Nicole Pisani used to work in a celebrated London restaurant; now she cooks couscous and preserved lemons for 500 children at primary school in Hackney. They love it – but questions remain over whether the model can be replicated

It’s 10.25 on a Tuesday morning and Elizabeth, who has been a school cook for 30 years, is deftly peeling and stoning an entire crate of avocados without lifting her eyes. On the other side of the kitchen, piles of pineapples and melons are being chopped and threaded on to wooden skewers; tray upon tray of chicken and portobello mushroom pies are browning in the ovens and vast pans of corn on the cob with ginger butter are bubbling on the stoves.

Pretty pots of pickled vegetables are being prepared for the tables; trays of living pea shoots and cress are chilling; in the fridge there are cartons of edible flowers. Amid all this culinary glamour, I have a job of my own: to prepare fresh pollock fish fingers, rolled in Chinese five spice, oats and breadcrumbs, which will be served with seaweed.

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Welcome to 21st-century school dinners. Ten years to the month after Jamie Oliver began his school food revolution – with the help of a formidable dinner lady called Nora Sands at Kidbrooke school in south London – a small inner-city primary on the other side of the Thames is doing its best to give it a new lease of life.

Gayhurst community school overlooks London Fields, with its cricket pitch, heated lido and hipster barbecues. It is fringed with streets that are becoming increasingly gentrified, with million-pound properties and artisan bakeries, but the school still serves a diverse Hackney community, with 30% of children on free school meals.

In January, Gayhurst hired a new school cook. Perhaps they were impressed by the CV. Maltese-born Nicole Pisani used to be head chef at Nopi, the celebrated Soho restaurant set up by chef and food writer Yotam Ottolenghi, serving exquisite Middle Eastern and Asian-inspired dishes for wealthy diners.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lunchtime at Gayhurst primary in Hackney … the Children’s Food Trust reports that primary schools are now serving more fruit and vegetables and fewer chips and confectionary. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Exhausted by the long hours, she was looking for a new challenge, something she could feel passionate about. So she left the graft – and glamour – of Nopi, and now works alongside Elizabeth, Raymond, Lucky and the rest of the kitchen team at Gayhurst, cooking and serving up lunch to 500 children in a shabby school hall.

With just over an hour and a half before service begins, Pisani and her team are in full swing. Elizabeth’s avocados are smashed, seasoned and mixed with yoghurt; preserved lemons and gherkins are sliced and stirred into the rice and black dhal mix. Meanwhile I add to the pile of carefully crafted pollock fingers – very slowly.

It looks and feels like a school kitchen – the same vast tins, battered trays and giant pans – but the food being produced bears no resemblance to any school dinner that ever passed my lips.

Pisani, 34, is the latest recruit to what seems to be a growing movement in schools up and down the country, aimed at not only improving the quality of school lunches, but also trying to impart to young people the sheer pleasure of growing, cooking and eating proper food.

According to food and nutrition experts, the quality of school lunches has vastly improved since Jamie first clashed with Nora in his 2005 TV series Jamie’s School Dinners. There was a national outcry over the ubiquitous chips, the Turkey Twizzlers and the 37p-per-child daily budget, and things changed.

Legislation governing school food was revised and strengthened in 2006; further legislation came into effect this January, making it compulsory for meals to include one or more portions of vegetables or salad every day, and outlawing more than two portions of fried or pastry-based foods per week.

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Dr Patricia Mucavele is head of nutrition at the Children’s Food Trust. “Jamie put school food on to the political agenda and I think things have really moved forward,” she says. Of the surveys the trust carried out in 2009 and 2011, she adds: “There are some really good headlines. In primary schools, compared to 2005, schools in 2009 provided more fruit, fruit-based desserts, vegetables and salad, water and fruit juice, and fewer condiments, starchy foods cooked in fat like chips, snacks and confectionery.

“More pupils took healthier options, choosing water to drink; three quarters of children had vegetables or salad on their plates, and on average, they took more than two portions of their ‘five a day’ with their school lunch – actually eating 1.6 portions.

“Similarly, in secondary schools the proportion of young people on school meals who had chips for their lunch was down from 43% in 2004 to 7% in 2011. It also showed that almost all schools had ditched the sale of chocolate, sweets and crisps completely since the introduction of the 2006 legislation, and the average school meal being eaten by secondary school pupils contained around a third less saturated fat, fat, salt and sugar in 2011 than it did in 2004.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trying to impart to young people the sheer pleasure of growing, cooking and eating proper food … lunch prep at Gayhurst primary. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

What’s more, she says, food is now much more of a priority in many schools: “The key thing is a ‘whole school approach’. If everybody – headteacher, teaching staff, school caterers – in a school work together, and parents and children are consulted around the school food policy and provision, that’s when it works in practice.

“The dining hall becomes an integral part of the school, where children and teachers eat together, cooks are considered important members of staff, and food is considered a vital element of school life. The trust’s research shows that when children eat a healthy school lunch in a pleasant dining environment, they can concentrate and learn better in afternoon classes.”

This all sounds very promising, but according to Henry Dimbleby, founder of the fast-food restaurant Leon and one of the architects of the School Food Plan (SFP), uptake of school food remains stubbornly low at 43%, with other children eating off-site or bringing packed lunches. According to the SFP, only 1% of packed lunches meet the nutritional standards that apply to school food.

Obesity rates, meanwhile, remain stubbornly high. In some parts of England, more than a quarter of pupils in their final year at primary school are classed as dangerously overweight, with children in deprived areas twice as likely to be obese as their more affluent peers. “Overall, things are a lot, lot better,” says Dimbleby. “But there’s still a long way to go; there’s still too much that’s beige and boring.”

