Doughnut Wars!

A primary school which refused a healthy free milk scheme is instead flogging its pupils fattening doughnuts in the playground.

*GASP* Call the ….well, who?

Cuddington Croft Primary School has already sold sugary Krispy Kreme doughnuts twice this year to children…

Hang on! Eating doughnuts (even those ghastly Yankee things) twice a year is hardly likely to be perpetuating the obesity ‘crisis’, is it?

… in an attempt to raise funds for school projects. Meanwhile, the school opts out of a European Community subsidy scheme to offer under-fives free milk, needed for healthy bones and teeth.

Oh noes! How can it possibly turn down an EU directive!

Astonished parents claimed the doughnut sale could encourage vulnerable children to buy more and increased the risk of obesity.

Note that the term ‘parents’ is used – however, it seems to be just one that has a bee in her bonnet about this.

Paula Dolijanin, a health visitor, of Cheam, said the school’s inconsistent stance on healthy eating confused young minds.

Oh?

The mother-of-three said: “Young children are vulnerable to such organisations through daily life, but I find it unacceptable that these organisations are welcomed into a position of trust inside school grounds. “They are allowing Krispy Kreme to push their product in the school at the expense of children’s health, but yet it doesn’t offer milk, which is good for healthy bones and teeth. “It’s sending mixed messages to children.”

Oh, boy! One of those.

A school spokesman said the provision of milk was not viewed as a priority because of “significant disadvantages in relation to the logistics, administration, storage and distribution of the milk including the implications of spillage during warm weather”. He said the school had examined the provision of free milk and felt while there were “marginal benefits” , the disadvantages “would have diverted valuable staff time away from the provision of a broad and balanced curriculum in other areas”.

They’ve clearly had run-ins with this woman before:

The spokesman said: “We are more certain, however, that the vast majority of parents at the school believe they should have free choice as to what they will and will not buy.”

Ouch! In the comments, the battle rages:

Twopenneth says...

A rather hysterical article I think!! The "Health Visitor" mentioned is a parent whose name I have seen bandied around on whinging correspondence before!! Just don't buy the Donuts if you don't want your kids to eat them - everything in moderation I think. How many other Primary schools in the area have a swimming pool where all the children (including the 3 year olds in the nursery) have weekly lessons? I don't know of any others. Cuddington Croft is great at promoting physical exercise and healthy living and is a fantastic school. I think us parents can ensure our under 5's get the calcium they need too without having to be provided with it and as the school points out, the kids get free fruit which I know is very popular.

Oooh, controversial! We can’t put Ms Dolijanin out of a job now, can we? She does have at least one supporter:

healthyeater says...

I am astounded at the negative response to such apparently obvious issues. The provision of milk to young children was a decision taken by health care professionals. What authority or qualification does a local school head have to override such a decision? Children are a blank canvas - if you tell them fruit is a treat then they will want fruit. If you tell them donuts are a treat then they will want donuts. It is not difficult to see that companies such as the one described are exploiting children in what should be a safe environment. They want children to consider donuts a treat so they keep buying them - otherwise known as a loss leader.... If the donuts are for the mothers as stated above, then why not provide them for the mothers in an environment where the mothers are able to make an informed decision…..maybe at the gym….so they can work off the 200 Calories before it causes them any serious health issues – that will be 30 minutes on the cross trainer per donut!! Education is not something which should be taken so lightly. We need to give our children the best start possible and protect them from those who either too ignorant or too lazy to resolve such situations themselves. I praise the efforts of the "Bully" parent you mention. Without such people, teachers might still be selling Coka Cola in the hallways, smoking at the school gate, and beating children with canes. Society needs people who are prepared to fight for what is right and not hide behind the established norms.

And with that, the blue touchpaper is lit!

mumster says...

