New film highlights the flaws in current standards and the benefits of improved enforcement. David Burrows reports.
The Food Foundation has launched a powerful animated campaign film narrated by Dame Emma Thompson and four young people from across the UK with lived experience of food insecurity.
The film, ‘The Lunch They Deserve’, seeks to focus minds on the need for better school food standards: there are currently 4.5 million children growing up in poverty in the UK and for many of them a healthy diet is unaffordable.
School meals have the potential to ensure these young people have access to a nutritious, hot meal that will help keep them healthy, the charity said.
Jamie Oliver, chef and school food campaigner, said: “School meals are the UK’s biggest and most important restaurant chain, and it’s failing too many of its customers. We’ve had the evidence for years – good school food transforms children’s health, learning, attendance and wellbeing. Yet we still have a system where some children eat well at school and others don’t. That’s outrageous,” he added.
The animated film explains how “some schools are managing to cook and serve healthy food”. However, “too many are now serving food that is unhealthy and lacking in essential nutrition. It is ultraprocessed”.
There is also a swipe at school food standards, which have been in place for two decades but not enforced. “… no one is officially checking the quality of the meals served in our schools”, the film highlights.
Last year the UK Government announced that from September 2026 the provision of free school meals will be extended to all children from households in receipt of Universal Credit.
“September 2026 is a huge opportunity to mark a step change in both access to free school meals and the quality of the meals served,” said Anna Taylor, executive director for The Food Foundation. “Monitoring has to go hand in hand with new standards so that schools which aren’t meeting standards can be given adequate support to improve,” she added.
“There are lots of wonderful examples of schools delivering fantastic food to children – that experience needs to be less of a postcode lottery and instead something which all children can benefit from.”
The government has pledged to improve school food standards, with Sir Keir Starmer again publicly affirming his commitment to quality school food at an event at Number 10 Downing Street in November.
The mandatory school food standards currently in place do not take into account recent nutritional recommendations. Compliance with the standards is not monitored, so “no one is checking the food schools are providing to our children”, according to the The Food Foundation.
In the UK, fewer than 10% of teenagers eat enough fruit and vegetables, over a third of children are living with overweight or obesity by the age of 11 and young people’s risk of type 2 diabetes has increased by 22% in the last five years.
The short film makes the point that this is very much a “disease of modern times” created by the food on offer to our children.
“It’s long past time for government to properly update 20-year-old standards and actually enforce them,” said Oliver.
