Many people launching a new food venture hope their work will eventually be recognised or publicly acknowledged. The winners of the OFM Award for Outstanding Achievement didn’t think about prizes or headlines. They did what they did because they believed it was what the children in their care needed and deserved.
That changed when OFM wrote about the impact of the new lunch offering at Queensmill, a west London school for children with autism which presents them with severe challenges. Our report became one of our most shared articles on social media. Our readers were just extraordinarily moved by the effort and determination of two people: Jude Ragan, the then head teacher of the school, and the trained chef she had hired to revolutionise their lives, Djalma Lucio Polli de Carvalho – or Lucio for short.
Today, Ragan, who has just retired after decades working to improve education for young people with autism, says she doesn’t regard what she did as a choice. “We had individualised every aspect of the day for our children at Queensmill apart from the crap lunches,” she says now. “I just thought I had to be brave because this is the last piece I haven’t fixed.”
The narrative of bad school food is a familiar one: of children needing better lunches than the carbohydrate-laden stodge they had become used to, because to do otherwise is uncivilised and lazy. But this is a fundamentally different tale. Many children with autism can have a complex relationship with food and mealtimes. They can be over-sensitive to heat or texture or go the other way, needing a hit of saltiness or crunch. Equally, they can find the noise and change around mealtimes confusing. And if they don’t get what they need it can be stressful. Mealtimes at Queensmill, then supplied by caterers who seemed unable to adapt to their clients’ needs, had indeed become very stressful. A lot of children simply weren’t eating at lunchtime, and that in turn led to major behavioural problems.
Ragan’s conclusion was that she needed to break away from using contract caterers. She needed to hire a different sort of cook, someone more willing to learn and understand; someone willing to be adaptable. That cook was Lucio, a Brazilian who had trained in the UK with Leith’s contract caterers, but who was ready for another sort of challenge. He rose to it. Simply put, he recognised that he had to take the mass out of mass catering. “I had to understand that they are all individuals,” he says now. “I had to make sure they trust me.” Yes, Lucio cooks his food from scratch, but he does so much more than that. He works hard to introduce the pupils to new tastes and flavours. He takes gradual steps. “One day they are going to be in the outside world and I have to prepare them for that.”
As OFM discovered when we spent a day there, what had been one of the most complex moments in the daily routine has become one of the most relaxed. Children whose failure to eat had become a genuine source of concern – children like Matthew who was eating a few chickpeas a day, or Finn who stuck to burnt toast – are now expanding their diet on a daily basis. As online comments by our readers said, the story is “inspiring”. Repeatedly they said it had moved them to tears. As one put it, Lucio is quite simply “worth his weight in gold”.
For Ragan, it’s all very obvious. “You should cook things for children that are nice.” Getting that to happen though was a struggle, and it was her willingness to face up to that struggle and give Lucio all the support he needed which made them both such popular recipients of the award with the OFM judges. “It’s an extraordinary thing to get an award like this,” Ragan says now. “It values what we do at Queensmill.” Lucio agrees. “It just makes me feel like I’m doing something right.” It’s what sends him back into the kitchen every school day, to continue the great work that Jude Ragan helped him start.
