International School Meals Day – how can schools help?

Today, 11 March, is the ninth International School Meals Day.  We asked Francesca Hogg, from our Poverty Proofing and Participation Team, to give her thoughts on the role schools play in children having access to healthy and nutritious food.

Girl with glass of milk and nutritious food

As we celebrate the ninth International School Meals Day this year, I have been reflecting on the importance of food provision for families living in poverty, findings from our own Poverty Proofing the School Day programme and how schools can play a role in ensuring all children have access to healthy and nutritious food.

The benefits of access to a balanced meal during the school day are well evidenced, and our poverty proofing work has given extensive insight into how schools support their families with food provision.  For example, uptake of school meals is most successful when children and parents have been involved in developing the school lunch menu, through taster days and opportunities to feedback on things such as portion sizes.  Crucially, this also gives children and young people a voice in decision making that impacts them.

Lunchtime is also a vital opportunity for children and young people to socialise with their peers.  Where schools allow pupils receiving school dinners to sit with their friends with a packed lunch, there tends to be high uptake of school dinners and, importantly free school meals, as pupils are not influenced by their peer’s lunch choices.

There are almost 93,000 children in receipt of free school meals in the North East, equating to 23.5% of pupils, making it the highest figure for English regions and compares with an England-wide average of 17.3%.

This leads me on to the importance of free school meal provision and how schools can ensure families are able to take up the support they are entitled to.  Free school meals ensure children have access to a healthy meal at least once a day.  This helps boost their learning, health and wellbeing whilst easing pressures on family budgets to cover other essential living costs.  However, there is a lot of stigma associated with free school meals.  This means, despite being entitled to a free school meal, many families do not take up this offer.  To ensure families can benefit from this support, regular communication around free school meal provision is essential as family circumstances can change throughout the school year.  Any communication must be poverty sensitive and use a range of methods such as newsletters, texts, social media and face to face.

Having a member of staff in school who can support families in applying for free school meals is also hugely beneficial and can help remove barriers to the application process.

The way in which the free school meal allowance is administered can also make access to food easier.  For example, enabling pupils to spend their allowance at breakfast time or morning break gives children and young people flexibility and choice.  This is particularly important for children who may not have been able to eat breakfast before coming to school.  Finally, allowing unspent daily free school meal allowances to roll over allows students to use it on a day when they need a bit of extra food, and means they aren’t losing out if they attend extra-curricular activities during lunchtime.

So my ask to schools on this International School Meals Day is to reflect on your food provision policies and practices, celebrate what you are doing well and consider what opportunities there are to develop your practices further.

For more information and advice about how your school can address poverty in the classroom, we have recently published the ‘Turning the Page on Poverty’ resource in collaboration with the National Education Union and Child Poverty Action Group.

DOWNLOAD TURNING THE PAGE ON POVERTY