As part of the School Food Plan, we are putting together a rich, easy-to-access online platform for schools to share ‘What Works Well’. This will cover a broad range of areas, from running a great meals service to delivering food education across the whole school. It will signpost users to the excellent material that has already been created by organisations working in school food and food education.
The full site will launch at www.schoolfoodplan.com in spring 2014. In the meantime, we will upload case studies here as a preview of what’s to come.
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Here at Reach Academy in Feltham, south west London, we believe that pupils have a good attitude to food because their teachers eat with them. The children sit at long tables, family style, with teachers scattered among them…
Phoenix High School is very far from a rural idyll. Located right in the middle of the socially deprived White City Estate in west London, with the six lane A40 roaring in the background, our school is perhaps the last place on earth you would expect to find a farm…
Nottingham is Britain’s poorest city. Half a mile from the city centre, surrounded by housing estates beset by social problems, is Greenfields Community School…
At Gayhurst Community School in East London we use a “Captain’s Table” as an incentive for eating and behaving well in the dining hall. Many primary schools use this strategy…
Seven years ago, the lunch service at East Sheen Primary was truly dreadful. Our school, in south west London, was locked into a contract with a substandard local authority caterer…
Getting parents involved has huge benefits for all schools, especially small ones like Barons Court Primary school in Southend. We have only 186 pupils. Until two years ago, we had no food service of our own, meals were delivered from another, larger primary school…
Rather than banning packed lunches outright, we resolved to make them as healthy as possible. We send out weekly newsletters to parents, explaining what the rules are on packed lunches and why they are important…
The food at our school, Ashley C of E Primary School in Walton-on-Thames, used to be pretty uninspiring. It was brought in pre-cooked by council caterers and dished up into plastic flight trays at a small serving hatch. Unsurprisingly, take-up had sunk to a miserable 27%…
Our school – Cambo First School – is a tiny primary school near Morpeth in Northumberland which educates village children between the ages of 4 and 9. The school has only two classes…
Crich Junior School, in rural Derbyshire, we have just 50 pupils and – because of tight planning regulations for its Victorian building – no kitchen…
In August 2009, seven secondary schools in Glasgow decided to keep all their ‘S1’ (year 7) children on site during the lunch break, in a bid to encourage them to make healthier choices…
Mickley First School in rural Northumberland is a small primary school. We have 63 children with a nursery class of up to 24…
Lunches at our school – Woodham Academy – a 760-strong secondary school in County Durham – used to be a sorry affair. The food (provided by a private caterer) wasn’t cooked, so much as reconstituted…