I had a brilliant lunch today with Rosie Denison and Belinda Roy from the School Meals Team...

They told me about the work they are doing to improve school food and drink, monitoring the quality of the catering providers here in Leeds and trying to improve the take up of free school meals. They also told me about two hugely important project they are working on; a policy on 'Packed Lunches' and 'School Meal Ambassadors'.



The brilliant 'School Meals Ambassadors' project has operated at three secondary schools: Cockburn College, Crawshaw School and Woodkirk High School, and two primary schools: Middleton Primary School and Park Spring Primary School. A group of young people in each school has been trained to monitor school food and to work with the school's catering provider to improve school food. Rosie and Belinda have commissioned Swift researchers to evaluate the impact and sustainability of the initiative. The initiative has helped us develop a toolkit to help all schools adopt this brilliant strategy.

It is important with a huge number of our young people eating packed lunches that we work with schools to ensure that schools help parents and carers provide a healthy and nutritious packed lunch... after all we are what we eat!
We want every child in Leeds to be happy, healthy, safe and increasingly successful... whatever it takes.This work is hugely important in our drive to improve standards and improve outcomes. If you want to find out more about the Packed Lunch policy, the School Meal Ambassadors or the work on Free School Meals contact the team at education.leedsschoolmeals@educationleeds.co.uk.
Chris