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Chapter 1: What changes are being proposed for England's school food standards?
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Keitetääs kahvit. Mikä ihana lause. Saa hengähtää ja unohtaa hetkeksi huolet ja hommat.
Siinä mieli virkistyy ja sydän kevenee. Ja kuulee maukkaimmat jutut. Tai saa vain hetken olla ja nauttia. Arkea ikä kaikki.
Ja se on hyvä niin. Eloveena.
Täyttä eloa. They have curry, chilli con carne, spaghetti bolognese. One day it'll be pasta, the next day it'll be two rice dishes. The grab-and-go options, pizza or a wrap or a sandwich. Personally for me, I'm always on packed lunch, so I'll bring a sandwich in, a packet of crisps. On a Friday they do do fish and chips.
School dinners with new standards on the horizon. It doesn't sound enticing, I know, with its talk of rules of policy. of how things should be done. But what's happening now in England seems to open up possibilities, creating foundations for a better future for our children, taking seriously the harm that highly processed, sugary, fatty, nothing food is doing to the next generation.
But how do you do it in a culture where food still really doesn't matter to many people and where in schools poor food has been normalised for so long? Change is often painful.
Think of those parents in the early 2000s in Rotherham passing burgers and chips through the school railings as Jamie Oliver tried in the school's kitchen to show that Brits are not genetically predetermined to love only what's fatty, fried, salty, sweet. ultra-processed and easy to chew.
Twenty years later, that long fight by him and many other activists has reached the level of changes proposed in the government's new school food standards. Now, the next difficult step is to get all the players involved in school food invested in the new standards.
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Chapter 2: How do students perceive the current school meal options?
I get school dinners, so we have the choice of going into a cafe or the canteen. So I'll just probably have a look what there is, and I'm guessing there'll be, like, mac and cheese or curry or something, and I'll just get what I fancy. I've got a wrap in my bag, a hand wrap.
That you made yourself?
Yeah, home. I have like a pot of grapes and I have some little mini cheddars and then I have like a little Mr Kipling's cake. I'll probably get food from the cafe so maybe like a veggie burger or a jug of potato.
It's the last period before lunch at Penritham Girls High School, a comprehensive in Preston in Lancashire. I'm with a group of Year 10s talking about lunch.
I bring in a meal from home. I've got a tuna sandwich and some walkers crisps and some mountain ice. I've brought in a ham sandwich with some grapes, a packet of crisps and some breadsticks with a little biscuit.
There are about 800 students in the school, and at lunchtime there are options. The canteen, where you can get a hot meal served on a real plate, or a takeaway like grab-and-go shop, pre-made sandwiches, jacket potatoes, salads, fruit cakes and biscuits, fruit-based fizzy drinks, or you can bring in a packed lunch. And that's the choice of most of the girls I'm talking to.
What's in their packed lunches is up to them or their parents, but what's served by the school is regulated by the government school food standards, last updated in 2015 to not very meaningful levels, hence the new attempts at improving quality. There are different standards in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that we'll talk about later.
Here at Penwitham Girls, the food served is all prepared and cooked in the kitchens by a team-run by Lancashire County Council's catering company. And the standard, I'm told, is higher than many other secondary schools. So what do the Year 10s make of what's on offer?
My name's Esther. I think the food here is really good quality and it's pretty nutritious, I'd say. You have salad bars. My name's Jenya and I think that this school's a lot better than other schools for having a balanced diet. And it gives me the energy to focus in lessons.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do schools face in implementing new food standards?
The thing that puts me off getting a school dinner is the long queues.
The school is right next to a giant Tesco and I gather it has a lot of custom from this school. So what difference is it going to make improving food here while you've got that next door?
It does have an influence on the school. I've noticed that people are bringing in Coke, crisps, sweets, and obviously that's having a negative effect on their health. But I think if this school possibly reduces the prices, maybe people will buy more of this food.
I mean, you are a healthy looking bunch. I mean, you could say, what's the problem? What's the problem?
I think it's a really good thing that they're getting involved because I think that it's not all about physical health. It's also about self-esteem. Healthy food makes you feel better about yourself. and it, like, fuels your brain. Like, we can get cakes every day, but we can also get fruit every day.
But I feel like when you're, like, in the queue and you're really hungry, you kind of choose to go for a cake. But if that option got taken away from us, and I think that we should be able to get a sweet treat like a cake only once a week, for example, on a Friday, then more people would choose the healthier option, and I feel like that would improve our health.
Jenya's idea to cut puddings to once a week is in fact one of the central proposals in the new school food standards. But what became clear, strangely, was that the food wasn't the central issue in what and how the girls chose to eat at lunchtime.
