At our school, children eat rubbish for breakfast. It is rubbish that we as a school provide and rubbish that we believe is highly educational, as well as nutritious. And we are hoping to persuade more and more schools to follow our lead.
Before you put a call in to Ofsted, let me explain. At Richmond Hill Primary School, we identified hunger as being a major barrier to learning and believe this has a negative effect on the outcomes achieved by children.
While universal free school meals for children in Reception and key stage 1 has been a positive intervention in tackling the challenge of hunger, it is arguably aimed at the wrong meal.
The traditional model of education front-loads key learning during morning sessions, when children are at their most productive, so ensuring kids are not hungry in the mornings has a much bigger impact.
A high percentage of children attend school each day without breaking the fast of the previous day and some don’t even have a drink, either. Many factors contribute to this - poverty and unconscious neglect being the two most common.
An empty stomach affects concentration, energy levels, attentiveness and emotional wellbeing. Prolonged exposure to lack of food ultimately results in children working below age-related expectations.
Traditional models of interventions, designed to support children to “catch up” and “close the gap”, are ineffective if the targeted children continue to present each day at school with empty stomachs.
Having identified hunger as a barrier to learning, it was essential that we found a sustainable solution. That solution may now prove very useful to schools if the Conservative manifesto pledge to provide a free breakfast for all primary children is put into action.
The answer, as mentioned above, is rubbish.
Getting their fill
Working in partnership with the Real Junk Food Project - an organisation that diverts edible food waste from reaching bins and offers it instead to the public through “pay as you feel” cafes - we became aware of the vast amounts of entirely edible waste food that is being created each day.
Supermarkets, caterers, independent traders and wholesalers all generate tons of waste food that predominantly heads straight to landfill sites. Businesses are charged for the disposal of their waste, yet it seems they accept such fees as part of their running costs.
With the support of our partners, we have been able to intercept waste food products. In a specific response designed to remove the barrier of hunger from the start of each school day, we have intercepted large quantities of bread; this provides toast each morning to all of our pupils - 630 of them.
But the effect is even wider. We use the food in our school-based cafe and have set up a weekly food boutique. A wide variety of products have been distributed through this initiative: fruit, vegetables, pastries, cakes, bread, cheese, cooking oil, tinned and jarred products, to name but a few. And the cafe is open to both students and their families.
Our cafe follows the principles of the Real Junk Food Project and operates on a pay-as-you-feel basis, providing our local community with good-quality food at a price to suit. Pay-as-you-feel is a currency that can be traded for time, skills and even food swaps.
As well as feeding our community, the initiative has enabled closer links to be built, too. In response to the requirements of the local community, the cafe and boutique are open throughout term time and the holidays. Allowing families access to school during the holidays ensures additional support and guidance can be given to any families in need when required.
Our coffee mornings are also extremely well attended and provide a lifeline for many families, who are themselves becoming better educated about food and nutrition. The families have built trust with the school and outcomes for children are improving. These better outcomes have been made possible by using food that the system deems useless and not fit for purpose.
We’ve been thrilled with the response to what we have done. It has inspired a local awareness day during which schools across Leeds are invited to take part in an event where food is made available to provide a breakfast to any child in the city. And the legacy of this awareness day is the formal creation of the Fuel for School initiative by the Real Junk Food Project.
Fuel for School currently provides schools with a weekly delivery of food. This food is used by the schools in a variety of ways: market stalls for the school community, ingredients for cooking activities, rewards for children, supplementing breakfast clubs and even chicken food for a school farm.
Currently between 10 and 20 tonnes of food per week are being saved from landfill as a result of this work, and this figure will increase as more schools sign up to the project. The initiative has expanded beyond the city of Leeds and almost 60 schools now benefit.
In addition to food deliveries, the programme also provides schools with an education resource that includes lesson plans and activities designed to improve wellbeing (including mental health for children), meal ideas, nutritional awareness (specific reference made to sugar), exercise plans and ideas on how to reduce food waste. The resource links with The Real Junk Food Project in highlighting the global issue of food waste.
My hope would be that the Fuel for School initiative will become an ever-bigger part of how schools feed and educate their students. It turns out that you can do a lot with “rubbish”.
Nathan Atkinson is head of Richmond Hill Primary School in Leeds