In response to the post by 'healthy eater' Cheam (who in most of the Mum's opinions is actually Paula Dolijanin, the health visitor, of Cheam quoted in the article!) I am a Cuddington Croft Mum who regularly chooses to eat Krispy Kremes & buys them for her children but still adopts a healthy lifestyle so we really don't need someone like you telling us we should be buying our donuts at the gym to burn off 200 calories! Get off your high horse & do something useful for our school instead of whingeing please. Whilst there are ongoing major concerns about the safety of our children as a result of the recent attacks in the area, you and the Guardian should be more concerned about protecting our children from strangers rather than Kripsy Kremes.

Safer, clearly, to get between an angry grizzly sow and its cub than between a Cheam parent and the Krispy Kremes!

mumster says...

I wonder which stall Paula is volunteering to help on at the PTA Summer Fair at Cuddington Croft tomorrow? Presumably the salad bar?

Ouch! Miaow!

Someone purporting to be the lady herself shows up in the comments. I suspect it really is her, as the insufferable sense of righteousness dowse tend to give it away:

Paula Doljanin says...

There seems to be some confusion after the recent publication of my comments in the Guardian and although I feel it is necessary to clear up some basic facts. I believe the school is generally a good school and recognise their achievement in attaining good inspection results. I appreciate all the efforts made by the school in provision of fruit and the focus on healthy lifestyles in PSHE. I also realise there are a number of issues at the school which are being discussed at the moment such as the issues with Mrs Flynn, the security concerns and the high staff turnover. Please realise that I am a Health Visitor and so, my professional interest is in all health related issues. I have discussed the staff issues with many people and feel that issue is being progressed at the right levels. I have discussed the security issues with Surrey Police and believe they have that under control. I have chosen to focus on those issues where I can offer the most assistance to the school. These are the hygiene of the toilet facilities, the provision of drinking water in the toilet facility, the provision of milk (as provided under the European School Milk Scheme) and the impact that eating habits will have on Children's long term health. When dealing with issue at any school, there is a simple process you should follow. Initially, it should be raised with a teacher. If unresolved then you should raise it with the Head. If still unresolved to your satisfaction then you should go to the Board of Governors. I have followed this course regarding the European School Milk Scheme and I am still unhappy with the outcome. As such, I have raised the issue of the School Milk and the donuts with the Surrey Council, the District Councillors - Nigel Petrie (also a Governor) & Christine Howells and our County Councillor - David Wood. I will continue to raise this with professionals in this aspect of Child Health until I feel I have received a reasonable outcome. When evaluating the long term benefits of milk, it is simply not good enough to say that it is too difficult. When contacted by the Guardian, I gave my opinion regarding the doughnuts and the milk and also raised a lot of positive points about the school. I did not see the final story before it went to print and had no say in which comments I would be quoted on. In any case, I am happy to stand by my comments and have not acted under any pseudonym when stating my case. I am prepared to state my beliefs and be judged accordingly. I can understand why some others have used that approach when stating that allowing corporations into schools is acceptable. The House of Commons Health Committee published a report on Obesity in 2004. This can be found at: http://www.publicati ons.parliament.uk/pa /cm200304/cmselect/c mhealth/23/23.pdf. For ease I have copied the following statements for your review.

 (Ed: huge wall-o-text snipped for brevity – you can read it at the original comment if you really want to)

Against the reports recommendations, the Government has set this as an issue for local determination so it is the responsibility of all parents to make their views known. I believe parents should make an informed decision so please review the House of Commons Health Committee report and make your opinion known. The school dinners should also be reviewed and I have not yet looked into them with sufficient detail to form an opinion. The point here is not about freedom of choice - if you want doughnuts.....buy them at Tesco, Waitrose, Asda, Morrison's or Sainsbury along with your alcohol, cigarettes and ****. If you think it is worth saving a few dollars (Ed: Huh? Wrong currency, love!)now at the risk of your (and my) Children's health then that is your right but please do not think I will stand by and allow that to happen without voicing my opinion. Finally, the PTA did a great job today. The school fair was enjoyed by all of our family. We caught up with lots of parents and made good use of the bouncy castle. We did not have any fairy floss or doughnuts but stuck to the home made cakes and soft serve ice cream - I don't believe their was any impact on our level of enjoyment! I am happy to discuss this further.

