“We Hope These Successfully Made the Journey Home”

So that is where the flapjack went. I could have told them. I have been waiting at our front door for Year 7 cookery for six years.

Our eldest, Hugo, started Food Tech in September. Week one was fruit muffins. I cleared a plate. He came home with the empty tin and a description. Week three was pasta salad, eaten at break by a boy who had forgotten his lunch, which I could not object to without sounding like a monster. Week five was flapjack. I bought the oats, the golden syrup and the good butter, £6.40 at the Co-op, and was told at the gate that it had been “sort of shared” in maths.

It is not a new problem. Clare Kirton, remembering Wakefield Girls’ High School in its 2004 magazine, describes being about twelve, with hockey, cookery and a wind instrument all on the same day, putting her luggage on the rack of the service bus, and: “my Lancashire hot pot escaped the wicker cookery basket”. Food has been leaving school by other routes for decades. Some of it under its own steam.

Other families get the food. Carrie, a parent blogger, wrote in June 2026 about a vegetable soup her son had made at school and brought home. She added a bit of milk, found it very tasty, and opened her post with “Sorry I didn’t take a picture.” She did not need a picture. She had soup.

By crumble week I had a plan. I parked outside school at 3.20 with an empty Tupperware, where I could see the side door by the food room. Hugo came out holding the dish in both hands like the FA Cup, saw me, and in the eleven metres between the door and the car was intercepted by three friends, a dinner lady and a boy who had brought his own spoon.

What reached the car was a dish with a crumble-shaped tide mark and one corner left, which he handed over with the pride of a man who had defended it. It was very good. I ate it in the car park before his brother could see, and this time I took a picture. Of the dish.