Hi, I'm Jess.
And Jess, do you eat in the dining room?
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Chapter 4: What insights can we learn from Japan's school food system?
Hard to do everything. Fitting in a meal with all the various clubs the girls were committed to. A pressure I could see not only in the many queues in the dining rooms and outside the grab-and-go cabin... but also in the dish-out-as-fast-as-you-can service from the catering staff as they tried to make lunchtime work as efficiently as they could.
But before we head into the dining room to pick up our own lunch, it's worth spelling out the new standards. Deep-fried foods are off the menu. Sugary puddings, just once a week. Grab-and-go options like pizza, sausage rolls and processed meat will also be limited. So children won't be able to have them every day. Primary schools will only be allowed to provide milk or water to drink.
At secondary schools, they can also top up on some zero sugar-flavoured waters. There'll be much more veg, fruit, whole-grain pasta and rice and beans and pulses. All meals will have to be served with vegetables or salad, including the grab-and-go. There's a lot more in the details, which run to over 16 pages.
If approved, the changes will be enforceable in primary schools from September 2027 and in secondary schools the following year. Someone who's had a big role in shaping the new standards is Anna Taylor, executive director at the independent think tank charity The Food Foundation. I asked her what she thinks will feel like the biggest change.
Probably the changes will feel bigger in secondaries because I think that's where we've moved the furthest towards... pre-prepared convenience foods. Moving away from some of those grab-and-go items I think will feel different.
I think it does also require secondaries to be thinking about that whole mealtime experience and the extent to which it does give children enough time to sit down and eat together.
The consultation closes on June 12th. Some of the planned changes seem complex, like the restrictions on the use of cheese as a main ingredient. That can't be used more than once a week. Too detailed?
Yeah, I mean, it has to be detailed in order to make sure that there aren't too many inadvertent loopholes created. And I think the cheese one in particular is to ensure that the vegetarian option isn't only cheese. The other one is that on processed meat, for example, you can only serve that once a week. Similarly, batter coated or breadcrumb coated food, including pastry is
So it's quite specific for the very reason that we've had a situation where it's possible for a child to end up sort of eating a slice of pizza every single day because there are other things on offer.
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Chapter 5: How do parents and health professionals view the school food changes?
And so because the other things are on offer, the standards are compliant. But actually, a single child can end up eating a very poor diet across the span of the week. And so the idea here is to minimize that risk.
I think that is one of the most shocking indictments of the present system.
Yeah, I mean, we've got a long way to go in some schools. The problem that we've also had with the current standards, they're not that bad, but they've not ever been monitored. And so we've now got a situation where standards have dropped, essentially below what they should be because people are not paying attention.
Such a plan will need monitoring. How? Well, so far, it will rely on a school governor being appointed secretary to ensure staff have the right training, equipment, and that the menus are following the standards. And there's not much money to help the process along.
3p per meal is being added to what schools are paid for supplying free school meals, though from September, more children will be eligible for those free meals. I asked Anna what's missing from the standards. For example, there's no mention of ultra-processed foods, UPFs,
the foods that now make up a high proportion of what UK children and teenagers regularly eat, and which now, good evidence shows, are strongly linked to many serious health problems.
There's no mention of UPF, but there's built in quite a lot of reference to high fat sugar and salt foods. And those, of course, have a big overlap with ultra processed foods. The proposed standards go a long way to address some of the really big gaps in the current standards, I think.
A lot of their success will now rest on the consultation landing where it currently is and not being eroded in terms of its ambition in the coming months. That's really, really important. But also this wider package of monitoring being really important. There are also outstanding funding questions for small schools when you don't have a critical mass of pupils involved.
Eating in the canteen, you can't get to those economies of scale. And small schools really struggle to provide the meals that they should be providing within the funding that is available. So there are wider things that need to be in place for this to be a full success. But this really does feel like a big milestone.
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Chapter 6: What role do caterers play in the school food landscape?
Not explicitly, but I think, as I say, the ambition is to really maintain high uptake of the meals. And so quality will really come into that. I mean, the other aspect of quality also, of course, is around sourcing.
And the government has an ambition to shift the public procurement of food with a goal of getting to 50% of that food being either locally procured or to higher environmental standards. As yet, those rules, government buying standards, are not applied to schools, but we know that there's ambition.
Anna Taylor, head of the Food Foundation... We asked the Department for Education in England why buying food locally isn't part of the standards. It told us it continues to, quote, work closely with DEFRA to support our pledge. We will also assess how we can support schools to purchase nutritious local produce within their current financial parameters.
