The School Food Trust (SFT) is the latest quango to come back onto our radar. Charged with fixing school meals and the looming obesity crisis, the SFT’s greatest achievement so far has been caused not by its new standards and dictates but via the law of unintended consequences. Rather than getting children to eat more nutritious school meals, the SFT’s greatest dietary success is the way it has motivated a large number of children to abandon school meals altogether. Figures vary, but the decline is as much as 20%, putting the SFT about 1m students behind the target set for it by the government when it decided to fork out over £500m!

With its funding guaranteed for another four years (until 2011) the SFT argues that it will take time to achieve the change needed. They are unlikely to achieve this by creating a regulatory and financial regime that is unattractive to private sector providers.

After such a poor start you might hope the SFT would be furiously reviewing their strategy and structure. Instead they are on a hiring binge with 22 vacancies listed on their website this month with a combined salary bill of about £700k (before overheads).

Prue Leith says, ‘This is the most important job I have ever had’, but when it comes to diets the first one she should be applying is to the bloated organisation she now chairs, before they become the Colonel Blimp of quangos and burst at the seams.
www.schoolfoodtrust.org.uk