It’s Friday morning at Cadoxton Primary in Barry and a group of pupils are busy serving roast dinner and crumble to members of the public. The pay as you can “junk food cafe” serves anything but junk and is just one of many projects run by the school to help the local community in the cost of living crisis.
Cadoxton, which also runs pay as you can food, clothes and uniform shops, as well as a laundrette, has gained international recognition for its work overcoming adversity in its community. It is one of six schools in the UK on the top 10 shortlists for the global T4 Education World’s Best School prizes.
Headteacher Janet Hayward is pleased her school has been shortlisted, but the real prize is seeing the difference it has made to children and their families, she says. She believes the projects have helped pupil attainment not just because of giving them better nutrition, but also by teaching them skills such as cooking, marketing, planning, and communication.
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Above the cheerful chatter of lunch Janet explains the cafe, which uses food donated by local supermarkets, teaches children about sustainability and food distribution as well as providing meals at reasonable prices and putting the school at the centre of its local community.
“This is an educational project about preventing food waste. If a supermarket has a box of cucumbers and one is bad, they can’t sell any of it - those boxes get delivered to us to use and sell.
“Yes, this is an under resourced area of Wales, however it’s about thriving communities coming together.
“I uses the food shop myself. There was a glut of aubergines and peppers donated to us last week so I bought some and made ratatouille.”
Janet and her staff are well aware of the impact of the cost of living crisis on their pupils’ families. Cadoxton Primary began planning the pay as you go shops before the pandemic started.
The shops, run from converted shipping containers, are run by volunteers and open to all members of the local community, whether they have children attending the school or not. The pay as you can cafe, also open to the public, has menus planned, marketed on social media, cooked and served by pupils as part of their curriculum.
Adversity is not just about money though. Cadoxton Primary also uses food to bring families together. Two other projects see parents and carers invited in to cook with their children for “soup and song” sessions, which run weekly for six weeks and a “ready steady cook” project where 10 families come to the school each week to bake small items like biscuits, sausage rolls and cheese wheels together.
Janet is proud of how staff, parents and children have worked together to help one another run the projects and expand them into the community. It has been especially welcome during the cost of living crisis, but she is keen to stress that the shops and cafe are also helping prevent waste.
Every week the Cadog’s Corner pay as you can shop, decorated inside to resemble a farm shop, takes delivery of surplus, or close to use by food which local supermarkets cannot sell. As well as this it gets a weekly delivery from Fair Share in Cardiff, which collects and delivers food from supermarkets further afield.
Llanelli-based independent wholesaler Castell Howard Food also donates stock items like pasta and rice which customers buy by the tub and pay what they can. The shops also sell sanitary items, washing up liquid, detergent and household cleaner.
Adjoining shipping containers house the used clothes and uniform shops, which also sell brand new donated shoes and underwear, while another one operates as the laundrette. The two washing machines and two driers were funded by the union, Unison, after it became clear some people in the school community and beyond were finding it hard to afford the cost of washing and drying laundry.
Unison got involved to help some of education’s lowest paid staff, teaching assistants, many of whom are also struggling to make ends meet with soaring prices, said Janet. Stigma about using any of the shops should not be an issue as all the staff use them and they are as much about preventing waste as saving money, she points out.
Shops which donate food include Marks and Spencer, Waitrose, Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, the Co-op and other small local supermarkets. While stock items come from Castell Howell Food the fun is partly in never knowing what fresh items might be available and what there is a seasonal glut of.
“The children are learning a lot about gut health and how it affects brain health and the link between food, wellbeing and attainment,” says Janet.
“If children make great progress that’s largely because of improved wellbeing. Being a community school is also really important to us, it’s about how we open schools up to be a community facility.”
Cadog’s Corner shop, which opened in 2020 with parents and the school fund raising and applying for grants, now runs as a charity. The school’s chair of governors Megan Merrett is chair of the charity and volunteers who run the shop are all DBS checked.
The shops, laundrette and cafe are all within a fenced off area open at specific times, within and out of the school day. Next to them is a garden where pupils grow vegetables to eat, sell or cook in the cafe.
The year six children who run the cafe on a rota system are keen to explain their roles and offer cups of coffee, taking orders neatly on notepads. Their confidence and enthusiasm is clear as two boys end the lunch session playing the piano.
It’s a good way to end the week, but Janet sounds one note of warning. The school has noticed donations of food are falling.
“We are not getting as much as we used to because of the cost of living and scarcity of food. Because of the war in Ukraine and Brexit supermarkets don’t have the same waste as they used to.”
Which could be a good or a bad thing long term, depending on which way you look at it, and how big your purse is.
Cadoxton Primary has been has been shortlisted among the world’s best for overcoming adversity, alongside a primary school in West Yorkshire in the global 4 Education World’s Best School prize. The winner will be announced in October and the prize is 50,000 US dollars (£40,000).
