School Food Champions in the North East
Schools throughout the region are engaging with Bite Back’s School Food Champion programme, enabling students to become advocates for their own health and school food systems.
At a time when 1 in 3 children are at risk from diet related ill-health, school is our biggest opportunity to ensure every child has access to a decent, nutritious meal every day. Right now, this is not the case.
Bite Back 2030
In 2021, Bite Back 2030 launched the School Food Champions programme — an opportunity for Key Stage 3 students to uncover the problems and injustices within our food system and then use this knowledge to devise social action projects to transform their school canteens to put child health first.
To date, over 1,200 students from 150 schools have taken part, 20 of which have been in the North East.
Last year, schools made changes such as increasing access to free drinking water, installing salad bars, increasing seating options, setting up breakfast clubs, and increasing the cultural variety of items on the menu.
Whytrig Community Middle School – Northumberland
The School Food Champions team at Whytrig Community Middle School are campaigning for healthy, appetising and diverse school food and to launch their social action project they drummed up 227 of their peers, that’s 79% of the school, to pledge their support!
Since then they have carried out a school food audit and survey which revealed that students do not currently think the pricing is very clear. This means that some pupils do not choose food as they are worried they will have to put it back. Students also wanted to see more variety in the canteen.
They presented these results to their catering team and finance manager and with their agreement they are going to work on three areas:
Adding prices to the menus
Bringing healthy foods into the spotlight
Introducing a nutritious break time offer
The students at Whytrig Community Middle School have already practised skills such as presenting, data collection and project planning and we can’t wait to see them develop these skills even further as they improve their school food.
Bellingham Middle School – Northumberland
The Bellingham Middle School team is already off to a flying start on their social action project journey!
After surveying their peers they have made a start on two brilliant projects. Due to their catering arrangement, they aren’t able to change the food served, but there is much more to school food than the food itself; making eating spaces more exciting and welcoming can ensure more students will be inclined to eat the nutritious meals on offer.
In the survey, students commented that their canteen was very boring. To tackle this, the team are working with Year 8 art students to design a colourful mural for the canteen walls to make the space more appealing. They are also working with the PTA to increase the number of water fountains on site, to ensure there is always a healthy drink freely available.
Consett Academy – County Durham
The team at Consett Academy have loved having ownership over a project from beginning to end and found the programme has really helped with teamwork skills, as well as identifying individual strengths. To further develop these strengths, each team member has been assigned their own role, such as the marketing representative who is creating posters to spread the word about their work around the school or the spokesperson who leads their conversations with SLT.
As with our other schools, Consett Academy’s team has surveyed their peers to ensure their project reflects the wider student body’s voice. The first theme was the limited number of fruit options available, particularly at breaktime.
Students also frequently mentioned how the queuing system is a problem, with students having to spend the majority of their lunchtime queuing. This means students opt for packed lunches instead, which are typically a lot less nutritious than school meals.
The School Food Champions team are going to explain these findings to their catering team and SLT and discuss what may be feasible before deciding on a social action project to address these issues.
Bite Back has 50 fully funded places for schools to join the School Food Champions programme in September 2023. The programme has both curriculum time and extracurricular aspects, allowing students to develop life skills, an increased awareness of how the world around them shapes them, and the belief that they can drive change.
You can read more about the programme and apply here or email schoolfoodchampions@biteback2030.com with any questions.
Whytrig Community Middle School and Consett Academy are both Schools North East Partner Schools. If you’d like to find out more about our Partner School Programme click here.
We love to hear good news from North East Schools, to share your news with Schools North East please tag @SchoolsNE on Twitter or apply here.
