• New report sets out evidence-based recommendations to give schools the powers to develop their own holistic approaches to improving healthy diets and physical activity
• Report urges the Government to support schools to diversify curriculum and teacher training and put the health and wellbeing of pupils at the centre of teaching and school life

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Child of the North and Anne Longfield’s Centre for Young Lives think tank are today (Friday May 24th) publishing a new joint report, “An evidence-based plan for supporting physical activity and healthy nutrition with and through education settings”, which makes a series of recommendations to the Government and the Opposition to tackle the child obesity crisis and mend the broken school food system.The report – the fifth in a year-long series of joint Child of the North/Centre for Young Lives reports – argues that schools should be crucial environments for boosting healthy eating and physical activity and highlights overwhelming evidence on the need to empower schools to devise their own whole-school approaches in collaboration with their local communities, as well as:

• Introduce clear nutrition standards for all food and drink available at school including school meals, snacks, and vending machines, and supporting schools to promote physical activity throughout all areas of the school day
• Extend free school fruit and vegetables provision to all school year groups and expand the provision of school breakfast clubs.
• Widen entitlement to Free School Meals and the provision of the Healthy Start scheme, which provides weekly food vouchers for pregnant women and families with children under four years, in low-income households

The report warns that the evidence is overwhelming and unequivocal – the health of children and young people in the UK is getting worse, and children’s education, health and wellbeing is being affected by inactivity and unhealthy diets.Physical activity has been shown to enhance educational attainment and mental and physical health outcomes, and a healthy diet in childhood is related to improved educational attainment and physical and mental wellbeing. However, since 1995, physical activity levels have been decreasing, and diet quality has decreased, with an increased intake of processed foods and reduced intake of fruit and vegetables.This is having a negative impact on children’s educational success and mental and physical wellbeing. The combination of inactivity and unhealthy diet is also fuelling the obesity epidemic, with long-term negative impacts on physical and mental health, and the additional pressures this puts on the NHS. Currently, obesity rates are costing the NHS around £6.5 billion a year and it is the second largest preventable cause of cancer. The report highlights how:

• Almost 4m children are not physically active for the recommended 60-plus minutes a day.
• Children and young people from the least affluent families are the least likely to be active, with fewer than half meeting the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines
• 4,000 hours of PE were lost from the curriculum in state-funded secondary schools in 2022/23.
• 250,000 eligible children are missing out on Free School Meals due to the out-dated opt-in system, and 900,000 children living in poverty in England do not qualify for Free School Meals at all due to restrictive eligibility.
• 18% of households experienced food insecurity in 2022-23.
• 82% of 5–15-year-olds do not consume the recommended five daily portions of fruit and vegetables, and children aged 4-10 years are consuming almost double their recommended daily sugar limits.
• Fewer than 2% of packed lunches meet the Government’s School Food Standards.

The report also highlights the challenges facing schools as they try to provide healthy food on tiny budgets. It publishes research carried out by the University of York’s FixOurFood and the Food Foundation, which investigated children’s perceptions of the food offered within secondary schools and looked at whether they could buy tasty, healthy, and sustainable food with the free school meal allowance.

Its conclusions show how children on free school meals often face restricted choices, having to opt for meal deals, including a main, a dessert, and possibly a drink, even though in some instances, non-meal-deal items offered healthier alternatives. There was a lack of fruit, vegetables, and salad in all schools, and portion sizes were often not filling, leaving children hungry. As one young researcher commented: “The closest thing you get to fruit is jelly”.  

The report urges Government to:

• Establish whole-school approaches for physical activity and healthy nutrition, bringing together health and education to better support childhood health and wellbeing. Every school should be able to tailor its own approach based on its unique local circumstances.
• Support schools to deliver an ethos where the health and wellbeing of pupils is central to teaching practices and the wider school environment, and encourage Ofsted to recognise schools that emphasise the importance of activity and healthy eating.
• Support schools to work alongside local Higher Education institutions, to draw on research expertise, including expertise on physical activity and healthy nutrition, to highlight the most effective interventions and use local and national data to guide good practice, in coordination with local communities.

The report also highlights some of the innovative approaches being taken to improve the health of children and young people through schools, including:

‍Auto-enrolment of free school meals: FixOurFood at the University of York, in collaboration with Bremner & Co and the Food Foundation, is evaluating the set-up of auto-enrolment processes for free school meals. This involves combining different benefits datasets, identifying entitled free school meals households, then writing to parents to inform them that their children will be automatically registered unless they opt out. In the first year of implementation, eight out of the 22 local authorities approached to take part launched free school meal auto-enrolment, with at least 10 preparing to launch in the second year. Data from five LAs suggest that almost 3,000 children were identified and registered to receive free school meals.

‍Keighley Schools Together (KST) is a self-organised network of local schools who have worked with charitable food organisation “Rethink Food” to re-route surplus supermarket food through schools, giving families a more accessible alternative to food banks. Keighley schools have also agreed to support families to access NHS Healthy Start vouchers, which support access to food and milk.

‍The Creating Active Schools (CAS) programme supports schools in taking a place-based approach to transform a whole school's physical activity culture. The professional development programme supports schools to review current provisions against four key domains: vision and policy, social and physical environments, school stakeholders, and opportunities for physical activity. Schools are then supported to build impactful and sustainable provisions, using their existing assets. CAS recognises that every school is different and features components that flex depending on a school’s needs.