In Penritham, the food hatches are open and the queues are building. Jenya, one of the year 10s I talked to earlier, took me to the front of the canteen queue.
Hash browns, omelettes, sausages, beans, so that's the all-day breakfast. Then I could have a jacket potato or spaghetti with garlic bread or a pasta pot.
Jenya chose the all-day breakfast, something that could be served under the new school food standards, but that sausage... from Booth's, it said on the menu, the Northwest supermarket chain, would be the one and only portion of processed meat for the week.
Outside, the playground is very crowded, with girls eating their lunches at picnic tables, some with takeaway boxes from the Grab and Go Cafe, others with food they've brought from home.
So this is our outdoor eating space, you can see there's lots and lots of different picnic tables that we've got and the girls just tend to sit around and eat socially. I'm Alison Katanak, I'm an associate assistant head teacher here at the school and I also teach music. We've also got another indoor covered area over here which just has seats in.
When I first came in Alison I asked you if you ate lunch in the dining room but like the girls you have, it's curtailed for you.
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Chapter 7: How do the proposed standards address nutritional concerns?
Alison Katanag. In Scotland and Wales, school food rules have already been tightened. Wales now offers free school meals to all primary pupils. And from October, the new Healthy Eating Regulations... require schools to serve more vegetables of more variety with less that's fried and sugary. In Scotland, regulations introduced around five years ago are similar.
In Northern Ireland, however, the standards haven't been updated since 2008.
K-Ruoka Verkkokauppa. Sitä saa enemmän kuin mitä tilaa. Vaihde Suomen suosituimpaan autovakuutukseen osoitteessa lähitapiola.fi. Voit voittaa samalla vuoden bensat. Palveluntarjoajat, LähiTapiolan pahinko- ja alueyhtiöt. LähiTapiola. Samalla puolella.
A few weeks ago in Belfast, I met Susie Lee, a chartered accountant, chef, mother and cookbook author who's been turned into a campaigner by her children's descriptions of the food at their local primary school.
My children go to school dinners every single day. That was a priority of mine because that's how I grew up. I feel that children need to be sitting down together as a community, breaking bread. But when my children know who you are, more vocal they can actually tell me what is on their school menu every day not that i don't know but when wording of school menu items transpired to be instead of
baked potatoes, but baked chips, it's actually fried chips. Why are we then, that's fine, but we're offering a dessert. There's always a dessert sweet option and there's just balance has kind of got out of kilter for me.
Susie shared her worries with a friend, also a parent of young children, consultant paediatrician Dr Jonathan Henderson. who was seeing a lot of things that worried him in his work.
A lot of kids were coming with their parents with tummy pain. Now there are lots of causes for tummy pain, but when we looked into the history, like what's the diet like, suddenly it was noticed in the history it's very beige. Not a lot of water being taken and kids were being diagnosed with constipation.
They fall down this spiral of needing medication, laxatives, presenting to A&E for treatment. These kids were getting blood tests that were normal and suddenly anxiety is driven with, there is something wrong with my child.
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Chapter 8: What are the potential impacts of these changes on children's health?
Why is nothing being found? When actually it was the functional aspect of what we put in our mouth is creating the problem.
Of course, not all the children's symptoms are diet-related. But Jonathan is seeing more and more children with severe medical conditions related to the food they eat. He is also seeing more neurodivergent children who struggle to eat certain textures and flavors.
I have a patient who's a teenager currently who we've had to put a tube in just to get the nutrition correct because they have vitamin A deficiencies, so they're losing sight. So there's an extreme element of this from different trace elements or deficiencies that's affecting health of children. And eyesight's only one of them.
Even response to infection, recovery from illness can take longer if the nutrition is not right. I mean, it could list lots of things.
In fact,
They've asked me lots of times, how do I get children to eat vegetables? I'm saying blitz them, hide them, grate them, whatever you want to do. But even if you're having a pizza or a burger, just boil some broccoli or cut up some raw carrot. That's brilliant. You're adding a bit of colour to the plate of food and that small little bits of exposure to different foods for your children.
It's going to be massive in the future. So Johnny can then answer some of those questions that parents are asking.
And what we actually did, we surveyed the school and that sort of informed us of how we should target this because we are definitely of the view that we're not going to go in to tell people what they need to do because they don't know what they don't know. We need to see what is it that we can do to help and allow for that open Q&A.
So for me, sharing experience because I can share what I see, so in preventative medicine term, share this with the public and go, if you don't follow these steps, potentially this could happen to you or your child.
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