Once you have a clear idea of what you should be expecting from your contractor, then you can get down to the detail of the service.
The two key areas to consider as part of your monitoring: review meetings and financial performance.
Review meetings (formal and informal)
As with cleaning services, these are the meetings that you hold with the off-site mangers: area managers or operations managers for example, rather than on-site team leaders.
As part of your informal meetings there should be regular and ongoing communication with these staff members. If they don’t keep in contact, please make sure you get in touch with them to build the relationship. These are the people that you will need to work with if there are any issues with the performance of the contract, so it is worth taking the time to get to know them a little. Ideally they will be visiting your school(s) regularly, to spot check the catering service and menu, taste the food, and check on compliance (e.g. food safety) as well as to check in with their staff as part of their line management duties. This is a good time to have a quick informal meeting to discuss how things are going. These more informal meetings will help ensure any little niggles with service can be addressed early.
See our final blog post in this series for information on formal review meetings.
Financial performance
As part of your role as School Business Manager or equivalent, you are responsible for your school or Trust’s budget, and so financial monitoring of your catering service is crucial to ensure that you are getting what you are paying for.
There are several things to make sure you know about your contract:
- Do you have a copy of your catering budget? If not, you can request this from your catering provider. They should be able to provide you with a ‘phased’ budget, one that is broken down into a monthly forecast, including sales, cost of sales, management fee etc. This should be based on the number of trading days for your particular school.
- What elements are fixed? Are you expecting a guaranteed subsidy or return? Do you get a profit share of any betterment budget?
- Is your contractor providing you supporting data to back up your monthly invoices? This should ideally be a Profit and Loss or monthly Budget versus Actual (BvA) report which you can directly compare to your phased budget, allowing you to review how the contract is performing.
Taking the time to properly review the financial performance could help highlight the following potential issues:
- Unnecessary agency labour – this will quickly erode any profits
- Overspend on fixed costs per head
- High costs (were you expecting lobster rolls and caviar as part of the menu?!)
- Low sales and/or low uptake of Free School Meals
- Incorrect invoicing (e.g. invoicing more FSM than there are pupils receiving them)
