News

The contract we have with Aspens to provide our catering service ends as of 31^st August 2019, the governing body has taken the decision to not extend this contract.

From September 2019 we will be running our own “in house” catering service named EATWELL. The governors took this decision to support us in our vision to run a catering service that provides fresh, healthy and filling meals to our students.

Magnus is part of the Southwell & Nottingham Diocese Multi Academy Trust, which recently had a second secondary school join, Samworth Church Academy in Mansfield. Samworth has been successfully running an in house catering service for a number of years and Les Purcell has agreed to be executive chef over both schools.

Magnus do not want to make any surplus from our catering service and any surplus will be reinvested back into the food service.

Les is passionate about sourcing local fresh food. We will be having bread delivered at 4am each morning from Adkins, our butchers will be providing high quality meat and we will limit the use of frozen products.

We want to provide a filling meal that is nutritious and tasty for our students, with less junk food such as sausage rolls and an increase in healthier food as this is what student surveys results have indicated a desire for.

We are having an upgrade to our cashless system, which will resolve any technical issues parents have had recently. Squid accounts will not change and balances will seamlessly transfer over.

Over the summer we will be making changes to the kitchen and Restaurant and one of the exciting changes is access to free cold drinking water with new water stations, this means that the meal of the day will no longer include a drink and will be the meal and pudding only, this enables us to focus on bigger food portions and better quality meals.

We will be increasing the free school meal allocation to £2.40 each day this will match the meal of the day price for a main meal and pudding.

Students will be able to buy each day a large meal for £2, this could be a large filled roll and piece of fruit, a large portion of pasta topped with cheese (optional) and garlic bread, or the main meal of the day. If they want to add a pudding it would be £2.40

As you are aware our Magic Breakfast scheme has been really successful and this is something that will hopefully continue, we will know more come October 2019 if the Magic Breakfast organisation secure 2 years further funding from the government. We have it secured until April 2020.

We will be reducing the food offered at break time and providing smaller healthier snacks that are fruit or oat based. This is for two reasons, we want students to opt in to the free breakfast scheme and fill up before lessons start and we then want them to have access to a smaller healthier snack at break but then be hungry at lunch for a healthy, filling meal. This is the biggest change and something our students may not like to start with, we have realised however that many of our students are currently filling up on the unhealthy snacks on offer at break and not then having a meal at lunch, this is something we want to move away from and your support on this would be most appreciated.

Please look at the EATWELL presentation below to look at the types of options we are looking to offer. Detailed menus and pricing will be posted over the next few days.

If you would like to provide feedback, please email nmoore@magnusacademy.co.uk by 22.07.2019.