Catering Facilities

Food4Life GOLD Accreditation [NHS Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care]

We are delighted to achieve this prestigious accreditation for the 4th time. St Damian’s is recognised for good practice around healthy eating and healthy lifestyles, and that we provide healthy food and drinks which meet evidence based nutrition and oral health guidelines. This shows that working as a partnership, St Damian’s through the delivery of our curriculum and PHSE, along with our fantastic catering team, and with the support of our great parents, are all committed in providing a ‘whole school approach’ to the provision and promotion of healthy food and health lifestyles. Our Food4Life assessor, Gillian Shaw said “We appreciate the time and effort you have put into liaising with the whole school to ensure compliance with the School Food Standards as well as creating a positive healthy lifestyle atmosphere. Huge congratulations on achieving the ‘GOLD’ level of the award!”. The evidence is clear, food does so much than merely providing energy until the next top-up! Well-nourished children have improved educational outcomes and are physically and mentally healthier. As teachers, we see the positive impact of a healthy school meal in the classroom with more engaged, alert children.

Our Catering Team

At St Damian's we have fantastic new catering facilities for both staff and pupils. Providing a first rate catering service is an important part of our school facilities, and we want to ensure our pupils have access to healthy food in a pleasant and friendly environment that enables a student to perform at their best.

Our catering team provide an excellent service, with food prepared freshly each day, which always very well presented, encouraging the children to eat and try foods that perhaps they have not tried before. As much as is possible is prepared freshly on-site and the fact that the majority of our children eat a school meal every day is testimony to that.

As a school we are keen to offer our children a healthy and varied diet and the Catering Team alongside the school ensure food is presented in an appetising way. Often, and to the delight of the students, special events in school are reflected in the food served in the dining room. A few examples are;

Our annual Christmas Dinner – they always go the extra mile and provide a lunch for our whole community – staff and pupils.
Preparing different foods from around the world so pupils experience different culinary tastes e.g. Chinese New Year, Diwali Celebrations.
Our Annual Senior Citizens Christmas Party – each year St. Damian’s invite senior citizens from our community to our traditional Christmas party. This has always been a fantastic event and the catering team support the school by preparing the buffet.
Shrove Tuesday – Our ‘flippin’ marvellous catering team always make a special effort each year to help our Catholic community celebrate Pancake Day. They make pancakes for our pupils.

As we all know food plays a very important part of everyone’s day and we really appreciate the catering team and all they do for everyone at St Damian’s.

Payment for School Meals

At St Damian’s we offer a cashless system for payment of school meals. The system enables us to deliver a more efficient, faster service whilst offering you two different methods of payment, online via IRIS - ParentMail or using a ParentMail PayPoint Card.

Online

You are able to add credit to your child’s account online via IRIS - ParentMail** (which can also be used for paying for other activities such as school trips).

The amount of money you ‘top up’ will be added to your child’s lunch account and money spent on food will deducted from the system. Pupils can always check their balance by using the revaluation terminals. IRIS - ParentMail is able to provide you with a report detailing each item of food served, each credit made to the system, for any time period and show a current balance. There is also a daily ‘spend limit’ programmed into the system of five pounds, this can be increased or decreased for an individual pupil by making a written request to school. Please note that no cash can be accepted at the food counter 'Till Point'. - We are a 'Cash-less school!

Contactless Cards

Each pupil is issued with a personal 'Contactless' card which amongst other things is used primarily as a Dinner Money Card which they need to present at the till if they want to purchase any food or drink.