‍The Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme is a national school holiday programme in England, funded by the Department for Education. Recent data shows almost 750,000 children attended HAF during summer 2021. There are a range of positive HAF programme outcomes, including: improved child and parental health outcomes, attenuation of household food insecurity, improved dietary intake, provision of a safe place to play and be physically active, and improved community cohesiveness and reduction in anti-social behaviours. Importantly, the overall return of investment in HAF programmes has been estimated to be over ten-fold, a return that is higher than many public health and nutrition-based interventions.

‍FUNMOVES was developed to empower schools to deliver an assessment within a P.E. lesson for all pupils, and to identify children struggling to develop the foundational motor skills that are essential for participation in physical activity. FUNMOVES is a freely available tool that enables two members of teaching staff to assess a class of children, using resources readily available in education settings. It focuses on six key playground movement skills – running, jumping, hopping, throwing, kicking, and balancing. FUNMOVES was developed alongside schools in Bradford, and takes account of teachers’ views through schools across the UK to ensure it is feasible for use in increasingly pressured school environments.

‍Anne Longfield, Executive Chair of the Centre for Young Lives, said:

‍“We are facing a child obesity crisis, and our children are becoming unhealthier and less active. The resulting poor physical and mental health of our population is crippling the NHS and urgent action is needed. The broken school food system and the lack of school funding to improve school meals is acting as a huge barrier to healthy food choices and improved children’s health.

“Many children are living sedentary lives, and encouraging and supporting all our children to be physically active has not been made any easier by the encroachment of smartphones and screen time into their daily routines over the last decade.

“A greater focus on physical activity in school is long overdue, as are the resources and specialist staff to deliver rich physical exercise experiences. We need to better recognise those schools which are placing a greater importance on improving physical activity, healthier diets, and wellbeing by recognising their endeavours through the schools’ inspection system.

“With the right support, schools have a crucial role to play as partners in developing and delivering wider approaches to supporting improved health nutrition and increased physical activity. If we get it right, some of the other challenges facing schools – the rising number of absences due to ill health, concentration levels, and classroom behaviour for example – could also be improved.

“We should look to Sweden where the introduction of high-quality lunches has raised educational attainment, improved health in adulthood, and increased earnings.

“Current strategies are making too little difference. It’s time to superpower our schools and communities to help children and young people eat well, engage in physical activity, and be healthy.”

‍Professor Mark Mon Williams, Child of The North report series editor, said:

‍“The links between health and education are illustrated perfectly through the negative impact on learning created by a malnourished child. A healthy country needs to invest in its future workforce and this means supporting schools to help children eat well and be active. The paltry costs necessary to ensure children learn effectively would be swamped by the long term savings the NHS would make if it wasn’t picking up the obesity problems created through the first two decades of someone’s life.”

‍Dr Eleanor Bryant from the University of Bradford said:

“Children that receive adequate healthy nutrition are more able to engage with education as well as have better physical and mental health. This report highlights the benefits of universal approaches, including Free School Meals, and Breakfast Clubs. It also emphasises the importance of child voice in decision making around healthy nutrition in schools. We urgently need change to ensure children have the best possible chance to succeed within education settings.”

‍Dr Lucy Eddy from the University of Bradford said:

“The broader curriculum in schools emphasises the importance of wider health and wellbeing behaviours for later life chances. Schools need to be empowered to and rewarded for supporting more holistic child development. The adoption of whole-school approaches that are tailored to the needs of local communities, have the potential to have long-lasting impacts on education, health and wellbeing for the next generation and beyond.”

ENDS

[.download]Download the Report[.download]

For further information or interview opportunities please contact Jo Green on 07715105415 or jo.green@centreforyounglives.org

1. ‍‍Today’s report is can be accessed in full here: https://www.n8research.org.uk/media/CoTN_Physical-Activity-Nutrition_Report_5.pdf
2. ‍Today’s report has been produced by eight research intensive universities in the North of England – the N8 Research Partnership – in collaboration with a wider academic community (the N8+) as part of the Child of the North initiative, and the new Centre for Young Lives think tank, founded in January 2024 by former Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield. It is the fifth in a series of Child of the North/Centre for Young Lives reports to be published during 2024 looking at how to encourage the Government and Opposition to reset their vision for children and show how putting the interests and life chances of young people at the heart of policy making and delivery is crucial to Britain’s future success. They shine a light on some of the biggest challenges facing the Government while also providing rigorous research and pragmatic, evidence-based recommendations which acknowledge the ongoing financial limitations on government spending. Seven principles will be a theme throughout the twelve reports: the Government must “put children first”; inequality must be addressed; place-based approaches must be adopted; public services must work together more effectively; education must be at the heart of public service delivery; universities must become the ‘research and development’ departments for local public services; and information must be shared across public service providers and used effectively.
3. Child of the North is a partnership between the N8 Research Partnership and the Northern Health Science Alliance / Health Equity North and includes partners from across the North of England. Its vision is to develop a platform for collaboration, high-quality research, and policy engagement to support fairer futures for children living in the North of England. The N8 Research Partnership is a strategic collaboration between the universities of Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, and York, and aims to maximise the impact of this research base to enable business innovation and societal transformation. The N8 universities receive around 80% of competitively awarded research funding in the North of England, and employ more than 18,000 academic staff, forming the largest research-pooling partnership in the UK. N8 creates programmes involving a critical mass of world class academics which form networks of innovation excellence with partners in other sectors, to drive investment and economic growth.
4. Health Equity North is a virtual institute focused on place-based solutions to public health problems and health inequalities across the North of England. Health Equity North brings together world-leading academic expertise from the Northern Health Science Alliance membership of leading universities, hospitals, and academic health science networks, with the aim of fighting health inequalities through research excellence and collaboration.