Why school food matters even if your child doesn’t eat them – Food For Kids Podcast episode 104

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today's episode is about school food and it's a topic which is very close to my heart because I worked in school food for a number of years and I know firsthand how incredibly important it is. In one of my previous roles, I worked for six years with the redevelopment of a primary school kitchen. The school was really lucky to have kept its own kitchen throughout the push for privatisation and it had been run for many years by a voluntary committee with fab paid cooks providing the daily food. At the time I got involved, the school needed to either expand or risk losing the kitchen altogether. So we grew to take on two other local schools who extended the kitchen and the staff and turned into a community interest company that also provided food education in those schools. It was a fantastic project and some of the provision has changed during and after Covid, but the kitchen team is still providing brilliant daily fresh cooked food for those schools to this day. Being involved in that project is something I'm incredibly proud of.

But most schools are not in that position. From the 80s onwards, schools have been encouraged to contract out their school food and this has resulted in a lot of food being cooked offsite and brought in and most schools have lost their kitchen facilities. There are obviously great school caterers and terrible as well as in-house kitchens, but the principle of school food being provided by profit-making companies has always made me very cross. And even in the contracted out setup that we have now, the reality is that the funding for school meals is so inadequate for the overheads that a lot of these companies are also now going out of business. There are, however, lots of brilliant and determined activists working in school food, both in individual schools and at the national lobbying level. And they've done a lot to raise awareness of what needs to change. 

So in this episode, I want to talk through some of those issues and see how you can help.

In case you're interested, the broad arc of school dinners history is as follows. After a few pilots of school meal schemes for malnourished children in northern industrial cities in the late 1800s, hot meals started to be introduced in more schools in the early 1900s, although these were mostly hot breakfasts and pretty basic. And then in the 20s and 30s, more variety came in and more lunches. And by the Second World War, it was compulsory for local authorities to provide a school lunch with nutritional standards even being brought in in 1941. Rationing of ingredients, however, kept the menus pretty basic and as the population grew, parents on higher incomes had to start paying for their meals. After rationing ended, schools brought in a lot of the items that we associate with school dinners, the heavy sponge puddings, fish and chips, rice pudding and jam.

Then in the 80s and 90s, Margaret Thatcher's government turned school meals on their heads. The 1980 Education Act made school dinners non-essential, meaning that local authorities didn't have to provide them except for children that were entitled to free school meals. Nutritional standards were abolished and schools were encouraged to cut costs.

In 1988, the Local Government Act introduced compulsory competitive tendering, meaning that schools had to put their school meals out to tender and accept usually the lowest bid. And this resulted in the majority of schools over time being catered for by private companies who were racing to lower the price to get the contracts, while still needing to make a profit for shareholders in most cases. Unsurprisingly, the quality of food provided fell dramatically and the 80s societal trend towards cheap processed convenient foods bled into the school dining hall too.

This continued pretty much unchecked through the 90s with the result that in 1999 kids were eating less healthy school dinners than during the immediate post-war rationing period. So that's how we got to the early 2000s with the big debate on the quality of school food, the turkey Twizzler and the push to try to do something better with a series of small attempts to put minimum standards in place from 2001 onwards.

I started working school food in the early noughties and at that time the famous Jamie Oliver TV series about junk food in schools and the work of great activists like Jeanette Orrey was starting to bring public attention to the issue. I was really happy to be involved in the rollout of the school food standards that followed in 2006 to 2007, which were a great starting point. Unfortunately, those standards got watered down over time by the fact that academies and free schools didn't initially have to keep to them, so many of them didn't.

In addition, many schools went down the road of providing officially a central menu that served the standards, but then also serving sandwiches, pasta and jacket potatoes alongside them, which didn't meet the standards of variety. Meaning that officially you could have a menu that rotated through all kinds of meat, fish, vegetarian options, fresh fruit and veg, rice, potatoes, breads, but a child could actually choose a ham and cheese sandwich every day of the year if they wanted. So there were massive improvements in general but has been a lot of patchiness in the implementation of the standards.

