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School Food To Make The Next Generation Fit For The Future
Rikke Bruntse-Dahl
Food for Life Partnership
At Food for Life Partnership (FFLP) schools, great food is matched by food education, cooking lessons, on-site food growing, visits to local farms and improvements to the dining area.. We learn how the food we eat impacts on our health, the health of our planet and animal welfare by growing it, cooking it, eating it and visiting farms.”
Inspired by famous dinner lady Jeanette Orrey, who also inspired Jamie Oliver to do his school dinner campaign, the Soil Association founded the Food for Life campaign in 2003 to help schools source fresh, local and organic produce and give pupils the chance to visit farms to see how their food is produced.
As the school dinner campaign developed it became increasingly clear that food education was needed to ensure the next generation not only eat well while at school, but also take the principles of a healthy food culture with them into adulthood.
The Soil Association therefore joined forces with three other food-focused charities, Garden Organic, the Focus on Food Campaign and the Health Education Trust and together they formed the Food for Life Partnership, which is funded from 2007 - 2011 through a £16.9 million grant from the Big Lottery Fund Well-being Programme.
The programme works with nearly 3,000 schools to get healthier and more sustainable school dinners on the menu, but also to give children the opportunity to take responsibility for their own health through practical food education like growing, cooking and visiting farms.
At the Food for Life Partnership we are worried that progress made on the school food front over the last years will be quickly unravelled if the government removes protection for the School Lunch Grant. And we are not the only ones who are worried. Caterers and headteachers have told us how concerned they are about the cost-cutting climate in which they now have to operate. In a survey of 30 school catering contractors conducted by the Food for Life Partnership, almost one in eight said removal of the Government’s School Lunch Grant, which was the only “ring-fenced” (protected) money for school food, would have a negative effect on the quality of the service they provide.
Cuts to the school meals service is a false economy. The UK has the highest rate of childhood obesity in Europe and the Government spends more in three days on diabetes, strongly linked with obesity, than it spent on the School Lunch Grant in a year. If a healthy school meal service, linked to good food education, can help reduce the incidence of Type 2 diabetes by just 1% then it will more than pay for itself in savings on diabetes costs alone.
The school catering industry is worth £1.2 billion per year to the UK economy. By buying directly from local suppliers and planning menus well, schools can often save money on ingredients and still invest more in the local economy, protecting or creating local jobs and making savings on clean-up costs for environment.
But, perhaps most importantly, healthy food in school gives children a fair chance to learn and improves behaviour and attainment. Several studies have shown that hungry children behave worst in school, fights and absences are reduced when meals are provided, and school children given nutritional supplements showed less aggression when placed under stress. Evidence linking horticulture with improved wellbeing has found a diverse range of beneficial behavioural outcomes that are likely to influence pupils’ time at school, including lower rates of crime, lower incidence of aggression, greater ability to cope with poverty, better life functioning, greater life satisfaction, and reduced attention deficit symptoms.
Through an awards scheme, the Food for Life Partnership gives schools a framework and guidance on how to link school meals, growing, cooking, farm visits and community engagement. Dedicated teams also offer hands-on support to school staff, who are creating school gardens or cooking clubs; caterers working to improve school meals and farmers who want to host educational visits.
In reality this means that schools who use the Food for Life Partnership programme and progress through Bronze, Silver and Gold will go on a journey to develop all aspects of good food culture within their school and their local community.
When schools reach bronze they serve seasonal school meals that are at least 75% freshly prepared by a well-trained school cook. School meals are a vital education service. By putting fresh, local, seasonal and organic food on the school menu, children get to understand the link between what they learn about healthy eating and what they actually eat. They also grow up with the expectation that food should be freshly prepared and of high quality, which is a crucial step towards creating a sustainable food system.
Pupils and parents are involved in planning improvements to school menus and the dining experience via a School Nutrition Action Group, boosting school meal take-up. Every pupil has the opportunity to visit a farm during his or her time at school, and opportunities are given for cooking and food growing activity.
Growing food organically at school gives pupils the opportunity to learn about where their fruit and vegetables come from. Young people always show far more enthusiasm for eating food that they have grown and nurtured from a seed themselves. As pupils develop their growing skills they will become more aware of fruit and vegetables that can be grown seasonally in this country. And by learning how to garden organically they will begin to respect and appreciate the environment that surrounds them. Food for Life Partnership schools across the country have been amazingly creative with their growing activities. Some grow in pots in any available space, some have dug up parts of the playground or unused areas within the school, while others have taken on allotments.
Schools that achieve the Silver award serve school meals on plates, not flight trays and a range of locally sourced and organic items are served. Serving meals on plates and using real crockery is part of improving the ‘dining room experience’. Jeanette Orrey realised many years ago that improving children’s experience in the dining room is very important in laying the foundation for a good food culture in the future. Along with serving freshly prepared, local, seasonal and organic meals, pleasant surroundings and a focus on manners and developing social skills are setting the scene for a good school food culture.
Silver schools also have cooking clubs, and pupils get to cook with and eat the produce grown in the school growing area.
Cooking is a basic life skill and knowing how to cook a meal from scratch using fresh produce is an absolute necessity to realise a sustainable food future where we can feed ourselves and our families. Besides teaching children an invaluable life skill, cooking in school can easily be linked into the curriculum.
Many Food for Life Partnership schools have organised clubs where parents can join and cook with their children. At this stage parents and the wider community also get involved in food education via food-themed events such as a farmers market at the school.
When schools reach Gold, they are hubs of good food culture in their community, actively involving parents and community groups in cooking and growing activity. One of the most important aspects of the Food for Life Partnership is that the impact is not just felt within the school gates. As Jeanette Orrey says: “Food is so much more powerful than many of us realise and what happens in the school has a huge impact on the local community.” At the heart of their local communities, schools are ideal for spreading good food culture to parents and families and can help re-connect people with their local farmers and food producers.
On top of school meals being freshly prepared they are also 50% local and 30% organic at Gold. Also, more than 70% of pupils are choosing to eat school meals. Every pupil learns to cook and has the opportunity to grow food, and groups of pupils are actively involved in the life of a local farm.
Knowing how food is produced – or could be produced – empowers children to grow up making the right food choices. Besides growing their own organic veg, visiting farms is a superb way of learning about food production. Through the Food for Life Partnership, schools set up a link with a local organic farm, which the pupils visit throughout the year and thereby experience seasonal food production for themselves.
School farm visits help educate future consumers as well as their parents. A recent study by Kingston University found that 54 per cent of parents said they had learned something from their child’s farm visit and that the children’s trips to farms influenced some parents’ consumer behaviour, with 16 per cent of parents saying that they would now be more prepared to change how they chose their food, to buy more local, seasonal or organic products.
The benefits of all this work are immense and varied. Whether the focus is on children’s health, attainment and learning in school, supporting sustainable food and farming systems or giving children, individuals and communities the opportunity to experience the enjoyments that a good food culture create, there is no doubt that it all contributes to a better future of food for us all.
Jeanette Orrey concludes: “We have come a long way to create a wholesome and sustainable food culture within schools and communities, but with Government cutting costs and the rising food and oil prices, we need to work even harder going forwards. We owe it to the future generations.”
All schools can join the Food for Life Partnership for free. To find out more visit www.foodforlife.org.uk
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