Got that? Good!

The increasing irritation with this dogmatic, ‘I know best!’ approach is clearly getting on the parent's tits:

astonished2 says...

Unfortunately all i read then was..blah blah blah!!When you start hiding behind tedious quotes people stop listening. Its interesting that this parent has taken her issues so far and yet nothing has changed? Is it actually because this whole thing has been blown out of all rational propotion? I am interested to know whether this parent lets her children have birthday cake at their birthdays or at their friends birthdays..or is that banned ? Isn`t this about the old adage...everything in moderation. Please do not assume other parents are not as caring or concerned about their children as you are. We are all intelligent, articulate people who can make sensible decisions for our children without the forceful input of a ` health visitor`. I am so glad you were not my children`s health visitor as I would probably have found you pushy ,forceful and actually rather intimidating. Your professional role should be to monitor and offer guidance to new parents...not ram your views down people`s throats and make them feel inadequate for allowing their children an occasional treat.`

Well, well, well. Ms Dolijanin certainly knows how to make friends, doesn't she?

I would tell her you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but she’d probably claim honey had too many calories…

So, Leads Are The Answer, Eh?

Yes, it’s the perennial cry of the comment-column and letter-page denizens of all local newspaper stories about dog attacks. If only we have laws demanding all dogs were leashed in public, all would be well.

Well…

A pensioner has told of his horror after being dragged to the floor by a dog while trying to save his puppy from its jaws. Barry Craig, 67, of Diana Close, Alverstoke was walking his five-month-old pedigree puppy at Queens Parade shops, off Privett Road, when another dog, which he believes was a Staffordshire bull terrier cross, attacked.

They were both on leads. Little good it did.

A police spokesperson said that as the other dog was on a lead, no further action will be taken by police.

If it had launched itself at a police dog, I wonder if they’d have taken the same view?

Mr Craig is unhappy that the other owner could do little to stop the attack. He said: ‘What’s the point of having a dog on a lead if you can’t control it?’

Well, indeed…

Meanwhile, in Chesterfield:

A woman was knocked out when she fell from a panic-stricken horse being attacked by a dog, Chesterfield magistrates heard.

What sort of dog? Ah. Well…

. Elizabeth Christian was riding along a bridlepath at Broadmeadows, South Normanton on June 16 when the horse panicked as a Staffordshire bull terrier-labrador cross, ignored calls from its owner and snapped at the horse…The horse suffered puncture wounds and bites. Clarke, 36, told police the 18-month-old rescue dog had slipped its lead.

/facepalm

Here, police weren't so reluctant to put the case before a magistrate, for which they should be praised, though it did little good:

JPs decided not to have the dog destroyed, but ordered it must be kept muzzled and on a lead in public areas for two years…The dog control order was applied to both Clarke and his wife, Terri-Marie Clarke, after Mr Bloore said the couple had separated since the incident and the dog lived with her.

Unless she’s built like Fatima Whitbred, how is she any more likely to be able to control it?

And what do these incidents both have in common? Powerful dogs with unsuitable temperaments and incompetent owners, on leads that proved totally ineffective as a result.

So slapping total blanket legislation on all dog owners is unlikely to be the answer. But I’ll bet it’s the one that’s eventually put in place!

How The State Tricks You…

Meg Henderson on the changing face of adoption:

In 2003, the Guardian published an account of my family's experiences of the adoption system. We had fostered Louise when she was two and a half, and adopted her five years later, still optimistic – despite the hell we had lived through already – that all would end up happily. In the early years, she smeared herself with excreta, picked wounds in herself until she bled, attacked anything that moved, and screamed day and night. We told social services that we would not knowingly take a child with learning disabilities because we didn't think we could cope, but we were told Louise was suffering from emotional deprivation, and all she needed was tender, loving care.

