Food Company joins in the commercial Rat Race
The multinational company Unilever, who in the past brought such dubious school schemes as Domestos “Germcatcher”, have now imported a scheme they run in the UK to Ireland.
Computers, Sports, cooking…What next?
The Flora Cooking with Schools Scheme, which claims to “help put healthy eating at the
heart of the
classroom”, offers ‘free’ cooking
equipment, when a school convinces the pupils in their care to buy their product- Flora and collect the proof of purchase tokens. In fact according to their brochure “…its easy to see the benefits. For example, if there are 250 children in your school and every family collects tokens from just one medium sized pack, your school will have €150 to spend on food technology equipment”.
Parents pay their taxes to fund schools and pay for teaching time, not turn our country’s classrooms into marketing bazaar for multinationals to tout their wares. Enough is enough! The minister needs to step to the proverbial plate and ban this nonsense from schools.
To see the scheme for yourself visit: http://www.cookingwithschools.com/
To register your disgust with the Minister for Education, email: minister_hanafin@education.gov.ie
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Addition to the above:
You are welcome to copy and paste this letter/email to send to the minister:
Dear Minister,
I am writing to you as a concerned teacher/parent/citizen.
I am appalled at the amount of marketing that is taking place in our schools.
Every week it seems there is something else being promoted: if it is not SuperVau pretending to care about our schools’ lack of sports equipment (sports equipment that your department are supposed to be providing), then it’s Tesco pretending to provide free computers (I say pretending because customers have to spend over a quarter of a million in Tesco to get a computer for a school- and again, this is equipment that your department is supposed to be providing); and if it’s not Tesco, it’s Flora (the latest) pretending to give free cooking equipment (and, yes, again, this is equipment that your department is supposed to be providing).
It is a terrible state to have our schools so under-resourced that students/parents/teachers/schools are being asked to accept these marketing scams as if they were philanthropic endeavours.
Can you please do something about this?
Regards,