John Curtin College of the Arts

LOCATION: Fremantle CLASSIFICATION: Senior High school TYPE OF SCHOOL: Independent Public School STUDENT POPULATION: 1700 DAYS OF OPERATION: Five days per week -  breakfast, recess & lunch

SCHOOL PROFILE Contact: Gitte Heij 

(P&C)

STORY: John Curtin College of the Arts provides a food service for the 1700 students at the school as well as providing lunches to the nearby East Fremantle Primary School. We also provide catering for College events and other surrounding schools.

Many of our students travel for long periods to attend school. On their travels they have the opportunity to purchase food at outlets in Fremantle. It has been a challenge for us to develop ways to be a viable food retail alternative for students providing healthy food at affordable prices. What we have found is that a healthy menu sets us apart from our competitors.  

Over the last two years we transformed our school canteen to a healthy food service ready for the future. We had lots of help during this change process. For example:

Received training and a thorough review from the WA School Canteen Association Inc (WASCA) We made time to visit the Applecross Senior High School canteen to learn from their experiences, this was a great learning curve for us. Menu review resulting in a new healthy menu that is fully compliant with the Healthy Food and Drink policy We introduced online ordering which is very popular with students and parents (we have over 1200 students registered). All lunches for East Fremantle Primary School are ordered online, so the days of counting coins in brown envelopes are gone A thorough review of the finances was undertaken, particularly our cost of sales and our menu prices  We shopped around for new suppliers and explored options for free display fridges and other displays Our fabulous canteen manager Sue runs our online accounting program so we always know how the canteen is performing The cheque books went in the bin as we moved to online banking Finally a refurbishment of our canteen made it a much nicer and better place to work and serve our customers. We could not have done this without the help of the school and the Department of Education.

The refurbished canteenThe old dated canteen

TAKE HOME MESSAGES: 1. Change is hard but rewarding 2. Embrace new technology, it makes life easier 3. Listen to advice from those who have walked the talk.                                                                                                                                                                                         

SCHOOL COMMUNITY LINKS:  We realised that our Human Resource (HR) practices were in need of an overhaul; with the help of an external HR consultant we are now up to date. Our volunteers now use an online program to let us know when they are available and will come in to assist our team.

Staff and volunteers are the backbone of our canteen, we are very proud to have such a fantastic team that joined us on the journey and embraced some challenging changes.

Using Survey Monkey we discovered much about our student customers, what they want and who uses our canteen the most. We introduced more vegan food items (our vegan soups in winter are our best selling products). Students asked for gluten free food, more variety, and if we could serve hot drinks throughout the day, we listened and we responded. 

                                  Published August 2017

MORE INFORMATION:                                                   For the Spicy lentil and kale soup see the recipe section of the WASCA website.

Subscribe to the WASCA YouTube Channel to see the amazing video from John Curtin outlining all the steps taken to achieve positive change.