You see, social services deliberately - and with malice aforethought - lied to her.

Back then we were naive and didn't understand the rules. For instance, if we wouldn't "knowingly" take a child with learning disabilities, they just wouldn't tell us.

Yes, it’s still lying if you do it by omission.

What they also failed to pass on was that she had brain damage from having been battered and had a family history of mental illness.

Quite a different kettle of fish, then, from a child with ‘emotional deprivation’?

The people at social services laughed when we wondered if Louise might have learning disabilities and by the time this became too apparent to deny, Louise was our child. That is what social services count on: if the child can be kept with you long enough, you will not want to give her/him up.

Just read that again. Blood chilling in it’s calculatedness, isn’t it?

I wrote the 2003 article in response to a surge of adverts featuring celebrities encouraging people to adopt smiling, but needy, children. Tony Blair was in office, feverishly burnishing his public image by volunteering as patron saint and saviour of little children.

And what’s changed? Well, as you might expect, just the faces…

What has changed since 2003? Well, David Cameron has assumed the mantle of patron saint and saviour of little children, abetted by Michael Gove, who was himself adopted as a baby. What they are ignoring is that adoption has changed from what they think it ever was.

Given the way our society has changed (in many ways, not for the better) it’d be amazing if it hadn’t.

For a start, there were never any well brought-up little orphans looking for loving parents. What we had were unmarried mothers who couldn't afford to raise children alone – though many did – and couldn't take the embarrassment and stigma of bearing an illegitimate child. But times have changed. Unmarried mothers are now single parents who have financial support from the state and there is no stigma these days – the "illegitimate" label that once marked children from cradle to grave has gone, and rightly so. What this means is that mothers are far more likely to keep their babies and there are virtually none available for adoption, so couples are encouraged to look at older children instead. And thereby a can of worms opens up.

Because if people can’t be ‘encouraged’ without being flat-out lied to, well, so what? They can hardly go to the Advertising Standards Authority, or the council’s Trading Standards team, can they?

The children available for adoption these days have often been removed from parents who have mental health, drug and alcohol problems. They have most likely been left with those parents until the bitter end because the state believes that children do better with their own parents. By the time these children are removed, they are already damaged by years of neglect and abuse. They are no longer children in need of an ordinary family; in fact often that is the last thing they can cope with, and they are the last thing an ordinary family can cope with.

But, to the adoption agencies, all that matters is getting them off the books. They have targets for that.

And they’ll hit those targets by any means possible…

But one thing that has changed since 2005 is that adopters are increasingly prepared to fight back. Social services are destroying marriages and lives, trying to get problem children off their books. It feels as though they will use any means, and that legal action against the local authorities concerned is the only thing that might stop them.

Except…they have shedloads of taxpayer cash to fight with. And adoptive parents rarely do.

Oh, Just Make It STOP!!!!

…Bear Grylls will now fall foul of new guidelines from the Scout Association, which has banned all nicknames in a bid to reduce bullying among its young members.

The organisation founded by Lord 'B-P' Baden-Powell believes that giving children nicknames could encourage taunting and bullying.

The organisation founded by Lord Baden-Powell has clearly gone as mad as almost every other organisation the nannying ninnies have managed to infest…

Training sessions are being offered to new and current leaders, who have also been warned not to use the shortening technique amongst themselves.

I do like the word ‘offered’. I suspect it’s the offer you can’t refuse, if you want to be a new or current leader…

It is particularly concerned aboutthe use of nicknames which focus on an individual’s physical characteristics – such as their hair colour, height or weight.

And who is responsible for this outbreak of cretinism? Step forward, ‘Barmy’ Sam Marks.

Oh, sorry, was that offensive? So sad, too bad…

The association’s chief 'safeguarding' officer Sam Marks drew up the plans. He told Scouting Magazine: 'Bullying can advance gradually and can start with something as simple as a nickname.