And because the funding provided is also very low and has to cover the midday supervision staff salaries, dining room equipment maintenance, kitchen staff salaries, as well as ingredient costs, many schools have found it hard to keep up. Outside caterers with economies of scale were often the only viable option in smaller schools. In 2013, the government released the school food plan, which finally made standards mandatory for all schools, but also made them much more flexible. again, there is a wide range of good and less good practice. The great thing they did do at that time was to introduce free school meals for all infants, so that's classes R, 1 and 2, which meant that children could start school with a school dinner as an expectation and that also gave schools a bit more economies of scale with the higher take-up.

Over the course of those two or three attempts to unpick the damage done to the quality of school meals back in the lower costs at all costs era, there have been a lot of improvements, things like processed meats or fried foods only being allowed a small number of times per week or per three weeks, oily fish being served across the three week menu cycle, more fruit based desserts, better standards for breakfast clubs, tuck shops and after school clubs.

In 2026, the current government has put out a proposal for more changes to school meals. These changes will tighten up some of the poor standards on things like fried foods, added sugars and salt, making sure there's more fibre in the menu overall, more pulses and less sweetened drinks. It's not about taking things away, your child's favourites are still likely to turn up on the menu. It's more about increasing the variety and balance on offer and improving how things are prepared like more baking and less frying. There's also some more specific guidance for breakfast club food. These standards will start from September with some staggering in of the more difficult parts of the guidance and for secondary schools who are bigger and more complex. There is a consultation underway at the time of recording that ends on June the 12th, 2026. So if you have strong feelings about this, I'll pop a link in the show notes to read the proposals and have your say.

In practice, what all this means is this. Your local school might serve incredible meals. Your local school might serve pretty crappy meals. Your local school might serve meals made on site. More likely they serve meals brought in on trolleys. Your school leadership team might think that school dinners and food in general is an important and integral part of education. Or they might think that dinners are a necessary distraction that they just have to get done between the pressures of the curriculum. 

But what I wanted to talk to you about today is how you as a parent can navigate this to get the best out of your school's food for your child and if possible, help to improve it.

First of all, should you get school dinners for your child?

This is a complicated question and there are obviously a lot of reasons why you would or wouldn't join in with school meals. I'll mention some of them, but please understand when I'm talking about the benefits or downsides, I recognise that they won't apply to every child. I'm just talking in general terms and you need to decide as a family what works for you and also be open to adjusting that over time as your child changes and grows up. So I want you to know that if you hear something which is different to the way that you've chosen to do things, there is absolutely no implied criticism of you or your choices in there at all. This is coming from a place of understanding that feeding kids is made unnecessarily hard by the food environment and the research that is done is to try to figure out paths forward for a whole generation, not for an individual family.

With that in mind, there has been quite a lot of research about the overall balance of food in school meals versus packed lunches. Studies generally find that children who eat school dinners tend to get closer to or meet the guidelines on intake of vegetables, protein-rich foods and fibre and also less likely to exceed maximum recommendations for salt and for savoury and sweet snacks compared to children who eat a packed lunch. This effect is most clear at primary school and fades off quite a lot at secondary school, partly because teenagers have more agency in their choices, but also because more pick and mix options are often in large secondary school canteens.

Again, these findings are for average in a cohort, not for your individual child. Maybe you pack incredibly balanced lunch boxes and your child eats them all. Maybe your child dislikes so much of their school meals that they wouldn't end up eating a balanced meal there. I'm not talking about your individual child, just the research which is based on the statistics across groups of students. The studies generally showed that neither school dinners nor packed lunches were perfect at getting a total nutritional balance into all of the kids, but that the children eating the school dinners are getting much closer to a balanced diet than those on packed lunches, with only generally around 2 % of packed lunches meeting the standards that are set for school dinners.

