The UK Food Standards Agency has teamed up with the organisation representing England’s school governors to help improve nutrition awareness in schools.

The National Governors’ Council (NGC) sent its members an information pack in autumn 2003 after a Food Standards Agency survey of 556 primary schoolchildren’s lunchboxes found that nine out of ten contained food too high in saturated fat, salt and sugar.

As well as containing healthier lunchbox tips, the pack contained information on salt and health and suggestions on how to raise these issues with parents.

It also contained a questionnaire asking governors to consider issues such as vending machines in schools, tuck shops, school meals and breakfast clubs, as well as teaching about food within the curriculum.

It included questions about whether schools had guidelines about food bought from home, and if they are workable and if governing bodies had faced any barriers developing healthy eating policies in schools.

Responses from the first 100 questionnaires returned were looked at and the findings are described in the report available from the link below. Its main conclusions were:

-- Most governors felt schools should have policies to encourage healthy eating but there was some confusion about the role that governing bodies should play. Some governors were anxious about trespassing onto the day-to-day management role of the head teacher.

-- There was little opposition to guidelines promoting fruit for snacks and restricting items like fizzy drinks where governing bodies had involved parents and children in developing these guidelines.

-- Implementing food policy was reported to be much more difficult in secondary schools than primary schools.

-- A recurrent theme was concern about catering companies and the quality of school meals, including Private Finance Initiatives.

The NGC will be working with the Food Standards Agency to draw up a framework illustrating governing body responsibility for policy-development and monitoring in relation to food in schools, to clarify the respective managment roles of governing bodies and head teachers.

The NGC acts a voice for the 250,000 governors in England putting their point of view to the Department of Education and Skills and other Government departments.

The role of governing bodies in developing policies to promote healthy eating
Read the full report (PDF file 104KB)
http://www.foodstandards.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/ngcreport.pdf