A pilot project shows promise in a new approach to enforcing requirements for food served in schools, but campaigners want to see greater ambition. By Nick Hughes.
School food has come a long way since Jamie Oliver first alerted the nation to the horrors of the turkey twizzler back in 2005.
When Leon co-founders Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent published their independent school food plan eight years later, they remarked upon “a clear, measurable improvement in the nutritional quality of most school food, and a reduction in junk foods”, since Oliver first began his crusade to ensure that beige, bland school meals were consigned to the dustbin of history (or preferably the food waste bin).
The following year, the UK Government introduced ‘The requirements for school food regulations 2014’, which set standards for the food provided to children in government-maintained primary and secondary schools in England with the aim of helping children develop healthy eating habits.
Yet – much as with the government’s own buying standards for public sector food – doubts have always existed over the extent to which school food standards are actually being met in the absence of a strict monitoring and enforcement regime.
Enter the Department for Levelling Up (remember that?) which in 2022 published a levelling up whitepaper that included a commitment to develop a new approach to assessing compliance with school food standards. In a rare example of a levelling up policy actually being delivered, the Department for Education and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) subsequently developed a pilot with 18 local authorities in England to see if food safety officers (FSOs) could carry out school food standards checks as part of their regular hygiene inspections.
Two years later the results are in – and they are mixed. The final report found that FSOs could indeed conduct additional school food standards checks alongside their food hygiene inspections with many finding them straightforward to administer. Schools, meanwhile, reported they were happy to facilitate the checks which, in some cases, prompted them to review their school food provision.
Meaty challenges
So far so positive. However, the pilot also identified challenges with the new system, including added pressure on the workload of FSOs, inconsistency in the extent to which schools acted to address reported instances of potential non-compliance, issues with communication between local authorities, schools and caterers especially when following up issues of potential non-compliance, and challenges over accountability for adherence to the standards.
There were more specific challenges too, including inconsistencies over how local authorities defined particular foods such as ‘meat products’ when applying the checks. The school food standards require that a portion of meat or poultry must be provided on three or more days every week, however meat products, including processed meats like sausages and chicken nuggets, must not be provided more than once each week in primary schools and twice each week in secondary schools. While some FSOs understood this to include only processed meat, others included all meat products when counting instances on menus (the exact definition is detailed at length in separate legislation).
The results of the pilot also come with an important caveat: participating local authorities opted into the pilot voluntarily and so may have had more resource, expertise and engagement with school food in comparison to other local authorities in England.
FSA chair Susan Jebb described the pilot as “a step in the right direction” but said more work is needed if action is to happen to enable improvement. “For example, it was not always clear to food safety officers during the pilot who they should share the outcome of the check with, and who was expected to take action,” said Jebb. “Pressures on local authority resources mean they are limited in how they can assist schools to resolve issues of non-compliance,” she added.
The report made several recommendations to improve on the pilot. These included creating a standardised follow-up process following instances of potential non-compliance. This would not prescribe exactly how a follow-up should happen locally since structures and relationships between teams vary widely between different local authorities; rather it would focus on the outcomes that should be targeted whilst leaving some flexibility to adopt local approaches.
Another recommendation is to target checks in schools where potential non-compliance has been identified as being more likely, specifically in secondary schools and schools not catered for by local authorities.
Local learnings
Work to ensure school food standards are properly enforced has been broadly welcomed by campaigners, albeit there is currently no firm government commitment to a full rollout of the pilot.
Policy makers, however, have been urged to learn from the success of local initiatives as they consider next steps for the programme of work. Assessing the results of the pilot on a recent podcast by The Food Foundation, school food expert Myles Bremner, chief executive of consultancy Bremner and Co, cited the example of Southwark Council, which has introduced a school meals transformation programme jointly funded by the council and the charity Impact on Urban Health, as a ‘best in class’ approach for the government to aspire to nationally. Schools in Southwark receive guidance and funding to implement measures aimed at improving meals in terms of nutrition and value for money with the aim of embedding a continuous cycle of school food improvement. This includes the requirement to publish a school food policy and report on the plans and activities schools have undertaken to deliver that policy.
Sufficient standards?
Ministers will also continue to face questions over the adequacy of school food standards themselves, which are now a decade old. Chefs in Schools, the charity co-founded by Dimbleby that places professional, often Michelin-starred chefs into state school kitchens, has called for a strengthening of standards with a focus on “colourful, flavourful, nutritious food” as well as mandatory training for school kitchen teams on child nutrition, culinary skills, food education and the school food standards themselves.
There is evidence too that current standards are a blocker to efforts to improve the sustainability of school meals. Schools present an especially challenging environment for reformulating menus with less animal protein, for example, because they are bound by the requirements of the school food standards. “The insights we’re getting from the local authorities that we work with is that these standards are preventing them from making their menus as healthy and sustainable as they would like,” Jimmy Pierson, director of ProVeg UK told last year’s joint Footprint/Chartwells reportinto sustainability in schools.
Government promises to help develop a ‘whole school approach’ to food as set out in the 2022 levelling up whitepaper have also largely fallen by the wayside. These included plans to invest up to £5m to launch a “school cooking revolution”, including the development of new content for the curriculum and providing bursaries for teacher training and leadership, which sources say has since been rolled into existing DfE work (government code for ‘it’s not going to happen’).
New government, same issues
We now have a new government in power which is currently working out its priorities for the next five years, including a root and branch review of the education system led by new education secretary Bridget Phillipson. Labour won praise from campaigners in the lead up to the election by promising to introduce free breakfast clubs for all primary school children, however pressure to make free school meals a universal right for all primary school children, as is now the case in London, will continue to grow from charities such as School Food Matters amid evidence of hunger impacting children’s learning.
Even those children entitled to a free school meal are not always getting one. New research from the community interest company Veg Power has found that every lunchtime 25-30% of the children who could be benefiting from a free school meal are choosing to avoid them. This could be for a range of reasons such as parents feeling like their child wasn’t getting enough food, or concern that their child might not eat the food available and would remain hungry.
Ensuring school food standards are met is a first step towards kids getting fed a healthy, sustainable meal at least once a day, but the evidence suggests much greater intervention will be needed to ensure the school food system is fully fit for purpose.
AN implicit thread in this article is that less meat is reasonable n children’s diets. However there is much evidence to suggest that there are minimums for meat intake if children are to receive nutritionally adequate feed. There is greater need for children to eat nutritionally dense animal food products for normal mental and physical development. We must not perpetuate the dichotomy of “animal products bad, plant products good” which misrepresents nutritionally adequate diets.
Yes, we eat less fibre than we should in the UK. And some people eat more animal food products than they need. we need messaging to target healthy diets that combine plant and animal sourced foods to supply enough fibre and ensure essential micronutrients are supplied in a highly bioavailable form, something that animal sourced foods can do.
UPF may be the real enemy. They often have little fibre and contain chemicals that a consumer can’t buy.