The difficulty of making a consistently balanced packed lunch is made harder by the fact that the cost of ingredients of a healthy lunchbox have gone up in price, while less healthy options have remained more affordable. A lot of parents choose packed lunches because they're cheaper, especially for larger families. If you pack a lunch box that does meet the same nutritional standards as a school meal, it will cost you generally between about 70 to 90 percent of the price of a school dinner. So if you're needing to cut back, you can save some money on those packed lunches. But when budgets are tight and the cost of living is going up, the quality of the items in the lunch box often gets squeezed to save money because more processed and profitable items are often also more affordable. In many supermarkets, you can get up to seven or eight days of less nutritious lunchbox ingredients for the same cost as five days of the more nutritious alternatives. So intentions may be spot on, but the ability to make those intentions happen day in, day out may not match up with finances and availability in the shops in your area.

So there is some good reason to try to take some school dinners to help with some of that balancing of nutrients over time, if that's something you can do, even if it isn't every day. A hot meal service with bulk ingredient purchasing and the ability to keep things hot or cold may be able to offer a wider variety of foods than are practical in a lunchbox day in, day out. So that's one good reason to try looking at the menu and see if some days might be appealing or give your child a chance to eat something that wouldn't work in a lunchbox.

Another reason to try to support school meals if you can is that the economies of scale help schools and their caterers to do better. When the universal free school meals for reception class, class one and class two came in, many schools, including the ones I worked in, were able to do more because they had more regular funding coming in because more parents took up the free meals. The funding they receive, as I said, doesn't always just cover ingredient costs. It's often having to help with the supervision costs, the electricity and gas to cook and store the food, the equipment and the cooking staff. Children eating a packed lunch still need a school hall to eat in, tables to eat on, staff to supervise them. If more children take up school dinners, then yes, you need more ingredients, but a lot of those fixed costs don't grow. And so the extra money can help with ingredient quality. So if we all take up the free meals that we feel able to, as well as any paid meals we can afford, then that helps the overall provision to have some financial breathing room to look at improvements in things like ingredient quality or staff time to prepare more things from course you have to consider your child's first, that is your job as their parent, but it's also nice to feel you're contributing to an improvement for everyone if you feel able to do so.

And finally, one of the reasons that many parents are hesitant to take school meals is that they worry their child won't eat them. This is something that came up a lot when I was speaking to new school families when running the school meal service. They liked the idea of the free meals in the first three years, but weren't sure their child would eat them because they were quite fussy at home.

Of course no one wants their child to go hungry and for children with very restrictive eating or ARFID or neurodivergence or a medical condition their parents have to be very considered in how they approach a school lunchtime. But for many children who are a little fussy at home, it can often be the case that joining in with school dinners with their peers can actually help with their acceptance of a wider range of foods because of peer influence and not wanting to stand out.

A study in 2025 which looked at children who were fussy at three years old and followed them up to age 13 concluded that the children who had had school dinners were more likely to eat a wider range of foods by the time they got to 13, especially in things like meat, fish and fruit. Of course there are those factors that I mentioned at play and it doesn't work for every personality. But I personally witnessed many, many children becoming less fussy over time when eating school meals with their friends. Even if for a long time they were just being exposed to having the food on their plates and not really eating it, or watching other children eating it. All of this can build familiarity which can help later down the line, even if they don't eat them that day.

So when working with parents in the school kitchen role, I used to suggest that they try to err on the side of being more confident in their child's ability to learn from their peers and to consider school dinners most days if they can, or at least on some days. In the first three years when meals are free, there's no financial loss in trying out meals to see if their child will take to them, and it helps the school to budget if people try things out. I used to suggest that they pack good quality snacks, especially on days where they weren't sure about the menu, so that if their child had a less confident day, they could have something else in their bag and then also be prepared to provide good after school snacks. School dinner staff and midday supervisors are mostly an incredibly caring bunch who want children to have full tummies and smiles on their faces. So they will usually tell parents or the office staff if children are not eating well at lunch, whether that's hot meals or indeed their packed lunches. If you're not sure if your child will like lunches, you can give it a try and ask the staff to let you know quietly how they're getting on with them or flag it up if there are things they're not eating so you can adjust which days you sign up for. For some families opting into one or two home favourites might work best and doing packed lunches for the rest.

