Join our latest webinar on ‘Hungry for Change: What Parents and Pupils Want from Food Education’

Food education is widely seen as essential for developing core life skills. Yet access to it remains fragmented, inconsistent, and unequal.

Hungry for Change, a new national report from The School of Artisan Food’s Best Food Forward programme, draws on polling of over 2,000 parents and 2,000 young people to examine how food education is experienced across England’s secondary schools. The findings are both clear and concerning. While parents and young people overwhelmingly see learning to healthy meals and making good food choices as essential for independence and wellbeing, fewer than half of young people report receiving dedicated curriculum time. Access declines sharply with age, and varies by income, school type, and region.

At Best Food Forward, this reflects what is seen in practice. When food education is embedded across school life, when pupils can ‘Learn it, See it, and Live it’, the impact is profound. But where provision is fragmented or surface level, those opportunities are lost.

This comes at a particularly important moment. Government investment in school food is expanding through breakfast provision, free school meal policy, and revised standards, while the Curriculum and Assessment Review considers the role of different subjects within the system. Without high quality food education embedded alongside provision, the long-term benefits of this investment will not be realised.

To explore these findings in more depth, and what they mean for policy and practice, we are hosting a webinar focused on what parents and pupils want from food education, and how current provision can better meet that demand. The session is aimed at policymakers, education leaders, and practitioners working across food, education, and child wellbeing, and is open to anyone with an interest in how food education is delivered and experienced in schools.

The webinar will cover:

·        Key findings on access, inequality, and the post-16 cliff edge

·        The role of curriculum-based food education within the current policy context

·        Why food education is critical to maximising investment in school food

·        How the report’s three practical policy asks could be implemented

To register for the webinar, click here.