Delicious!
Providing school lunches for summer holiday child-care programmes

Summer holiday child-care programmes. There are quite a few children in these programmes who buy their lunch at convenience stores. In answer to parents’ requests, to prevent outsourcing of school lunch services and to re-energise the workplace, for the past few years, the Koshigaya City Manual Workers Council has been providing lunch for students in the summer holiday child-care programmes at public schools in the City.
This project provides support for parents bringing up children, as well as ensuring food safety for young children, something which can only be achieved by workers who are employed directly by the municipal government. The management has also recognized this and last year the project was implemented in 9 schools over 3 days. This year, it was implemented in 25 schools over 21 days, covering all summer holiday programmes in the City.
　Service extended from cooking to delivery (which is usually carried out by an outsourced company). The cooks worked on a shift and serving was done by summer program instructors, assisted by the school officers and school employees. There are 1487 students from grade 1 through grade 3 who attend summer holiday child-care programs in Koshigaya City and 91% of them order the school lunches. One lunch cost 250 yen and the menu, which rotates daily, is designed to appeal to children’s taste buds, including items such as mild curry and rice, miso ramen noodles and spaghetti Neapolitan. The children also have many positive comments: “I’m so glad I can eat school lunches every day” “I want to be the serving monitor” “I love hot lunches.” The children were also happy with the menu variety.
Labour and management will carry out a joint evaluation of this project by surveying children, their guardians, instructors and cooks. The Koshigaya City Manual Workers Council is being highly praised for its key part in the project and the workers are very proud of their achievements, including facilitating the link between the local Education Board and the Dept. of Child Welfare, which are, like many Japanese governments, often vertically segmented and do not communicate effectively with each other. The Council also managed to coordinate workers from various different job sections and maintain the conditions (workers and equipment) at the school lunch workplaces while at the same time raising the awareness level of the cooks. The Council is resolved to continue making proposals for projects that are needed on the ground and has adopted ‘rights and useful work together make us winners ’ as their slogan. There are as many smiles in this workplace as there are on the faces of the children at lunchtime.