About the Trust
Who are we? What do we do? What do we want to change?
Who are we? What do we do? What do we want to change?
The School Food Trust is an independent body with the unique remit of transforming school food and food skills. It was set up as Non Departmental Public Body in 2005 with £15 million of funding from the then Department for Education and Skills (replaced by Department for Children, Schools and Families, DCSF) to promote the education and health of children and young people by improving the quality of food supplied and consumed in schools. In April 2007 the School Food Trust became registered as a Charity.
Following consultation on the report ‘Turning the Tables: Transforming School Food’ published by the School Meals Review Panel in October 2005, and the Food Other than Lunch report, published by the School Food Trust in February 2006, the Government announced the standards it intended to apply to school food in May 2006. The Trust is charged with taking forward these standards to transform school food and food skills to improve health and education for school age children and young people.
The School Food Trust Board and staff believe that eating well during the school day is crucial to a number of government, societal and parental objectives, including improving the health, well being and academic performance of children and young people. The School Food Trust is charged with helping all stakeholders to ensure that young people eat better food at school, and has set for itself four broader objectives to achieve this agenda.
Established at the outset, these are reviewed each year to ensure they remain relevant.
The aims of the Trust are being recognised as increasingly important. There is a body of evidence which links children’s diets to their immediate and long-term health, whilst experience from schools suggests that when children eat a balanced diet they find it easier to concentrate in the classroom and their behaviour is significantly improved. Diet is increasingly being seen as central to unlocking the potential of children as well as being critical to their health. Improved nutrition and food habits can play a part in enhancing well-being and emotional welfare, and are an important part of addressing the need to reduce the number of overweight and obese children. Since poorer eating is regularly associated with low income, improving food in schools can help address children’s poverty.
Over the next three years we will continue work to prove these links ourselves, encourage others to do work that proves these links, and encourage all those interested in the health, well being and attainment of young people to make the necessary improvements to school food.
As a non-departmental public body (NDPB), the Trust is independent of government but we work closely with our sponsoring organisation, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, (DCSF), as well as with the Department of Health (DH), the Healthy Schools Programme and the The Food Standards Agency. Most importantly, we engage with other stakeholders; particularly parents and children, but also head teachers, school governors, and leadership teams in schools; catering industry, educators and staff; the food industry, and local and regional government bodies; in short, with any organisation or group of individuals that shares our aim or would benefit from improved school food. We believe that it is important to engage all parties in such a way that they support and influence changed behaviour in other stakeholders.