The battle of Rawmarsh

It was a bizarre sight: three mums passing buns to their kids through a school's iron railings, for all the world like daytrippers feeding animals at the zoo. "Sinner ladies" they were labelled, campaigners against Jamie Oliverism and what one of the women involved, in an unwise moment, called the "rabbit food" that the school was insisting on feeding to their children.

It's easy to write off the Battle of Rawmarsh School as a war between supporters of Jamie Oliver's healthy-eating campaign (in this case led by the school, which two weeks ago stopped its pupils straying off the premises to buy burgers at lunchtimes) and a bunch of misguided, junk-food-mad parents. But it really isn't as simple as all that, as Keith Allgood explains in the local chippy, from which some of the food passed through those railings has been bought.

"Let Jamie Oliver come in here and tell me this is junk food," he says as his assistant spatulas a slice of cod middle from the fryer.

Across the road and behind the railings, in Rawmarsh Community School's canteen, headteacher John Lambert has just finished a chicken korma with vegetable curry cooked by some of his 1,100 12- to 16-year-olds. The previous day's menu, he says, included a mixed grill of bacon, sausage, burger, tomato, poached egg and baked beans - hardly rabbit food - and, as he points out, students with lunch boxes are allowed to bring whatever food they like on to school premises.

"We don't police the contents," says Lambert. "We're very strongly in favour of healthy eating, for all the reasons shared by most schools. But our students are young adults and our policy is to explain and persuade."

So what did lead Julie Critchlow, Sam Walker and Marie Hamshaw to sneak up to 60 takeway lunches a day through the school railings for a fortnight? An uneasy truce was announced on Monday, with further talks agreed to for later this week, after an increasingly unpleasant 24 hours: claims of canteen queue chaos; allegations of abuse against the jovial staff of Chubby's sandwich shop, which is now out of bounds until 3.10pm. But the women are still angry.

When Walker, 41, and one of the protesting mothers, nervously opens one of her windows - "Sorry but I'm not answering the door to journalists any more" - she does so above a small bit of graffiti which reads: "Jamie." Hatches have been battened but she is keen to make one point: "This isn't about us against healthy food, like they've been saying," she says. "It's about how people change the rules."

Lambert says he didn't expect to be popular when he changed the rules. "When you've been able to get out of school at break time, what adolescent isn't going to complain when it stops?" he says. Healthy food was part of the thinking behind the lock-in, after two years of discussion and research. "There is no doubt that eating well helps concentration in the classroom," says Lambert. "And all the medical studies suggest that adult eating patterns are established in youth."

But road safety was the initial trigger, he says - worries about pupils darting across Monkwood Road to Chubby's and Keith Allgood's chip shop - along with complaints about litter and pupil behaviour. Waiting for his £1.10 regular-size bacon sandwich in Chubby's, street cleaner Marc Shipman is right behind the head on this one.

"Litter has almost disappeared," he says. "I'm sorry about this fuss over the school dinners. They kept a lot of us going when I was at Rawmarsh - in the same class as Sam Walker, as it happens. That were during the miners' strike and you appreciated hot helpings of meat, taties and carrots."

The trouble now is that the famous solidarity of the mid-1970s has gone - and, according to Walker and Critchlow, Rawmarsh has also made "Scargill's mistake".

"The school didn't have the decency to ask either parents or pupils what we thought about the idea," says the women's petition, whose forms are stacked on the counters of local shops, and getting plenty of signatures. "We would have liked a vote."

What they did get was plenty of information; Lambert flourishes a brightly coloured, clear, simple leaflet headed "Brunch & Lunch @ RCS", which was one of repeated bulletins about the plan in the school's Update magazine over the past two years. But as he says himself: "There's no way of knowing how many go straight in the bin." When the change came, it was unavoidably abrupt. Freedom to go out until the last day of last term; stay on site from day one this school year.

Except, of course, that going out is still going on. Chubby's suddenly fills at 12.45 with a posse of teenage girls who, as one of them demurely explains, "found ourselves on the school wall and sort-of fell off the outside side". No great angst for healthy-eating enthusiasts, though; they all bought £1 sandwiches stuffed with tuna.

"It's not just girls who keep off fatty stuff," says the shop's owner, Neil Beaumont, 34, who says he chose his business's slightly unfortunate name after seeing a pizza joint in Scarborough called Chubby's and found that he couldn't get it out of his head. "Loads of boys at the school are very keen on sports and they're really into healthy eating. You'd be surprised how much salad I sell them."

The girls claim that the new lock-in system has caused terrible queues at lunchtimes and it's this that is causing all the disobedience. Thanks to a new system of two half-hour breaks, replacing the previous 15 minutes followed by 45 minutes for lunch, some wily students are also now getting two lunches a day, one in each break, at the expense of others who get none at all.

"You can wait for 25 minutes and then five minutes just isn't time for a proper dinner," says one of the girls, before setting off to fall back over the wall the right way.

"In the first week, yes," admits Lambert. "Any new system has teething troubles. But students are good at sussing out the way things work. Most of them have sorted it out and don't have to wait any more."

Where things go next depends on how much good nature has survived the fall-out. The protesters have backed off after getting the worst of it with all the "Junk food mums" headlines, but their petition is growing.

But there is a line of negotiation that acknowledges that healthiness and Chubbyness - and maybe cod middle - could still live together in Rawmarsh after all. "Last year," says Neil Beaumont, "I got an approach from within the school about Chubby's running a take-in service of pre-booked dinner orders for students who want them. I'm very much up for that."

"It's true," says Lambert, "but there are conditions and one we haven't solved is a commitment from the shops not to serve students who go in at break when they are supposed to be on site." No more falling off the wall the wrong way, then.

# Martin Wainwright
# The Guardian,
# Wednesday September 20 2006 source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2006/sep/20/schoolmeals.schools