By Gavin Mackintosh-
A government report has recommended new measures for schools in the Uk to improve pupil nutrition and food education.
The second report of the national food strategy, commissioned in 2019, is seeking to improve the diet of pupils and ensure wider awareness and education about food contents. The report calls for the programme to be funded to run for “at least the next three years, or until the next spending review”, and for free places to be extended to all pupils who would become eligible for free school meals under the recommended increase in earnings threshold to £20,000
It calls for the FSM threshold to £20k to reach 1.1m more pupils. It puts the average annual cost to deliver the recommendation at £449 million, twice the £220 million allocated by government for this year.
The report stated that given n the increase in the number of people eligible for universal credit since the beginning of the pandemic, implementing its previous recommendation would now cost £790 million “at a time when the public finances are already under extreme pressure”.
.Accreditation Schemes
Schools will be expected to work alongside accreditation schemes on the way they teach cookery and nutrition and provide food to pupils, with a new “sugar and salt reformulation tax”, which would net up to £3.4 billion a year for the Treasury expected to expand free school meals eligibility.
Environment secretary George Eustice said the government would “carefully consider” the report’s conclusions and “respond with a white paper within six months, setting out our priorities for the food system”.
These schemes would also “provide training and support for leaders and staff”.
Schools would be required to account for how school food funds had been” adequately spent” and fully comply with the school food standards and government buying standards for food, in order to attain a bronze certification, required by schools as an absolute minimum.
They would also have to demonstrate that the food and nutrition curriculum was being met and “ensure their catering staff are adequately trained to deliver quality meals”.
The report calls for food A-level to be reinstated, and calls for every school, both primary and secondary, to be “required to have a cookery subject lead”, and “sensory food education” should be added to the curriculum for nursery and reception classes.
The report calls for cookery and nutrition lessons to be inspected “with the same rigour as English and maths”, and says Ofsted should conduct “deep dives” on cookery and nutrition lessons “as often as they do other subjects”.
Ofsted should also publish a research review into food and nutrition like it has recently started doing with other subjects, the report said.
The report recommends that government should pay for ingredients pupils use in cooking at school, at a cost of £124 million a year.
The current system “leads to waste”, because it is “hard for parents to buy ingredients in one-portion quantities”, and to “stigma” for children whose parents “struggle to afford them”.
Funding for the school fruit and vegetable scheme, which entitles every child in England aged four to six to a piece of fruit or vegetable each day, should be doubled, from £40.4 million to £80.8 million a year, the report said.
But the government should give the money directly to schools “rather than administering the scheme centrally”.
“This will allow schools to procure higher quality produce from local suppliers.”