There’s nothing beige and boring at his sons’ school, however. Dimbleby is a parent and governor at Gayhurst, where he has been involved in developing the school’s food policy with executive headteacher Louise Nichols and her team. It was a tweet by Dimbleby asking if anybody was interested in becoming a cook at his sons’ school that caught Pisani’s attention and led to her career change.

So is this a credible way forward for school food? Surely not every school can hire its own West End chef? What impact can one school’s happy experience have on the national picture?

“This is happening bit by bit, school by school,” says Dimbleby. “Schools are helping each other, and that’s what needs to happen now.” He regularly visits schools around the country, and the SFP website is full of examples of brilliant initiatives to enhance children’s interest in and passion for good food.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘What we are trying to do is to change the perception of what school food can be, and what a school cook can be,’ says Gayhurst governor and School Food Plan founder Henry Dimbleby. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

“What we are trying to do at Gayhurst,” he says, “is to change the perception of what school food can be, and what a school cook can be. As Nicole and others are showing, it can be a great career choice for cooks who want a different kind of life from that in a professional kitchen.”

And there are others – small numbers of professionally trained chefs moving into school kitchens, bringing their knife skills and their sophisticated palates. But it’s a tricky move, out of a team of highly skilled staff in a professional kitchen and into a school setting where staff are traditionally low-paid and low-skilled.

It has clearly been a tough transition for Pisani, but perhaps even more so for Elizabeth, Raymond and Lucky, whose jobs must have changed beyond recognition. They work as a team, quietly plugging away at their tasks as the minutes pass. Then suddenly it’s midday, and the pace picks up.

Trolleys piled with pies are rolled out, the youngest pupils begin to arrive at the service area and Elizabeth dishes up the main course. The children approach, some with gusto, some a bit warily; a few visibly shudder as they spot the mushrooms and gherkins nestling in their food. “What’s that black thing?” one boy asks. Elizabeth seems not to hear and carries on serving.

“There’s always something I don’t like,” says one boy. “Oh, yuck!” says another involuntarily. “Are you from Ofsted?” asks someone else.

But as the children get older, the enthusiasm grows. There are lots of vegetarians, who choose the couscous and vegetable pie; a small number will not venture beyond a jacket potato; quite a few accept the offer of a handful of torn pea shoots; everyone likes the ice cream in cones.

Elizabeth is so busy she can barely speak. She’s worked at Gayhurst since 1986 – but never like this. “It’s hard,” she says. “It is hard. But it’s good.”

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The teachers are encouraged to eat (for free) with the children, and many do. The week before the Guardian’s visit, Pisani masterminded a pop-up restaurant fundraiser in the school hall, laying on a lavish eight-course dinner for £30 a head, serving mussels, seaweed broth and fennel pollen.

The £30 fee was “controversial” at a school where almost a third of children are from deprived backgrounds, admits Nichols, but it raised £3,000, which will be invested in improving the children’s dining experience, with new plates, tablecloths and flowers on the tables.

“We don’t want to be famous for having snooty food,” says Nichols, “but we all felt something better could be done with the food here. We wanted to do something original. It takes a bit of getting used to, but the kids like it. Though it still causes a great deal of hilarity – for example, when there’s seaweed on the tables.”

So far the results of the Gayhurst experiment are impressive: take-up of school lunches has gone up, the number of packed lunches has gone down from 100 to 67, and – perhaps surprisingly – the daily cost per pupil has been slashed from 92p per day to just 78p, mainly as a result of more – and better cooked – vegetable dishes on the menu.

Pisani’s aim now is to get the Gayhurst model right – the menu and how best to serve it in the context of a comprehensive school food policy – then share it with other schools, initially locally, with 15 neighbouring primary schools and three secondaries, and then further afield. That afternoon Pisani is due to go out on a bus, meeting and talking to other school cooks about her project.

After their lunch, the children are asked to give their feedback. They have to put a coloured ping-pong ball in a bucket – green for good, yellow for bad. Margot and Sonny choose yellow and run off giggling – Margot didn’t like the mushrooms and Sonny didn’t like the vegetables in the vegetable pie. But there are far, far more green balls than yellow.

“It’s all about eating being fun, as well getting nutrition down their necks,” Pisani says, and I can only hope my pollock fish fingers, to be served the next day, meet the standard. “Change is hard for everyone,” she adds. “But we’re getting a lot better.”

Cod fingers in five-spice crumbs with yoghurt and fennel slaw (serves 500)





For the cod fingers (2 per child):

30kg sustainable pollock

A big tray of seasoned flour

24 eggs

1kg panko breadcrumbs

250g Chinese five-spice

1kg oats

Portion the pollock into fingers of about 25g each the day before. Keep on j-cloths in the fridge overnight. You’ll need an assistant for the next step: roll the fish in the flour with one hand and then in the egg with the other, making sure to keep the two separate. Pass to your assistant, who should roll the floured fish in the mixed panko, five-spice and oats. Then deep fry at 160C for 2-3 mins, and squeeze lime on immediately. Store on a hotplate at 40C during service with the doors open – it will keep your fingers crunchy but hot.







For the yoghurt and fennel slaw:

5kg savoy cabbage

5kg grated carrot

3kg shaved fennel

3kg red onion

5 bunches fresh mint

3kg drained yogurt (labneh)

Juice of 10 lemons

Shave the fennel (this takes a lot of patience!) and store in cold water in the fridge the day before. Chop the savoy cabbage very finely, grate the carrots and finely slice the red onion. Mix together in a big bowl and add the lemon juice. Then mix in the labneh and finely chopped mint. It’s important to only do this just before you serve the food, and you may need to do three batches to keep it fresh – if you add it all at once, or too early, the result for the last children in line would be a mushy, watery slaw.

