Every meal is a till transaction against a pupil's account, funded or paid. The kitchen's own portion count is one higher than the till, every day, and the food cost proves the kitchen right.
I run the finance and operations side of a two form entry primary. Four hundred and eleven pupils.
School meals are the most counted thing in this building.
Every meal is a transaction. A child comes to the hatch, the server taps their name on a screen, and the system records a meal against that pupil's account, either paid from the parent's balance or funded because the child is eligible for free school meals.
The funded ones are a claim on public money and they are audited. Our local authority samples us and the counts have to reconcile to the register, the kitchen's production and the invoices from the food supplier.
So there are three numbers every day.
The till count, which is meals served against named pupils.
The register, which is who is in school.
And the kitchen count, which is portions made, from the production sheet the cook fills in.
The kitchen count is one higher than the till count. Every day.
Not most days. Every service day since I started here in 2019, and the cook says it was the same for the eleven years before that.
The obvious answer is that the cook makes a spare, and it is such a good answer that I believed it for a year and a half.
Cooks do that. You always make one extra because a tray gets dropped or a child is sick on their plate and needs another, and nobody would ever criticise a cook for it.
Two things ended it.
The cook says she does not, and she is a woman who has run that kitchen for nineteen years and who told me, quite sharply, that she makes what the sheet says and that if I thought otherwise I could stand and count them.
So I did. Four times, over a term, at the pass, with a clicker.
Her count is right. The portions that leave that kitchen match her sheet exactly.
The food cost is the second thing and it is the one I cannot argue away.
We are invoiced by the supplier for what we order, and what we order is driven from the production sheets. Over a term the food cost per meal served comes out at a figure I report to governors.
If the kitchen were making one extra a day that nobody eats, the cost per meal served would be about a quarter of a per cent high and the waste bin would show it. Our kitchen weighs its waste, because the county runs a scheme and there is a small grant attached.
Waste is normal. About what every school of our size records.
The extra meal is not thrown away. It leaves the kitchen and it does not come back.
Where it goes.
I have stood in that hall through a full service, twice.
Four hundred and eleven children, minus absences, in three sittings, at eleven tables. It is loud and it is fast and a person counting heads in it is a person who will get the wrong number.
So instead of counting children I counted plates coming back to the trolley.
Both times the trolley took one more plate than the till had transactions.
Not a clean plate. A plate that has been eaten off.
What I have done about it, which is bounded by the fact that nothing is wrong.
Nobody is defrauded. The claim we make on public money is the till count, which is the lower number, so the authority pays for four hundred and eleven meals when we have made four hundred and twelve.
The school buys one extra meal a day out of its own budget. Two pounds thirty one at this year's cost, which is about four hundred and forty pounds a year, which is less than we spend on photocopier toner.
I have put it in the budget as a line called kitchen contingency and it has been in there for four years and no governor has ever asked.
The one thing that made me write it down.
In the March we had an inspection of the free school meals process, which is routine and which we passed.
The inspector was a careful woman and she did what a careful person does, which is pick a day at random and reconcile everything for it.
Her working paper has the till count, the register, and the kitchen production, and at the bottom she has written a note querying a variance of one.
I gave her the explanation I give everybody, which is a spare portion, and she wrote it down and moved on and the report says the process is sound.
Then she asked, on the way out, in the way people ask things they have decided not to put in a report, whether we had a child on roll who did not come to the hall.
I said no.
She said her last school had one, and that it took her a while to work out that the extra meal there always went at the second sitting, and then she said goodbye and got in her car.
I did not ask her which school. I have thought about that a great deal.
What I do now is stand at the back for the second sitting on a Friday, which the children think is because I am checking on them, and which the staff think is because I am checking on them.