News & Views

In the intricate tapestry of independent school management, operational efficiency stands as a cornerstone for sustainable success. While academic excellence remains paramount, the intricate workings of essential services like catering and cleaning contracts significantly impact the overall school environment. In the United Kingdom, Red Box Consultancy Services Ltd. emerges as a key ally for independent schools, specialising in negotiating, improving, and cost-saving on these critical contracts, thus ensuring an environment conducive to learning and growth.

Red Box can provide the expertise and support fully integrated facility management to ensure the catering service and facilities management services within your schools achieve high standards. So how do we do this?

Food within the independent school marketplace is a cornerstone for parents and pupils. With a focus on nutrition, sporting endurance, welfare and mental health all being attributed to a catering service within your prospectus, the advice from Red Box would be to ensure your dining experience is a positive one. Are you at a crossroads in determining if your facilities should take these services in-house or to outsource? Red Box summarises the two positions.

 We are pleased to announce we’re now listed on the Independent Schools'​ Bursars Association!

COVID-19 has changed everyone's view of what is important. It has renewed the importance of supporting local businesses, communities and everyday heroes. It has also reinforced the importance of trust and perhaps most importantly, it has particularly affected young people. As schools begin to fully reopen, the risks are being looked at through a magnifying glass.

Clients often tell us that the contract monitoring service we provide, saves them a lot of time and effort in ensuring standards remain in place during the life of the contract, meal numbers are maintained, and the catering continues to develop.  Really it keeps the contractor on their toes!

As September rolls in, and welcomes with it another school year, we here at Red Box can’t help but think about all our clients within the education industry. Having worked with many schools, academies and universities to produce diverse and sustainable catering solutions, the recent discussions about food waste at schools has got us thinking. 

Free School Meals entitlement is changing and there is some debate whether this will help or hinder thousands of families by 2022.

Yorkshireman and state school chef Steve Ashburn believes schools should put more of an emphasis on sourcing quality, seasonal ingredients from local producers. At Rosset school in Harrogate, this is exactly what he is doing.

New research from the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) has found that one in ten 14-16-year-olds believe tomatoes grow underground, and a quarter of primary school children believe that cheese comes from a plant.