Who says they do? They might be relying on lunchtime assistant feedback to write up the diary because madam demands it's needed.
Bloody hell, I support 2 children each morning as a TA, one with a physical One Plan in place and 1 with a cognitive EHCP in place. Neither have funding so don't have 1:1s over lunch but are carefully monitored by lunchtime staff and guided to the correct places after eating with help given for coats etc where needed.
I was a midday meals supervisor for a couple of years and our hours were cut from 120 to 90 minutes per day and we had to set up for lunch, supervise, clean up and cover playground duty during that time. Also been a classroom TA and seen how stretched staff are to cover children’s needs because even those with high needs do not get funding for a full time 1:1 TA.
So I am fully aware that a lot of children who need funding do not get it and schools adapt to meet their needs anyway. I just do not understand, given all those children with additional and complex needs, why a child without an EHCP, who can cope pretty damn well in comparison, needs someone to sit with him at lunchtimes and write down everything he eats and what he says about it. It seems like a huge waste of that person’s time, whether they are midday meals supervisor, TA, teacher, cleaner, whatever. And if a parent kicked off and demanded a detailed food diary, I would expect them to be told, politely, that there simply is no way of facilitating that in school.
Maybe I just live in a more deprived area, idk. My son is 13 and has a far more restricted diet than Wimbledon and always has done. He refused to eat nursery meals, refused the universal free school meals in EYFS, years 1 and 2, and even now has FSM but barely eats at school because there isn’t much on offer that he will eat. I have provided him with a lunch box since he was in nursery aged 3. When, in year 1, he was coming home with his lunch untouched every day, I asked his teacher if he could be monitored as I was concerned about him going all day without food and was told that he would have a word with the MMS but generally it was difficult for them to monitor individual children due to numbers.
But then my son was not birthed from the golden womb of Rachel Scambleton the First