Dinner pods for county schools
A project to bring hot dinners back to virtually every school in Northamptonshire will see more than £3 million spent on building improvements.
The leaders of Northamptonshire County Council announced plans to make hot dinners available at 93 per cent of the county's schools last year.
But because many school buildings do not currently have kitchens capable of preparing hot food, the authority has asked firms to come forward to carry our work at 55 buildings.
The school works will cost between 3.2 million and 4.1 million and in some cases see special "kitchen pods" built next to schools because there is insufficient space in the actual buildings.
The council's cabinet member for schools, Councillor Andrew Grant (Con, Brackley East) said the fact many schools had been built without kitchens was ridiculous.
He added: "One of the problems we had when we changed from a three-tier to a two-tier schooling system in Northampton was we were not allowed by the Government to put kitchens into the new school buildings.
"It was very frustrating, but I think the new system is going to be excellent when it's fully up and running."
Money for the new school kitchens will be taken from a pot of 10.9 million the Government gave to the council last year.
The kitchen pods, which will be about 20ft long, will be built at 24 schools in the county while the majority of the other schools in the scheme will simply have their existing kitchens improved.
The council has warned that the work on the 24 schools which need kitchen pods will be carried out between June and August this year when children are at school, meaning the builders will have to be prepared to work during evenings and weekends.
It is hoped that once the building work is completed, the scheme will create about 250 new jobs at schools across the county.
It is hoped virtually all of the county's schools will have access to hot dinners by 2013, but the first 107 to benefit from the project will start serving hot meals from September.
The plans were welcomed by almost all members of the authority after they were first announced in 2009, but some opposition members expressed regret that hot dinners had been cut back by a previous Conservative administration at County Hall in the 1990s.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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