School Lunches

Healthy Eating

We recognise that nutrition plays a key role, not only for healthy growth and development during childhood, but also to support learning and educational attainment.

Holroyd Howe's approach is to use fresh, local, seasonal produce to create tasty ‘made from scratch’ dishes that are inherently healthy and never over-processed.

The Power Plate

Holroyd Howe’s Power Plate initiative is an integral part of our children’s dining experience at Lady Barn House School. The Power Plate is featured on our menus, with colourful graphics displayed throughout the dining room and across our digital screens around school.

The simple message is: “Eat Go, Grow and Glow foods at every meal and feel the power!”

The initiative encourages children to enjoy a balanced meal by including a combination of carbohydrates, protein, fruit and vegetables. It helps our pupils understand the different roles food plays in giving them the energy they need to learn, play and grow.

We are proud to work in partnership with Holroyd Howe to support our children in developing healthy eating habits. Our relationship extends beyond the dining room, with regular collaboration between Lady Barn and the wider Holroyd Howe nutrition team to bring healthy eating education into the classroom.

Through specialist sessions and engaging activities, children learn more about nutrition, the benefits of a balanced diet and how the food they eat can support their health and wellbeing.

Menus

Holroyd Howe ensure the structure and content of the menus promote the wellbeing of everyone we feed, from the Pre-School pupils to our Prep 6 pupils. We adhere to the principle of ‘getting the balance right’, which simply means consuming a varied and balanced diet that contains plenty of starchy carbohydrates and fruits and vegetables, moderate amounts of dairy food and meat, fish, eggs and beans and only small amounts of fat, sugar and salt.

Nutritional Guidelines and Half Measures

To help ensure our chefs are always considering healthy eating and the nutritional balance of a menu Holroyd Howe have developed their own ‘Nutritional Guidelines’. The recommended guidelines not only take into consideration children’s nutritional requirements but any new Government recommendations are also implemented, e.g. guidance on how frequently processed meat should be consumed. The ultimate goal is to help our pupils and staff enjoy balanced meals containing quality sources of protein and starchy carbohydrates (wholegrain wherever possible), accompanied by lots of vegetables, salad and fruit.

In addition to ‘nutrition guidelines’ Holroyd Howe adopts the ‘Half Measures’ concept at Lady Barn House School. It is an initiative that involves halving the amount of sugar used in desserts. Rather than using added sugar to sweeten desserts, the natural sweetness from fruit, vegetables and dairy foods is used instead.

Catering for Allergies and Intolerances

The provision of special diets is of the upmost importance to us. We want all of our pupils to feel like they can eat with us every day and not feel any different to their friends when having to make food choices. Holroyd Howe do not use nuts or nut derivatives in any of their recipes or ingredients and take the responsibility for managing food allergies incredibly seriously. Their ‘Think of Me’ allergen policy has been adopted at Lady Barn House School.

All of our catering team have been given comprehensive training on how to approach allergy management and given clear instruction on how to manage the issue of pupils and staff with food allergies or intolerances.