'Research and experience all highlight that name calling – whether it be nicknames or harmless taunting – is often the largest form of bullying.'

Brilliant! So, to reduce the risk of bullying, we ban nicknames! What a genius plan! That one's up there with blaming the victim...

I mean, never mind intent. That’s hard to prove. No, the ‘new and current leaders of the Scout movement’ can’t be expected to make judgement calls. They need firm, clear, black and white guidelines.

'We don’t have a black and white list of approved nicknames. 'If someone is called Frederick and you call them Freddie then there is no problem with that.

'But you need to ask why that person has a nickname – if it is because they have red hair or are fat or they have a funny face, or because they did something funny and it stuck with them? They might be quite embarrassed by that.'

Well, how about you ask them? And if they don’t mind, why should you?

Mr Marks continued: 'It is in response to industry standards – all the anti-bullying work mentions name calling and teasing as the main form of bullying.'

Translation: ‘ I've read all the stuff pumped out by the fakecharities and I don’t understand half of it, but my job depends on me coming up with a policy, so I've come up with one. Whew!! Earned my salary there!’

'It is about getting the adults to think about their behaviour and how they are role models, because what they do, the children may do. 'If adults don’t use nicknames then the children are less likely to do so.'

Yes, children will always do just what adults do. It’s the way of the world, right?

If It’s Not ‘Serving The Needs Of Local Residents’…

…just who is it serving?

Trojka, known as the Russian tea rooms, closed down a fortnight ago after owner Sophia Szymankiewicz was faced with paying a 70 per cent increase in the cost of a new lease. The Regent’s Park Road café had become a local institution since Ms Szymankiewicz founded it in 1992, but she says the street has now changed and established businesses are being driven out by a new wave of expensive cafés.

“Camden High Street is now all coffee and food places and Regent’s Park Road is going that way too,” she said.

Places change. That’s not news. Areas that were once little hotspots for books, or records, or fashion, change. Other shops move in.

The new owners don’t even plan to change the business all that much – it’ll still be a café:

The lease is being taken over by Morfudd Richards who has renamed it the Greenberry Café and plans to sell coffees, charcuterie and ice-cream.

But other businesses say there are too many cafés and warned that the area’s diversity is being eroded.

If there really were ‘too many cafes’, then there’d be no point in people opening them – there is such a thing as ‘market saturation’.

And hey, it's not like they are that dreaded modern scourge, Costa Coffee!

Peter Haxton, who opened the Sesame health food in 1983, is closing next month after he realised he was facing a tripling of his rent. He said: “I’ve had a very kind landlord who has kept my rent below market value for years but he can’t keep doing that and I can’t afford to pay that much more. When I first opened up there was huge diversity on this street — lots of different quirky shops and only one café. That’s all changed now and it’s a terrible shame.

This road is no longer serving the needs of local residents; it’s all about expensive cafés for the people who come in at weekends — but will they still come when there’s nothing but cafés to look at?”

I find it very hard to believe that a shop can take in enough revenue on two days of the week to offset the other five making a loss. Can that really be the case?

Amit Jain, who runs the long-established Shepherd’s café, estimates that one in three businesses on the street is now selling food and drink.

He said: “I don’t think people realise that soon Primrose village will be café village.

“The yummy mummies just want somewhere to settle their prams and have a mummies’ meeting, so anywhere with coffee and a table is in demand.”

Well….you seem to have just such a place, so why are you complaining?

But new café owners hit back at the criticism. Natalie Allen has been running her cake company, Sweet Things, for seven years and opened her offshoot shop and café in Regent’s Park Road 10 months ago.

She said: “Everyone is being very negative but people wouldn't open a café if they didn't think the demand was there. We have just taken on more employees, so we are contributing to the local economy. And I hate this phrase ‘yummy mummy’ — I'm a mum of two but I'm running a business too.”

In business, as in life, there are winners and losers. What we are hearing here is the whining of the (imminent) losers.