How to Ensure Your School Kitchen Meets LACA Standards

In a school kitchen, ensuring excellent hygiene, safety, and capacity to fulfil nutritional requirements is of the utmost importance. With experts agreeing that varied and nutritional meals improve a child’s capacity to focus and learn, it’s also essential to have the facilities necessary to provide the appropriate balanced meals
In this guide, we’ll look at LACA’s guidance and how you can best equip your school kitchen to meet it, including optimised school kitchen design, maintenance, and more.

What Is LACA?

LACA, otherwise known as the Local Authority Caterers Association or simply ‘The School Food People’, is a board of individuals and organisations dedicated to the provision of healthy, nutritious school meals. Members include local authorities, catering managers, kitchen and school staff, catering equipment manufacturers and more.
We at Airedale have had LACA membership, lending our kitchen and catering expertise, as well as benefiting from LACA’s guidance and knowledge in our school kitchen projects.

Why Follow LACA Guidelines?

LACA aims to help schools keep students safe and well-nourished, using experts and thorough research to inform this. Studies agree that nutritious and varied meals help children to learn and concentrate better, with a positive impact on mood, too.
Furthermore, Ofsted considers school meals and dining in their overall score of your school. Therefore, by enhancing the quality of food served, you also elevate your educational facility as a whole.

Allergy and Medical Diet Guidelines for Schools

A key concern in any kitchen is managing allergens, and this is particularly prevalent in school kitchens, where numerous pupils with a wide variety of dietary requirements are served daily. In understanding this, LACA has provided a thorough guide on allergen management.
Communication and data sharing are essential to allergen management. Data must always be kept up-to-date, with written communication regarding changes and requirements between relevant stakeholders – in this case, the school management and catering providers.
Communication between students and staff is also crucial. Under the Food Information Regulations (2014), food providers must clearly communicate the presence of any of the four main allergens. All team members should also be fully allergy-trained to handle the contamination risk, and an identification method for students with allergies should be implemented to point them out to kitchen staff.
LACA acknowledges limited or badly laid-out kitchen space, inadequate prep space, limited storage, and inadequate cleaning and washing facilities as significant risk factors for improper allergen management. For this reason, it is crucial to ensure your school kitchen is expertly designed.
To learn more, see our guide to why a well-designed kitchen layout is important for food safety.

The Importance of School Kitchen Risk Assessments

Risk assessments are a requirement for all kitchens, under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the HACCP food standards. In a school kitchen, risk assessments are particularly crucial due to the product consumers all belonging to a vulnerable group. A detailed risk assessment should also be carried out regarding students with allergies and medical diets.
Our guide to kitchen risk assessments can aid you in this process.

Nutritional Guidelines for Schools

LACA upholds the government’s nutritional guidelines. This involves including one or more portions of vegetables, one or more portions of fruit, a portion of starchy foods, a portion of dairy and a source of protein in a child’s school diet every day.
The freshness of these ingredients is emphasised, meaning ample refrigeration space is required in your school kitchen.

Food Hygiene Guidelines for Schools

The health of our young people is critical, so hygiene in school kitchens is a serious matter. All staff must be fully trained in proper hygiene practices, and proper utensil cleaning and hand washing practices should be emphasised.
The layout of your school kitchen should also be optimised for hygiene, with waste disposal areas positioned away from food preparation areas and cleaning stations placed in several areas within the kitchen. Adequate drainage is essential for waste liquids.
Safe storage at correct temperatures is also vital for school kitchen hygiene. Fridge and freezer temperatures should be regularly checked to ensure food is cooled and preserved properly. Dried goods’ packaging should be fully sealed, and chilled units should be kept at 5C or below. Meanwhile, hot holdings such as soup kettles and Bain Maries should be kept at 63 degrees or above to prevent bacteria growth.
A First-in-First-out (FIFO) stock rotation system is also advised to prevent out-of-date food from being stored.

Accommodating Free School Meals

One unique concern for school kitchens is accommodating free meals, a scheme championed by LACA. LACA also campaigns for a wider uptake of school meals for students nationwide for clearer monitoring of student nutrition. Should LACA succeed in this aim, school kitchens will cater to a higher volume of students.
In Wales, free school meals are now available to all primary-school-aged children. This meant that many school kitchens in Wales were no longer adequately sized for the volume of pupils that they had to serve.
In response to this government initiative, Caerphilly council selected Airedale to scale up their primary school kitchens. Our expertise meant that Caerphilly was the first Welsh area to successfully scale up its kitchens, and LACA itself nominated Airedale for an award to celebrate this work.
If your local school requires expansion due to increased free school meals, or simply a higher influx of students opting for school lunches, we at Airedale can use what we have learned from this project to swiftly and effectively scale up your facilities.

Reducing Your School Kitchen’s Carbon Footprint

LACA and the University of Edinburgh have created a Meal Analyser to judge the carbon footprint of school meals. This can include the sourcing and transport of ingredients and how they are cooked.
A kitchen optimised for sustainability can also help reduce meals’ carbon footprint. Smart kitchen technology to reduce energy wastage, high-quality kitchen equipment to reduce repairs and replacements, and optimised refrigeration and freezing can all help create a more eco-friendly school kitchen.
See our guide to creating an energy-efficient commercial kitchen for more sustainability advice.

To learn more about industrial kitchen design and construction for schools, see our guide to your new school kitchen build. For wider guidance on the building, running, and maintaining large-scale kitchens, explore our blog or contact us.