School meal funding has always been tight in the UK, but in England it has now fallen badly behind. At £2.61 per child, per day, it lags Wales by 79p, Scotland by 69p, and Northern Ireland by 49p. The actual cost of delivering a quality school meal, according to a recent industry report, is £3.45 and climbing.
In this Served. panel talk, we sat down with two experts who work both the kitchen and the campaign trail: Luke Consiglio, CEO of The Pantry UK Ltd and a director on the national board of The School Food People, and Bryan Lygate, Chief Operating Officer of Impact Food Group (which feeds over 1,700 schools and colleges across England) and vice chair of The School Food People.
What £2.61 Actually Pays For
School meal funding in England is £2.61 per meal. On paper, that might sound like enough. The reality is that most of it never reaches the plate.
Of the £2.61 England pays per meal, roughly half goes to staffing. The rest covers pensions, training, equipment, breakages, head office overheads, and the ordinary costs of running a kitchen service. What's left for the food itself is under £1.
Bryan Lygate puts the maths plainly:
"Once you take off your staff costs and your overheads, you've got less than a pound really to spend on a two course meal. I would challenge anybody to feed themselves for 90, 95p, a two course meal, let alone go and find a two course meal for £2.61 that's of good quality."
Consiglio reaches for a high street comparison.
"You can't even get a McDonald's Happy Meal for that sort of money nowadays."
The belief stuck. The funding model was never built around it.
The Subsidy Trap
Because the funding doesn't stretch to cover the real cost of a quality meal, operators like The Pantry and IFG face a simple choice. Compromise on the food, or ask the school to pay more. Both guests have chosen the second option, but there's a limit to how often a school can say yes.
"We've got some schools now where if they want to offer the service that the headteachers want to give to their kids, they can be talking tens of thousands of pounds of subsidy," says Consiglio.
One headteacher recently put it to him plainly: "that is the cost of a teacher."
Another school was weighing whether to fix a leaking roof at all. The calculation was whether maintaining meal quality meant deferring the repair. These are not hypothetical trade-offs. They're on the table now, this term, across the country.
Every Lever Has Been Pulled
Operators haven't been passive in the face of this. Since COVID, the industry has absorbed a compounding stack of pressures: food inflation, wage cost rises, National Insurance increases, energy, and ongoing supply chain volatility. Through that whole period, catering businesses have squeezed every efficiency available to them, year after year, just to keep delivering at the prices schools could afford.
Consiglio describes what's already been done:
"The bits over the last four, five years we've been working on is becoming leaner as a business, trying to lean on technology wherever we can. We've exhausted that as much as you physically can, because we are an industry, hospitality generally, which is driven by people."
That work has gone deep into the menu too. Recipes have been reformulated. Beans, pulses, and vegetables worked further into the weekly rotation. Importantly, it has not been a downgrade. Where costs have come out, nutrition has stayed in (or improved).
Lygate is clear that the cost mitigation already happened, and was about preserving quality, not compromising it:
"We've previously been able to mitigate some costs in the face of inflation, but it's been to a nutritional benefit to students. We are in these businesses or these organisations to feed students good food. Any changes we make are for the benefit of the food we're putting on the plate."
The point both keep returning to is that those levers are now spent. Five years of menu engineering, supply chain work, headcount discipline, and technology investment have already been done. There isn't another round of it sitting in a drawer.
Consiglio is direct about where that ends:
"There's nowhere else to go apart from the food on the kids' plates. The only two options is affect what's on the child's plate or push schools into further subsidies."
Policy Without Plumbing
The frustration is sharpened by a policy environment that keeps producing good headlines and skipping the work underneath them.
Two big changes are coming. From September 2027 for primary schools, and 2028 for secondary, the School Food Standards are being updated with tighter nutrition requirements. Separately, the government has announced an expansion of Free School Meals under Universal Credit, bringing roughly half a million more students into eligibility.
Both are supported, in principle, by the industry. Both have been welcomed. And both arrive without any additional funding.
Consiglio's frustration is with the order of operations:
"The school food standards are changing. We all want to celebrate. We all want children to have the healthiest possible foods they can. Underneath the headline, there's no conversation about universal feeding, funding changes, any of those things. We seem to be jumping six or seven steps in front, championing and celebrating this headline. We're still working on actually the foundations of getting this industry right."
Lygate makes the same point about the Free School Meal expansion. The additional 500,000 students will be funded at the same £2.66 rate (the 2026/27 rate), a 1.8% uplift that bears no relationship to food or labour inflation. Worse, for many operators it means a drop in revenue: a student who was previously paying £3 for a meal now receives the same meal funded at £2.66. That gap becomes another subsidy for the school to absorb.
"It's a fantastic scheme so that an extra half a million students will qualify. It's well deserved. But the delivery is going to be a real challenge and put more funding pressures on schools."
108 Countries
If one line in the conversation captures the frustration most cleanly, it's Consiglio's:
"There's 108 other countries in the world who universally feed their primary school children. 108, including Wales and Scotland, right, our neighbours. And England just doesn't do it. Whenever you speak to anybody, they have no intention of rolling that out in the near future. We are being left so far behind now. It's becoming a national embarrassment, really, for me personally."
A Single Voice
Both guests sit on the board of The School Food People, a national body representing operators, local authorities, multi-academy trusts, and suppliers. Much of the conversation returns to the same point: the industry isn't short of good intentions. It's short of a single, coordinated voice loud enough to land at Westminster.
Their wish list is specific.
Funding brought into line with the real cost of a meal. Funding indexed to inflation, so the gap doesn't reopen every September. Universal feeding extended to all primary school children, as Wales and Scotland already do. Auto-enrolment for Free School Meals standardised across every local authority. A protected lunch hour treated with the same seriousness as a maths or science period.
Lygate frames the call clearly:
"We all need to get together and we all need to say essentially the same thing. We need to unify as one voice to make sure we're heard really clearly."
Consiglio picks up the thread.
"If everyone could sit around the same table, the same conversation, and even have a list of 10 things you agreed on seven, right, we are moving forward. The more voices and the more business leaders and businesses that come together, our voice will be amplified."
What Happens Next
None of this is new. The funding gap has been opening for years. What's new is how little room is left inside it.
Operators can't absorb another round of unfunded policy. Schools can't keep subsidising at the rate they have been. Parents can't be charged enough more to close the gap. And the only lever left, the food itself, is the one nobody in the industry wants to pull.
That shared position is also, in its own way, the opportunity. For years the conversation about school food has been fragmented. Catering companies talking to schools. Campaigners talking to government. Local authorities talking to each other. Everyone saying a version of the same thing in slightly different rooms. What Luke, Bryan, and their colleagues at The School Food People are pushing for is a single conversation with a single number behind it. £3.45. Indexed to inflation. Universally applied. Auto-enrolled where eligible.
None of that is radical. Most of it already happens elsewhere in the UK.
Whether the next policy cycle matches the ambition of the School Food Standards arriving in 2027 and 2028, or undercuts them with the same £2.61 mindset, is the question that will shape the next decade of UK school catering. The industry is ready with the answer. It is waiting to be asked the question.
The maths is simple. The politics is not. The children eating the meals, either way, are waiting.
