The kids who get pub grub for school dinners

Asparagus, not ale, for these hungry pupils.

Primary school children have swapped their plastic dinner trays full of stodgy mash for some of the best pub grub in the country.

While their parents may only dream of sneaking off for a pub lunch during the week, 27 pupils at Ravenstonedale Primary School, near Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria, now enjoy daily lunchtime meals prepared “down the local”.

The Black Swan pub, which won the AA Pub of the Year 2012/13, wheels over the freshly-made dishes from its kitchens down the road from the school. Some days the youngsters will even go over to the pub for their meals and, when the sun is out, they’ll eat in the beer garden or tuck into a lunchtime barbecue.

Pub head chef Kevin Hillyer, 37, a dad-of-two whose five-year-old son Ryan attends the school, is behind the scheme.

He said: “We have done four different menus and if they don’t like what’s on the menu they can have something else. I teach them about fruit and vegetables on ‘Try it Friday’.

“The first week was asparagus, and I was really surprised by the number who wanted to try it. “Last week they had five or six different cheeses. It’s not just about the school feeding them, it’s getting them to try fruit and vegetables.

“We are a farming community so it is educating them and, hopefully, when they go round the supermarket with their parents, they’ll be saying, ‘Can we have some of that?’”

Kevin and his team have also dispensed with the plastic dinner trays and replaced them with pub crockery to make the food look more like something they’d serve customers on a Friday night.

He said: “The thing that got me down was they were being served in split trays. They had plastic cutlery with dinner on one side and stodgy pudding on the other.

“Now they can learn how to eat at the table and with proper crockery. It’s scandalous kids all over the country are eating off plastic crockery.”

Among the £2.25 meals served at school last week was a roast beef dinner followed by fresh fruit salad and vegetable and tuna pasta bake followed by one of the twice weekly treats chocolate chip brownies. During quiet periods in the winter months the youngsters will try to make their parents jealous by “heading down the pub” for lunch.

If that doesn’t work, next year’s summer term plans certainly will.

Kevin added: “In the summer, we’ll have barbecues once a month either outside at school or they can come along to the beer garden and have it here.”

The Black Swan also has a village store which was opened in 2007 with the help of Prince Charles’s charity, Pub Is The Hub, stocking food, gifts and crafts. It also provides a base for the area’s first responders and Tony Jerome, of the Campaign for Real Ale, believes such diversification is the only way for pubs to survive.

He said: “These places are becoming more of a hub, with libraries and Post Offices in them. Some even screen films. I’ve heard of one pub in Liverpool that has a hairdresser’s in it.

“Some provide computers and free Wi-Fi and others have shops where people can hire a rail and sell clothes.”