Since our February update, School Food Matters has been busy delivering food education programmes in schools across the country.
Children taking part in our Young Marketeers, Know your Onions and Schools to Market programmes learned the vital life skills of growing from seed in their school gardens and cooking with their harvest. Months of hard work paid off in July, as our talented entrepreneurs successfully sold their school-grown fruit and vegetables and homemade chutneys and jams at 19 community markets. The pupils raised more than £6,000 for great causes, supporting local food banks or helping their schools provide further food education opportunities.
It’s also been a great year for our Honeybee programme. In 2023/24, nearly 3,000 children learned about honeybees and their vital role in our food system and around 600 visited an apiary to see a thriving bee colony in action!
Over 150 students took part in creative cooking sessions, as part of our Fresh Enterprise programme earlier this year. Students explored diverse flavours and textures as they created their very own tasty pastes. They also participated in a marketing workshop and pitched to an expert tasting panel, with the winning product going into production and on sale next year.
School Food Matters also delivered almost 40 We Can Cook programme sessions, teaching primary school children to create simple, tasty dishes over three progressive lessons.
More than 150 children took part in our Welcome gardening sessions – fun, hands-on workshops that help schools warmly welcome and integrate refugee children and new arrivals into their school community.
We’ve also been doing a lot of work around school food.
We’ve continued to support schools in creating a healthier school food environment with our Healthy Zones programme. We’ve been working in seven London areas, including Lambeth, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Westminster, Ealing, Wandsworth, and Islington.
Earlier this year, School Food Matters published a manifesto urging the new government to invest in the next generation by harnessing the power of school meals and food education.
We carried out research this year looking at the disparity in access to school meals across the country in light of London’s universal primary offer. Our survey of 10,000 teachers in England found a high prevalence of children too hungry to learn and revealed that schools have been using their own budgets to compensate.
This week, we launched our report, Cost of a School Meal, which reveals a critical shortfall between government funding and what schools actually need to guarantee all children access to nutritious and sustainable school meals.