The week’s biggest news story has sparked jubilation within the ranks of school food campaigners after persistent calls to extend free school meal provision and improve standards were finally acted upon by ministers.
The Department for Education announced that from the start of the 2026 school year, every pupil in England whose household is on universal credit will be entitled to receive free school meals. The School Food Standards will also be revised “to ensure quality and nutrition in meals for the future”, the department said.
Currently, children have only been eligible for free school meals if their household income is less than £7,400 per year. Campaigners have argued this threshold locks out hundreds of thousands of children who live in poverty. Once the change comes into effect it will align England more closely with eligibility criteria in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Social media was awash with celebratory posts at the culmination of what has been a long and often fruitless campaign to feed more children with better quality school food. Extending access to free school meals has been a key ask of campaigners, including charities and young people, for many years, and has been bolstered by the support of influential individuals like national food strategy author Henry Dimbleby and chefs including Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall and Tom Kerridge.
The government said more than half a million children are expected to benefit from the expansion in free school meals, whose value is estimated at around £500 per child per year. It added that the policy change would lift 100,000 children in England completely out of poverty, although the Institute for Fiscal Studies cautioned that the short-term impact would be more limited due to transitional protections introduced in 2018.
Anna Taylor, executive director of The Food Foundation, described the policy announcement as a landmark day for children. “Free school meals bring multiple benefits – they relieve family finances, they protect children’s health and they help children learn.
“Coupled with the announcement to improve school food standards today, the government shows it is serious about breaking down barriers to opportunity and ensuring every child in Britain has the chance to grow up well nourished – a commitment which is at the heart of their forthcoming food strategy.”
As Taylor alluded to, the government has also pledged to review the School Food Standards for the first time since they were introduced for government-maintained primary and secondary schools in England in 2014. In recent years, there have been growing concerns that the standards are not being properly monitored and enforced and have not kept pace with the science around child nutrition.
The focus of campaigners will now turn to what should be in the updated standards with calls expected to focus on the need for more nutritious, freshly prepared meals and fewer processed foods. The Soil Association has asked that the new school food regime is properly funded and that spend is channelled into the pockets of British and organic farmers. Labour has previously stated its ambition for 50% of public sector food to be local or produced to high environmental standards, although it has not confirmed whether school food is within the commitment’s scope.
Meat consumption is also likely to be a focus for passionate debate. Prior to the announcement of the review of standards, The Food Foundation had published a report titled ‘Meat facts’ in which it called for the current requirement for schools to serve meat three days a week to be relaxed to help boost uptake of plant-rich diets, and for guidance to recommend limiting the amount of processed meat being served to children.
Elsewhere in this week’s Footprint News:
- A landmark study finds regenerative farms are more productive than those farmed using conventional methods. More.
- Companies are not doing enough to assess whether modern slavery policies are being adhered to in practice. More.
- Artificial intelligence has been used to create a first-of-its-kind map of Europe’s soil health. More.
