No standard dietary prescribed for school

No standard dietary prescribed for school

The Department of School Education had taken several initiatives to improve School Feeding Programme (SEP) and also to improve the nutritional status of the boarding schoolchildren.
The department introduced centralized procurement of essential food items to improve the quality, attain higher economic of scale, timely delivery of food to schools, ensure uniform nutritional quality, ease burden of procurement on school management.
Despite these positive contributions of SFP and the initiative of the Ministry of Education, Schoolchildren are not eating healthy food, according to the Royal Audit Authority’s (RAA) performance report 2016 on the school-feeding programme in 16 schools.
The RAA observed that there was no standard dietary requirement prescribed for school going children because of which, the schools cannot ensure that the daily nutrient intakes as per the standard ration scale developed by the MoE meet the requirements.
There was lack of systematic monitoring system to review and ascertain the micronutrient deficiencies among schoolchildren in the country. “School menus did not include variety of foods and the menu cycle was repeated day in and out throughout the academic year,” the report stated.
The schools had developed ‘just one option’ menu, which did not include a wide variety of foods. “The menu was repeated throughout the year discouraging children from eating and thus, reducing intake of nutrients,” the audit team noted.
The food prepared in visited schools seem to be unpalatable and unappetizing discouraging students to eat the right portion and resulting in less intakes of nutrients.
Food commodity reports submitted by schools to the Ministry were not used effectively for preparing food release note for the food items. This was resulted in ordering surplus or short quantities of food items required by the schools. The audit team noted that surplus orders would lead to spoilage and wastage of resources.
“Short orders would result in depriving schoolchildren of getting adequate quantity of nutrients” the audit team noted. “inadequate leading to spoilage of vegetables with less shelf-lives thereby resulting in wastage as well as depriving schoolchildren of getting good diets or nutrition.”
Meanwhile the introduction of fortified rice on pilot basis by World Food Programme (WFP) in some schools is also expected to address the nutrient deficiencies to certain extent, the RAA recommended the education ministry to develop a minimum dietary requirement standard for students besides instituting a strong monitoring and inspection mechanism to ensure that all schools comply with the standard.
The RAA stated that an effective mechanism for monitoring nutritional status should be implemented so that appropriate preventive measures can be taken in case of micronutrient deficiencies such as periphery neuropathy or hidden hunger.
The audit team found that schools did not check the quality of food commodities when receiving deliveries from the Food Corporation of Bhutan, although the MoU with FCB clearly stipulates schools to inspect commodities for damages and infestations.
RAA found that the school managements only verified physical quantities through manual counting, as they did not have the capacity or means to check the quality of food commodities delivered. This led to accepting poor quality food items infested by rice weevils particularly lentil. For instance, both Monggar Higher Secondary School (MHSS) and Kengkhar Lower Secondary School (KLSS) had received some damaged or spoiled stock of pulses (dal), which were infested with rice weevil, during the month of June and July 2016
In MHSS, the RAA found that the schools. Mess team has separated infested food items from other food items but in KLSS, the pulses were stored in the same place and this in turn has infected other food items as well. In order to ensure good quality of food commodities supplied to schools, the audit team recommended that the school education department should institute a strong quality control system in school feeding by involving BAFRA as an independent assessor. Food Commodity Reports submitted by schools to the ministry were not used effectively for preparing food release note for the supply of food items.
This resulted in ordering surplus or short quantities of food items required by the schools. Surplus orders would lead to spoilage and wastage of resources. Short orders would result in depriving schoolchildren of getting adequate quantity of nutrients.