basis from 2008.

(Tim Crabtree) 07.04
The grant funding that we’ve received to support the development phase has been given on the condition that we do share the model with other groups of schools. Also it’s important to remember that schools are able to access capital funding so they may decide that one of the larger schools within their partnership creates a school that then serves the other schools in the pyramid and it’s very likely that they’d be able to get the capital funding for that. So we do feel that this is a model that could be replicated because we feel that from a revenue it can become self-sustaining.

(Caroline Morgan) 07.42
I think it gives schools more control. The parents have to be much more on board with the whole project but then they’ve got much more control because if you decide that for ease and not having to rely on volunteers you will go with the reheating meals option. They are starting much more expensively than our meals are starting and we have some control over the cost of our meals because we work with the local producers, we use a lot of seasonal vegetables. Even when we are going to use our meat producers we will still be trying to keep the costs as low as possible. But if you’re at the mercy of microwave meals, if they put the cost up you just have to accept it because you’ve got no other option, you’ve got no kitchen. So we think this gives much more control back to the schools and the school community, and ultimately we think it really will show value for money.

(Student)
I always really like soup because I know that it’s healthy and it’s very very tasty and I just really like it.

09.08