And for others, signing up for most or all days and just opting out of one or two tricky days on each menu might work better. And if you're worried about your child managing the cutlery or cutting skills, don't worry. Midday staff are on the case with new class Rs, cutting up meat or hard items and squeezing sauces, etc. as children build their skills.

If your child is older and has been on packed lunches for a while, please consider asking them again each time a new menu comes out if they fancy any of the days on it, as their taste might have changed over time or they might feel able to have a go at something they didn't before but have seen their friends enjoying. It might seem small to have only one school meal a week, but the knock-on effects of their feeling part of something or more confident that they've tried something, as well as the school having more income to spend on quality if more people do the same, can actually add up to something bigger than the effects of the actual ingredients of that one meal you choose.

So just like at home where it's important to respect when a child doesn't want to eat something, but that we should still bring those foods back on a regular rotation so that they can build familiarity, but also change their mind if they want to. So the same goes with asking them about school meal menus and seeing if they want to change their mind about any of the days on there too. We should always offer children a chance to change their mind if they want to.

So that's my heartfelt plug for school meals. And in addition to considering them for your lunch options, please also consider supporting schools in general by joining in any campaign that's trying to offer free school meals for everyone, even if you wouldn't personally take them up.

The benefits of that would be huge for very many families and it would help enormously with the budgets of those families who aren't quite eligible for free meals but find lunch provision a hard stretch. But it would also help schools and caterers to be able to use those economies of scale to increase the quality of the ingredients.

In addition, anything you see that encourages the government to increase the per-person allowance for a school dinner is also worth joining in with. And if you hear this in time for the consultation I mentioned that's linked in the show notes, that is something you could mention in there that the rate needs to rise to cope with higher minimum wages, ingredient costs and utility bills.

Finally, if you're really interested in school food, please consider talking to your school about it, offer to volunteer with something or help them find a scheme to improve their whole school food offering. The new proposals will expect schools to have linked governors and oversight of food, but several voluntary schemes already do this.

I will link to one that I've worked with in a Beacon school called Food for Life, who provide a framework not just for the offering at lunchtime, but also the food education across the whole school, growing, cooking and eating throughout the curriculum. Please have a look and see if your school might consider something like this or ask if you can help them.

So that's my roundup of why we should all care about school food. And I hope there was something interesting in there for you. School food was woefully neglected for a long time and thought of as something non-essential and easy to hive off from the school day and be squeezed for profit or savings. But food is an integral part of our life every day and school food is no different. It is a beating heart underpinning the rhythm of the school day.

Children are at school for about 190 days a year. So if we care a little bit more about what they're eating at breakfast, break time and lunch on those 190 days, we can make a real difference to their relationship with food. We've made massive strides in the last 20 years to improve the food being offered in many schools, but there's still a way to go. And the new proposals go some way to moving that along.

For families with children who struggle with food, there will still be plenty of opportunities to modify and adapt the new proposals to accommodate individual needs. But the direction of travel for the majority of schools and the majority of their children is hopeful.

I've seen firsthand what a difference changes like this can make over time. And I hope that this round of changes is thoughtful and listens to the concerns of parents, dietitians and school leaders to make it a success. I'll pop lots of links in the show notes to research on school dinners, as well as some links for organizations that campaign for better school meals or help schools to improve what they do.

I'll also link to that consultation that's out for the next couple of weeks and a blog article by children's dietitian Charlotte Stirling-Reed which summarises the proposals really helpfully.

I hope you found that interesting. Please do let me know what you think about school dinners for your family. I'll be back next time with the last episode of this first year of the podcast, so I hope to see you then and in the meantime, happy eating!