The debate on school canteens persists: who manages them better?

LleidaThe school canteen service in public schools is always a cause for debate. The high cost of its management, menu policy, food origin, supervision... The fronts are multiple. The debate has been a constant for years everywhere and with a very clear trend: public administration, represented by the county councils, is progressively taking over the control and management of this service, despite the reluctance of some town councils and, above all, of students' families. Families criticize the commodification of an activity that they consider essential for the development of their children and demand more participation in its decisions. “It is a space that takes more than two hours and requires it to be well constructed, well accompanied, that it becomes a well-structured learning time to avoid conflicts,” argues the director of the Federated Associations of Students' Families of Catalonia (AFFAC), Lidón Gasull, who laments the prevalence of a “completely privatized and outsourced canteen system, which is not directly linked to the school”. A large part of the reasons for this reality is that the service, previously always managed by families or the schools themselves, is now mostly managed by school councils, which entrust it to private companies through public tenders.

According to data from AFFAC, in the Lleida demarcation, canteens managed by AFAs or town councils (73) are just over half of those controlled by the comarcal councils (131). La Noguera is one of the most extreme examples, where practically all the centers in the comarca (26) have entrusted the canteen to the administration and, consequently, subcontracted to a single private company that generates 1,300 daily menus. On the other hand, there is El Segrià, where the will of many families to control (directly or indirectly) this service persists. Nowadays, the comarcal council has awarded two large firms (Comertel and Aramark) to just over forty school canteens, while about thirty continue to be managed by the AFAs. In the comarca, there are still two municipalities that manage the canteen directly from the town hall. Corbins is one of them. “I recognize that we are a minority, that we are outside the framework proposed by the comarcal council, but we owe ourselves to the will of the AFA to maintain this model”, claims the mayor of Corbins, Jordi Verdú, who admits certain pressures from the comarcal entity to join the collective model.

According to a study by AFFAC in 2019, in school canteens managed by AFA, the canteen price was lower than those managed by public administration and family satisfaction was higher. Despite this, they claim, the pressure to give in to the public tendering system is progressively more intense. “Every time, they ask for more documentation to justify our service,” admit sources from AFA. This is because there is still no regulation that governs and updates the canteen service. “We depend on a decree from 1996, completely obsolete,” denounces Gasull.

Little by little, direct management of canteens is declining. The last one has been Fondarella, which for many years was directly managed by the town council and which, for the next academic year, will be incorporated into the tender of the Pla d’Urgell county council. “The costs are increasingly high and we cannot continue to bear them,” laments the mayor, Xavier Acosta, who acknowledges that the service awarded to private companies is increasingly monitored and that its quality has improved substantially in recent years.

It is, in fact, the pressure (and the repeated complaints) from families that have led tenders to include increasingly demanding tender conditions. Precisely, in Les Garrigues, a new tender is being prepared that will affect the canteen of all the schools in the region for the coming years, and a large group of AFA (Parents' Associations) have joined forces to demand a better service from the council. “We are fed up with Comertel,” assure spokespersons for the associations, very dissatisfied with both the quality of the food in recent years, and with the menus and supervision offered by this Barcelona-based firm. The council is now drafting new terms and conditions and promises to incorporate “everything that the AFAs ask of us within a legal framework,” such as the requirement to use local products and to eliminate cold food lines. “For the first time, the economic proposal of the bidding company will not be a scoring element,” say regional sources.

In any case, “no matter how many clauses you put into the tender, private company management always tends to minimize costs and seek profits,” warns Lidón Gasull.

In any case, the AFAs of Les Garrigues acknowledge that canteen management is a too complex and costly matter to undertake directly. In Urgell, there is also a progressive adherence of municipal schools to the model managed by the council (which covers 70% of the entire region). Currently, a new tender is being prepared for the next academic year, and the promoters announce that they will share the content with the town councils. “We are proposing a demanding tender, in order to ensure that the service is excellent,” defends the president of the council, José Luis Marín.

It should be noted that one of the entities that serves food to many schools in Urgell is Quàlia, a social cooperative of social initiative. This entity manages the canteens of small schools such as those in Belianes, Guimerà, Ciutadilla, Preixana, Tornabous and Puigverd d’Agramunt, among others. They are centers with very few children and are not economically viable. One of the most emblematic cases in the region is that of Maldà, where the existence of a school canteen was decisive for a new family to settle there last year and save the school's existence in the town. "We believe that fighting against depopulation is also done from the school canteen," claim spokespersons for Quàlia.

Regulating student-to-monitor ratios, improving their training, attending to specific educational support needs, buying local food through agreements with local producers, and using appropriate materials (such as glass and stainless steel) are other areas of improvement that the AFAs claim and arguments for the final drafting of a canteen regulation appropriate for the new times. "We must move towards a more transversal model, where the involvement of the center and the AFAs is important, while that of private agents is limited to what is strictly necessary," concludes the director of AFFAC.