Food education is seen as essential for developing core life skills, yet access and quality vary widely across schools. Parents and pupils agree; it’s time to prioritise food education for all children.
Food education matters
Parents and young people overwhelmingly see cooking and food choice as essential skills for life, comparable in importance to digital literacy or time management. But access is fragmented and uneven. It declines sharply with age and varies by household income, school type, and region. Many pupils receive limited curriculum time and few opportunities to apply learning beyond the classroom, particularly those from lower-income households or in state comprehensive schools.
This new polling report, Hungry for Change, comes at a pivotal moment, as government investment in school food provision expands through free breakfast clubs, wider eligibility for free school meals, and revised school food standards. Without high quality food education embedded alongside these reforms, the long-term benefits of investment will not be fully realised.
Drawing on nationally representative polling of over 2,000 parents and 2,000 young people aged 11-18, Hungry for Change shows strong public support for a more consistent and meaningful approach to food education. This report builds on Best Food Forward’s Food Education Mapping Project (FEMP), finding that food education is most effective when young people can ‘Learn it, See it, Live it’.
For young people to develop the skills, confidence, and independence to make good food choices and apply their knowledge beyond school and into everyday life, a whole-school approach to food education is needed; one that embeds learning across curriculum, culture, and practice.
To address these challenges, Best Food Forward calls on the government to:
