It brings together 30 social groups, trade unions and educators who have been working for six years by school canteens that are "healthier, closer, fairer and more educational". The communication note of the meetings recalled the situation of the subject: a commission of inquiry was set up for fraud in the competition of catering companies and an agreement was reached in the Basque Parliament in October 2019: "We believe that we are in a new phase that requires concrete, forceful and real steps.

What does the parliamentary agreement of 24 October 2019 say?

According to EHIGE, "under this agreement, the school canteen management system needs changes and improvements in procurement, transparency and control procedures. In this agreement, the Basque Parliament also urged the Basque Government to lay the foundations for a complementary system so that centres that are committed to innovative and decentralised management can have viable opportunities". The key to this is that, in recent years, it has been the government that has managed all school canteens directly, and that the result is that the services it brings to public competition are provided through large catering companies, instead of hiring local producers and workers, and that every school community decides what it is going to eat in its own dining room.

According to EHIGE, in October 2019 the Basque Parliament called on the Basque Government to "build kitchens in the centres that so requested, as well as to establish an information process to compare the new technical bases of the contract documents of the school catering service and, with all this, to rewrite the current regulations".

Real and feasible proposals

EHIGE welcomes the path being opened year after year: "All the work done in recent years and the small advances made have led to a lot of tiny strands that are becoming a real and feasible proposal in many regions of the Basque Country. Over the past few weeks, many people have contacted the organizations that make up Ensure Platera Ensure Aukera to request information about school canteens. They have begun to take steps with the objective of creating a new and feasible management model for the school dining room. All these initiatives have emerged differently, but all of them aim to achieve a healthier, closer, equitable and educational school canteen, and to this end, different synergies have been created in so many other sectors".

27 March Meeting

The meeting will take place on 27 March, online, at 10:30 a.m. You need to register here.