2024 Heart's Kindness & Community Award Naomi Parkinson, Ingol Community Primary School, Preston

Naomi Parkinson is the headteacher of Ingol Community Primary School in Preston, where she looks after 208 children and the local community… 

Well done on winning your award! Food is important at your school, isn’t it?

This is for my fantastic team at school – the teachers, the catering team, the kids! I’m very lucky that all the staff are invested in the same vision. The children need to be well fed and well rested for us to perform our jobs properly. We can’t educate them to the best we can if they have underlying barriers preventing that from happening. When they’ve had a good lunch, productivity and engagement in the afternoon is much better. We also provide every child with breakfast in the morning, too. We’ve brought the catering in-house, so the children have more ownership of what’s on the menu.

Do you ask the kids what they want? 

We start off by saying that we’re not a fast-food chain! But one of the meals they wanted was Pot Noodle, so we’ve adapted a chicken and veggie noodle dish and that goes down really well. Then they told us they wanted spicier curries – we didn’t expect that! But having the chance to give feedback means we have that option. The more the kids have invested in their food, the better the result, because they’ve taken ownership and we’ve listened. They feel empowered. It’s not done at them; it’s done with them.

Why did you bring the catering in-house?

It means we can make sure the team is trained in the ethos of the school. Obviously, we adhere to national standards, but seasonal produce and sustainability is also really important to us. We work closely with our local mosque, which runs food banks at the weekend, then we’ll take anything leftover from that to make 60 extra meals twice a week. It’s perfectly usable food that’s no longer going to landfill.

These are for the vulnerable families at your school, aren’t they?

Before lockdown, we had a food market at school, where people would pay what they could afford for the food they took. Then lockdown hit and we had to stop the market, although we continued to do food parcels. But it was becoming more and more apparent that actually the issue wasn’t just getting food, it was choosing between putting the oven on and putting the lights on. We had children coming to school worried that there was only 12p left on the electric meter, thinking: Is there going to be anything on when we get home tonight? So we had to switch the focus to make sure we were providing something that’s less draining on households. So cooking the meals for the whole family helped them with both their food costs and their energy costs.

People must’ve been so grateful, what was the feedback?

It’s been a lifeline, really, because they’re not having to make that decision. In our community, a lot of our families are earning just over that £16,000 threshold that entitles them to free school meals. When we first started it was just for a few families that were really struggling; but that’s just grown and there’s no stigma attached, so kids are quite happy to go home with the containers of food. Sometimes the catering team cooks the food, sometimes we cook it ourselves. 

You also open up the school to be used by other community organisations in the holidays. How does that work?

It can be charities that haven’t got their own space, or faith groups. We’ve worked with the Sikh community, who cook a lot of food for the homeless in the city. Over Covid we also cooked twice a week for homeless people, because we didn’t have the children to cook for and we wanted to use the produce.

Tell us more about your allotment…

Our site supervisor and the children built the allotment just after lockdown, and that’s grown and grown. Now they tend to the allotment throughout the year. A lot of our children don’t have gardens, so it’s a place where they can learn to be more sustainable. But they also seem to really enjoy the meals that contain the ingredients they’ve grown. It’s strawberry season at the minute, so they’re in nearly every dessert! But they’ve been freshly picked off the plants.

One of the things that struck us about your entry was how children seem to be losing the skill of using cutlery…

We do have children who start Reception having not used a knife and fork. So they’ll get a metal knife and fork and a plate and be taught how to use cutlery properly, as well as how to sit and eat a meal, then clear up afterwards. The teachers will sit with them at lunchtimes, because they want them to be able to have that socialisation of a meal. It’s the communication and physical skills that seem to be dying. Mealtimes are for sharing, and realistically we want that replicated in the home, so at least we know they’ve done that once a day. 

What would you like the government to do?

We need better infrastructure within the kitchens, so that we can provide better meals – we’re limited in space, resources and equipment. And make things more affordable for families, because if it’s more affordable at source, we wouldn’t need to do what we’re doing. Our aim over the next couple of years is to bring down the cost of school lunches, so more can afford it. Then they’ve got a well-balanced meal. We’re having to do a lot of this ourselves – when we’re also battling things like a leaking roof, and the upkeep of the school building itself.

If you could share one tip, what would it be?

Get the kids outside and grow your own. That’s cutting your costs massively. The children have so much pride in what they’re doing and their actual dedication to seeing a seed being planted and going all the way through to the harvest, it’s personal growth and ticking off a lot of boxes for cost and health.